The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-06-07
MIME. HuMBERY.
THE GREATEST FRAUD OF THE
 CENTURY
And Splendid Liar and Thief

And Splendid Liar and Thief
 We all know the Rue depla Paix ir
 Paris. It is tine street of the biggest jewellers and the most expensive dress makers in Paris. No visitor has ever
 been to Paris-especially no woman- who has not passed down it's splendid
 spaciousness, and gazed in wonder at the dazzling treasures in it's windows It is a street that figures in every French novel of present day manners and if the writers of France be not
 calumniators, it is street which has
 been as the Valley of Prophet to fash ionable and extravagant womanhood In Paris-the dark abyss in which Wo- men have buried love of husband, duty
 to children, honor, affection, hope. It IS | the street, likewise, in which weak and l infatuated men have found their temp
 talon and their doom have bought the
 jewels for some frau and venal beauty,
 and all the other luxuries which have
 robbed them of ancestral homes, or broad acres, of millions of francs, and
 have finally landed them and the great
 and historic names they bore in the | hell of hunger or the deeper hell of the
 police court and the cell.
 1 Behind every counter in every shop
 in this street and underneath the beam- 1 ing face and oily smile of the shop l Keepers, one can without much imagin- ation behold the death's-head of ruin, dishonor suicide, the grave; and the | ,-t 11 @Jr 1,nY al
 rapacious, if one only remembers the parts in human lives their big earrings and glittering jewels have played. This
 Rue de la Paix, then, is the great Ap- plan Way of all that is luxuriant, cor- rupt, desperate, sinister in Paris; in all that city of scepticism, pleasure, reck- less playing in life and death-here is the very natal ground of hardness,
 cynicism, relentless pursuit of gain-re- lentless extorton of the uttermost far
 thing of debt. It Is street where the
 shopkeeper has often had to transfer
 the princess of the fashionable cocotte
 from the cider down bed to the pallet
 of straw-from dazzling celebrity to as
 notorious infamy.
 Yet it is into this street that Nine
 Humbert descends with nothing to back her demands for money but the three palpable forgeries; these fairy and fam
 tastic tales of imaginary millions and invented legacies, which even the veri- est and tiniest gamin of Paris might have been supposed equal to evaporat- ing into thin air with one breath of the satanic wit of Paris. I look over the list of her creditors, and I find among them, M. Roulin, diamond merchant he has lent her 9160, 000--and M. Dumoret, who Is a retired jeweller of the Rue de la Paix-he is down for
 G7200C.
 Indeed two other things stand out in relief from this astounding list of creditors-first, that so many of them are Jews-the last race in the world one would expect to be taken in so easily; and secondly, that the sums borrowed are of such gigantic pro- portions This woman, whatever else she was, was granalose in her ideas, | she had none or the pettiness of the | thief on a small scale; she stole, but | she stole III the grand manner. From M Schotmann, for instance, of Lille | a Jew. l should think, from the name she got E2SU,0UO from NM. Girard of | Elbeut she got G24S,000; from M. Lefevre of Valenciennes, &l6S,OOO; from M. Chateau Of RoubaiX, E160, ,000; from M. | Paul Bernard, banker, El20000; from M. Brugnere of Narbonne, El04,000; | from M. Oppenheimer an antiquarian I dealer, G6 ,UO0; from M. Samuel of the stock exchange of Brussels, &40,00J. It | will be seen then that this splendid liar and thief did not go only among the simple and the poor and the contiding for her money; she descended without the tremble of a nerve into the tiger pit of bankers, brokers, jewellers; into .he mighty world of Jewish finance; in tact, there was no man or class before whom she trembled--from whom she vas not willing to ask huge and moun- ainous sums that could not be men ,ioned by the ordinary man or woman without a slight inner shudder--Without tremor in every limb and in every lerve.
 She who did not fear the living, was ,uually fearless of the dead; even of he dead whom she had sent to their premature and tragic doom. Time after | hant or retired statesman who had ,een seduced by her wondrous tongue , nto givng her all his fortune, found { himself face to face with beggary; with a wife and children beggared as yell, an dwith brain reellng before he abyss, preferred death to facing ! he terrible reality. And profund, in eed must have been the sleep and plendid the nerves, and of marble inn t enetrahility the conscience of the wo- I 1an, who could go through the day and I ight without waking to the shrieks of c iirard, who put a bullet in his brain; 1 f Paul Bernard, who asphyXiated him ] elf with prussc acid..- of Schotmann, c 'ho was found assassinated in a train; | r any of these ten victims, who saw il l self-infiicted death, the one outlet l 'om their ruin and their mad con c dence in this woman's word and hon. | TT P. O'Connor in M. A. F. c |