Unlike in France, one of the most incredible counterfeit scandals of all time has hardly left any traces in this country. Only Wolfram Fleischhauer took up in his novel “The woman with the rain hands” on the 1869 by the famous mathematician Michel Chasles litigation against the maddened swindler Denis Vrain-Lucas. “I ask you, dear jury,” it says, “the plaintiff may not be a little complicit, and Mr. Chasles, through his own ignorance and presumptuous instinct for validity, didn’t really irritate Mr. Vrain-Lucas, and after his initial successes, Mr. Chasles did not really irritate him to drive? ” A fair question as we shall see.
Konrad Kujau and Wolfgang Beltracchi are known in Germany, but not Vrain-Lucas. That was different in the 19th century. When Hans H. Busse became the readers of the family paper in 1896 The gazebo explained about collecting manuscripts, he naturally also came up with the most sensational autograph forgery process of the time, about which he was still angry years later: “That goes into the sheer unbelievable, this nonsense of supposedly real autographs!”
But why this outrage? It becomes more understandable when you know the facts. Denis Vrain-Lucas cheered his victim Michel Chasles on more than 27,000 forged documents over a period of eight years and earned the handsome sum of at least 140,000 francs. At the same time, and this makes the matter as outrageous as it is tragicomic, the authors and addressees of the documents read like the who’s who of world history.
The master thinkers Socrates and Plato are just as much among them as Alexander the Great or Cleopatra, who turtles with Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate as well as Mary Magdalene and Lazarus, yes, even a letter to Jesus Christ could be found. The great minds of literature and science from Rabelais to Shakespeare to Molière and from Galilei to Blaise Pascal to Isaac Newton shake hands. To name just a few of the illustrious names with which Vrain-Lucas frankly and freely signed his fake news.
The cover story with which he approached Michel Chasles, a professor of geometry, a respected member of the Académie des sciences and an enthusiastic collector of autographs, testifies not only to criminal energy but also to a remarkable talent for fantasy. Vrain-Lucas told the mathematician the story of an impoverished nobility who had to sell pieces from his unique family collection, but did not want to appear himself. His name: De Boisjourdain. On top of that. According to a recently published book with maritime legends by the Frenchman Cyril Hofstein, his ancestor sank in his ship in 1791 while crossing to America. Only his flower harvest of valuable autographs could be saved.
The forger left no stone unturned to make his works look real
Denis Vrain-Lucas was born in the provinces in 1818 as the son of a day laborer and a maid. He made his life as a notary’s clerk and clerk until he made the acquaintance of a fraudster in Paris who was helping families with forged family trees and who introduced him to the techniques of parchment forgery. From then on, Vrain-Lucas pretended to be an archivist and stole the blank pages of old works from libraries. From a technical point of view, the assiduous autodidact left no stone unturned to make his works look real.
Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why the highly intelligent Michel Chasles, given the sheer volume, the big names and the very strange fact that all his writings were in French, had no suspicion for years. Probably also because Vrain-Lucas devised excuses and claimed that some documents were copies of the lost originals. But even this did not make the autograph connoisseur sit up and take notice. One can only speculate about the reasons for this. Was Chasles particularly gullible? Or, which is not so unlikely, did he not read the majority of the documents? Was he obsessed with collecting, was possession enough for him?
Another explanation would be the event that slowly but surely made the matter public. In 1867 Chasles, then over seventy, trumped his academy colleagues with the claim that it was not Newton but Pascal who had established the law of gravity. As proof he cited a letter from the French to the English. His discovery, a coup for his own as well as for the fame of France, was of course refuted. It was argued that Newton was only eleven years old at the time of Pascal’s alleged letter.
Little by little, other treasures were dragged out of Chasles’ fund and questioned. But he himself remained convinced of its authenticity. If Vrain-Lucas had not delivered several thousand prepaid documents, Chasles would probably never have reported him for fraud on his own initiative. In 1869, however, the widely acclaimed trial came about which, to the amusement of the public, made the mathematician appear as a bizarre eccentric and brought Vrain-Lucas two years’ imprisonment.
As soon as he was released, the forger cheated on an abbe and was put behind bars for another three years. And after that, too, he ran into another conflict with the law and went back to prison before he died in 1881. His well-known victim was already dead by this time. Michel Chasles, whose name was to be engraved on the Eiffel Tower along with other personalities a little later, had died very old in 1880.