Paul Gosslett's Confessions in Love, Law, and The Civil ServiceLever, Charles
General
Paul Gosslett's Confessions in Love, Law, and The Civil Service
Lever, Charles
Fiction
I believe that most readers of the “Times” or the “Morning Post” could
finish my story; they, at all events, might detail the catastrophe
with more patience and temper than I could. The MacNamara divorce was a
nine-days' scandal. And “if the baseness of the black-hearted iniquity
of the degraded creature who crept into a family as a supplicant that
he might pollute it with dishonor; who tracked his victim, as the Indian
tracks his enemy, from lair to lair,--silent, stealthily, and
with savage intensity,--never faltering from any momentary pang of
conscience, nor hesitating in his vile purpose from any passing gleam of
virtue,--if this wretch, stigmatized by nature with a rotten heart, and
branded by a name that will sound appropriately in the annals of crime,
for he is called Gosslett,”--if all this, and a great deal more in the
same fashion, is not familiar to the reader, it is because he has not
carefully studied the Demosthenic orations of the Court of Arches. In
one word, I was supposed to have engaged the affections and seduced the
heart of Mrs. MacNamara, who was a cousin of my own, and the daughter of
the Rev. W. Dudgeon, in whose house I had been “brought up,” &c. I had
withdrawn her from her husband, and taken her to live with me at Lahneck
under the name of Dacre, where our course of life--openly, fearlessly
infamous--was proved by a host of witnesses; in particular, by a certain
Virginie, maid of the respondent, who deposed to having frequently found
me at her feet, and who confessed to have received costly presents
to seduce her into favoring the cause of the betrayer. Mr. Bracken,
a retired detective, who produced what were called the love-letters,
amused the jury considerably by his account of my mad freaks and
love-sick performances. As for Mrs. MacNamara herself, she entered
no appearance to the suit; and the decree _nisi_ was pronounced, with
damages of five thousand pounds, against Paul Gosslett, who, the counsel
declared, was in “a position to pay handsomely for his vices, and who
had ample means to afford himself the luxury of adultery.” I was told
that the mob were prepared to stone me if I had been seen; and that,
such was the popular excitement about me, a strong police force was
obliged to accompany a red-whiskered gentleman to his house because
there was a general impression abroad that he was Gosslett.
Of course I need not say I never ventured back to England; and I indite
this, my last confession, from a small village in Bohemia, where I live
in board--partial board it is--with a very humble family, who, though
not complimentary to me in many things, are profuse in the praises of my
appetite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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