Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1896-02-06
BARON BRINGS SUIT
BERLIN'S LATEST SOCIAL SENSA-
TION A BIG ONE.
GEIERSECKS PATIENCEGONE
Noble German to Press the Demand
for Divorce in the Court-High-
est Families in the Empire May Be
Involved-Silence No Longer-The
Case Soon to Come on.

! Within the next ten days a cele
, brated case is TO come before the SUI.
preme court in Berlin. 1t is not {
crown case, nor a contest for a colos
sal estate, nor one of those great DO.
!; 1tlcal prosecutions which occasion.
ally involve hundreds of thousands in
bitter differences with their monarch
and his minister. 1t is simply 6
scandal in high life, but such a scan
dial as the Russell suits have made in
England, the Deacon tragedy in
! France and the Draytcn-Astor compIi-
cations in America. 1t is bound tc
turn the eyes of the fashionable world
now drifting slowly back to the CAPT
tai, from the political horizon for a
week or more and to provide the radi-
calls, socialists and democrats with a
text for many articles on the deterior-
alton of the nobility and the general
generalization of the titled tories who
claim for themselves the special
guardianship of religion, morals and
throne il the German empire. It
comes as the last in a series of scan
Gals which began with the murder of
Gold Elsie, a beautiful demi-mon-
| dame, for whose sudden end a dozen
Silesian barons and counts are half
suspected, which was kept unbroken
by the revelations of Countess Perpon-
cher's open infidelity and perjury
which includes the adventures of the
| bogus Archduchess Katharine of Aus
| tria with her titled dupes and frances,
the Hanover gambling escapades of
| h1gh-born officers and the forgeries
perpetrated by Baron Hammerstein,
the tory leader, upon the names OF
General Count Waldersee and Count
Finckenstein.
The story which the supreme court
will hear is the criminal romance of
the Baroness of Geie1 seek. The baron
esS began her criminal romance in a
common fancygoods shop in Berlin,
continued it among coronets and cas-
ties in a dozen large cities of Ger
many, Austria anG Italy, and is elab-
Grating it in her ThUringen castle.
She is likely to end it in the supreme
court, and leave it for some lola or
Dumas to use as the plot OF a great
realistic novel or play.
She appeared as 1orewoman in the
fancygoOds shop under the name OF
Annie SchulZe. Of course, she was
beautiful, with all the PROJECTIONS OF
form and giddiness OF temperament to
which the titled pillars of morals and
society in Germany are Sc susceptible.
ha
ents; she did not even have an &C
knoWledged father. She was simply
beautiful in face and figure and stupid
in mind. Her first elevation in her
peculiar social scale came through a
nephew of the Bleichroeders. She
! spent scores of the thousands which
were taken from the imperial treas
ury to pay the old head Of the famous
banking house for his negotiations Of
! loans for the government. When she
! had spent them she was notorious At
| her box at the royal playhouse were
! leveled the glasses OF Eussar lieuten-
ants and life-guard colonies and
mediatized princes and dukes of the
blood. Two men who still inveigh
/ 3
against the im1no1 atty and grossness
of the German Jew did net hesitate 10
| grovel at the feet of this shopgirl
mistress of Jewish bankers nephew
1t goes without saying that the
nephew could not compete with the
Breisachs of Seisach-Lillienstein-
Eisenach in such contest for a demi-
! Ioin C iad
under the pile of CHARTERED shields and
lifeguard regulations which soon were
! laid at her feet. Counts, barons,
| dukes passed IN and out OF her favor
in rapid succession, each coming with
his $4,000 or 100000 marks for her en-
tertainmelt, and each going with his
purse empty, but his reputation as a
pillar of throne and society uninjured.
In three years, her husband says, she
squandered some 100000 marks
most of it, by the way, the property Of
tie oppressed and impoverished agra
rian aristocracy that now cries for
state help to save it from black bread
and beer.
It was such an open scandal that
:, zen prince of the royal Prussian
.t.ood began to cast his eye toward the
! woman a strong hand was stretched
from the royal palace, and d stern po-
lice warned Schulze to reform or be
eXiIed from the capital. She reformed
by taking a house in the Leipziger
strasse, with a rent of $4,000 marks a
year and a noble officers widow as a
chaperone. The widow introduced to
him the Baron Of Geierseck. She told
him that the girl was the wife of q
titled bankers SOL who, at his father 5
command, had left her to save him
self from disinheritance. Three
months and the graduated shopgirl
and demi-mondajne was the Baroness
of Geierseck, travelling OF her wedding
tour in regal style, for her husband
was rich and infatuated and found
nothing too expensive fer her in Paris
or Rome Or Vienna or Milan.
The lola or Dumas who is to put
this living romance into a novel will
not have another new Magdelen as a
heroine, for in Milan, but a little time
after the marriage, came the shopgirPs
relapse into the ways Of her titled
friends of former days. She met TWO
German counts whom she had known
long before. In her husbands abb
sence she received the attentions of
both There was break a week later
"a hot quarrel, w1etched wedding