Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)Griffiths, Arthur
History
Mysteries of Police and Crime, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Griffiths, Arthur
Crime; Police
These inquiries were followed by others as to handwriting, and many new
and surprising facts came out. It was asserted by experts that the
letters written before her alleged death by the Marquise and after it by
the claimant were in one and the same hand; that the documents the
claimant was said to have written or signed were forgeries, and must
have been concocted with fraudulent intention.
Now, too, the claimant explained away the famous date of entry into
prison, and laid it to her poor memory, enfeebled by so many
misfortunes.
There seemed enough in all this to reverse the decision of St. Fargeau,
but the Court of Bourges upheld it. The Procureur-Général pronounced his
opinion, formed at the imperious demands of his conscience, that the
claimant was not the Marquise de Douhault; more, that "between her and
that respectable lady there was as much difference as between crime and
virtue."
The law was pitilessly hostile to the very end. On the revival of the
case the claimant was successful in proving that she was certainly not
Anne Buirette, but although she published many memoirs prepared by some
of the most eminent lawyers of the day, and was continually before the
courts during the Consulate and First Empire, she was always unable to
establish her identity. The law denied that she was the Marquise de
Douhault, but yet would not say who she was. To the last she was
nameless, and had no official existence. When she died the authorities
would not permit any name to be inscribed on her tomb.
JUDGE GARROWS STORY.
Our own criminal records abound with cases of disputed or mistaken
identity. Among the most remarkable of them is the one which Judge
Garrow was fond of recounting on the Oxford circuit. He described how a
man was being tried before him for highway robbery, and the prosecutor
identified him positively. The guilt of the accused seemed clear, and
the jury was about to retire to consider their verdict, when a man rode
full-speed into the courthouse yard, and forced his way into the court,
with loud cries to stop the case; he had ridden fifty miles to save the
life of a fellow-creature, the prisoner now at the bar.
[Illustration: "A MAN ... FORCED HIS WAY INTO THE COURT" (p. 104).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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