Historic Oddities and Strange Events

Оглавление

Baring-Gould Sabine. Historic Oddities and Strange Events

PREFACE

The Disappearance of Bathurst

The Duchess of Kingston

General Mallet

Schweinichen's Memoirs

The Locksmith Gamain

Abram the Usurer.9

Sophie Apitzsch

Peter Nielsen

The Wonder-Working Prince Hohenlohe

The Snail-Telegraph

The Countess Goerlitz

A Wax-and-Honey-Moon

The Electress's Plot

Suess Oppenheim

Ignatius Fessler

Отрывок из книги

The mystery of the disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst on November 25, 1809, is one which can never with certainty be cleared up. At the time public opinion in England was convinced that he had been secretly murdered by order of Napoleon, and the "Times" in a leader on January 23, 1810, so decisively asserted this, that the "Moniteur" of January 29 ensuing, in sharp and indignant terms repudiated the charge. Nevertheless, not in England only, but in Germany, was the impression so strong that Napoleon had ordered the murder, if murder had been committed, that the Emperor saw fit, in the spring of the same year, solemnly to assure the wife of the vanished man, on his word of honour, that he knew nothing about the disappearance of her husband. Thirty years later Varnhagen von Ense, a well-known German author, reproduced the story and reiterated the accusation against Napoleon, or at all events against the French. Later still, the "Spectator," in an article in 1862, gave a brief sketch of the disappearance of Bathurst, and again repeated the charge against French police agents or soldiers of having made away with the Englishman. At that time a skeleton was said to have been discovered in the citadel of Magdeburg with the hands bound, in an upright position, and the writer of the article sought to identify the skeleton with the lost man.1

We shall see whether other discoveries do not upset this identification, and afford us another solution of the problem – What became of Benjamin Bathurst?

.....

As nothing could be proved against the Schmidt family, except that they had taken the fur coat, Frau Schmidt and her son were sentenced to eight weeks' imprisonment.

The matter of the pistols was not properly cleared up. That, again, was a point, and an important point that remained uninvestigated.

.....