Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in SolitudeBidwell, Austin
General
Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude
Bidwell, Austin
Bank fraud -- England; Bank of England; Bidwell, Austin; Criminals -- Biography
At the Cafe Riche and Tortoni's I have seen extravagances in ordering
expensive wines and viands by my countrymen that made me regret that the
fools who were being served were not forced to toil for the mere
necessaries of existence. Certainly they were unworthy stewards of the
wealth heaven or the other place had bestowed on them by inheritance. I
remember one boy there throwing away in vice and dissipation the fortune
his father had through years of a long life spent toilsome hours in
accumulating. I sat at a table near him on several occasions, when,
after his banquet was half over, he used to reward the waiter with a
five-hundred franc note ($100), but the proprietor was ever close at
hand and would instantly despoil the garcon of his prize. He was
companioned by a member of the demi-monde, who, when arrayed in male
attire, as she was nightly, would cut up enough monkey tricks in one
night at the Valentino or Mabille to have made the fortunes of all our
comic paper artists had they been on the spot to catch her antics with a
kodak and then lay them before an admiring public.
The fortune this boy had inherited was unfortunately too vast and too
well-invested by his overfond and madly foolish father for the son to
run through it entirely. A very few years left him an imbecile in body
and mind, to become the prey of a parcel of sharks who, dressing in
purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, held him in a
state of abject slavery and fear. One day, aboard his own yacht, off
Naples, they married him to a notorious woman. Under the guardianship of
his wife and her villain paramour he wandered like a spectre amid the
scene of his former riot.
For long at Monte Carlo he lingered like a ghost, and at last died in
Florence. The American colony attended his funeral in a body, while his
widow, dissolved in tears, refused to be comforted. Although many dark
stories were whispered, the Americans there forgave her all, for her
grief and sorrow were so overpoweringly evident that it would have
seemed a crime to doubt her tender love for the departed. After having
the body embalmed, she embarked with her dead love for America, and
to-day his ashes rest in that mighty city of the dead, Greenwood, under
a Greek cross of white marble, bearing the date of birth and death. I
went to see it last Easter week. The grave was strewn with flowers, and
the pedestal bears this inscription:
"Too good for this world,
The angels bore him to heaven,
Leaving his heartbroken wife
To mourn her unspeakable loss."
Unopposed she succeeded to her husband's estate. It was large then;
to-day it has grown to enormous proportions. She is not, but easily
might have been, one of the Four Hundred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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