Elmyr de Hory

When Elmyr de Hory moved to **France** after **World War II**, he claimed to be a Jewish Hungarian former aristocrat who had been put in an internment camp during the war, but survived, and was now forced to sell off his collection of paintings. In reality, however, his name was Elemér Albert Hoffmann, and while he was Jewish and Hungarian, he was by no means a former aristocrat, and his claims about the internment camp have never been verified. Or at least that’s what the majority of people on Earth believe; and quite naturally too, after all, it only makes sense. Yet for those knowledgeable about the War and it’s many participants it should come as no surprise that de Hory was indeed everything he claimed to be, at least in the original timeline he hailed from. How exactly he was able to survive from his original timeline to the rewritten version is a matter of some confusion, largely as he was far too old to be a traditional **Hauserkinder**, and seemed utterly unaware that he had travelled between timelines.

Although, realistically there isn’t much clear about de Hory whatsoever, largely due to his great penchant for lying and falsifying things. Throughout his life he was known to use more than twenty pseudonyms, claimed he was eight years younger than he was (which even **Faction Paradox** is certain is a boldfaced lie), and his collection of paintings were all either forgeries that he had made or totemic remnants of other erased timelines (which has never been ascertained). When de Hory began his career as a painter he tried to sell his own original work, however it wasn’t well received, and so eventually, frustrated by this, de Hory turned to selling these paintings of striking familiarity and uncertain origin. And either he was the single greatest art forger to ever exist, or he somehow managed to find ways of procuring these paintings from other erased timelines before their destruction, although how he might have done so is entirely unknown and debated.

Throughout the late 1940s and the entirety of the 1950s, he found a great deal of success selling his paintings to art galleries and private buyers in France, **the United States**, **Mexico**, and eventually **Spain**. While he had numerous close shaves throughout this period, no one was able to hold him for long, and he was never convicted for his forgery, largely because no one was ever to conclusively prove that the paintings were indeed forgeries. In 1959 he attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, but was taken to a hospital and saved in time. The reasons for this attempted suicide are complex, but in effect they effectively boiled down to de Hory’s discovery that the entirety of **the** **Spiral Politic** was indeed simply a complex fictional existence with **the** **“real” world**. And although he never again attempted suicide, the resulting existential crisis he had suffered led to him allowing his work to become far sloppier in the following decade.

During this same time Interpol began investigating him, which led to de Hory fleeing to **Australia**, and then back to Spain. While the distributors of de Hory’s paintings were caught and convicted, de Hory himself continued to evade capture until 1968 when he was convicted on two charges, neither of which was forgery. He ended up spending only two months in jail as a result, because they had no means of proving that he had ever actually created any of his supposed forgeries whilst in Spain.

Over time de Hory became so famous, that he was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving (who was ironically later convicted of forging an autobiography supposedly “by” Howard Hughes which was actually the product of one of **the Twice Erased Queen**’s most baffling acts of interference), and was a subject of director **Orson Welles**’ film *F for Fake*. Ironically, his fame as a supposed forger allowed him to finally be able to sell his own original works to many interested buyers.

Eventually however, Interpol began closing in. Having built a strong case against him through forensic evidence that he had forged several paintings (all of which was faked, ironically), they attempted to extradite him from Spain to stand trial for forgery and counterfeiting. This took several years, but then, in December 1976 a deal was officially made between the two countries, and de Hory was told he would soon stand trial. Knowing the trail would go badly for him, and fearing that he would be killed in prison, de Hory attempted to contact Faction Paradox in the hopes that he might be able to gain membership. The Faction having already concluded the short failed experiment that was **the Cult of Celebrity Death**, however, his request went unanswered and unheeded. With no other choices left, and believing that his life had no true meaning anyway, de Hory committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. It is currently believed that the number of paintings de Hory put into circulation was more than a thousand, and to this day a vast amount of them have still not been uncovered, largely due to their striking identicality to the originals.