Denis Vrain-Lucas

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Denis Vrain-Lucas

Denis Vrain-Lucas (* 1818 ; † 1881 ) was a successful forger . He was best known for a collection of over 27,000 alleged autographs by famous people, which he sold to the mathematician Michel Chasles .

Life

Denis Vrain-Lucas worked in Châteaudun as the head of a notary's office before he took a job at a bookseller in Paris . There he learned about the value of old manuscripts in contact with Marcel Roux and was instructed in the art of aging parchment by a fraudster named Letellier, who earned his living with invented family trees for the nouveau riche. In the National Library on Rue Richelieu, where he posed as an archivist and palaeographer , he not only stole blank parchment pages from old books, but also used documents that enabled him to slip into the role of important historical figures and writings from their hands to fake. Among the customers for these alleged autographs were respected booksellers, but above all the mathematician Michel Chasles, whom he had apparently known since 1851. He gradually bought more than 27,000 letters from him, which were said to have come from various celebrities.

In one of these letters, allegedly written by Blaise Pascal to Isaac Newton , Vrain-Lucas let Pascal discover the law of gravity . Chasles announced his "find" to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1867, sparking bitter debates. Finally, however, a biographer of Newton pointed out that the recipient of the letter in 1654, to which the letter was dated, was only eleven years old and thus perhaps would not have been the right addressee for Pascal and his alleged discovery. Then Michel Chasles, who is said to have bought forged letters from Julius Caesar and even from Lazarus from Vrain-Lucas , gave his collection of alleged autographs to Florentine experts for review. However, the mathematician is said to have firmly believed in the authenticity of the fonts he obtained from Vrain-Lucas and only reported him when he did not receive 3,000 prepaid fonts. Vrain-Lucas was arrested in 1869 and taken to court.

He also admitted that he had forged the letters, but insisted that they were still worth the money and that he had only acted for the good of the fatherland. To the amusement of those present, the judge had some of the forger's products read out during the trial. Among them was a repentant letter from Pontius Pilate to Emperor Tiberius , in which Pilate regretted the death of Christ , a letter from Vercingetorix to Pompeius, and a letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle , in which the latter suggested to the philosopher that he study local customs in Gaul. A love letter from Cleopatra to Mark Antony was also read out. Understanding the contents of the forged letters was not a problem, because Denis Vrain-Lucas had written them all in French.

Vrain-Lucas had to serve a two-year prison sentence for these acts. When he was taken to prison, it was found that he was working on a document in which he had Jesus deliver the Sermon on the Mount in French.

Soon after his release from prison in 1872 he was arrested again and convicted for not only forging a family tree for an Abbé Tochon, but also for plundering the buyer. In 1876 he was given a third sentence of four years as a repeat offender for stealing rare books. In 1881 he died of " dropsy ".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Museumofhoaxes.com
  2. ^ A b J. J. O'Connor and EF Robertson, History topic: The mathematician and the forger
  3. ↑ Ken Alder , "History's Greatest Forger: Science, Fiction, and Fraud Along the Seine". Critical Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004), pp. 704-716. For the biography p. 715. PDF online

Web links

Commons : Denis Vrain-Lucas  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Vrain-Lucas, Denis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French forger
DATE OF BIRTH 1818
DATE OF DEATH 1881