Telling Tales (8 page)

So, like William Henry Ireland before him, Lucas was able to combine his experience of the pomp and technical language of lawyers with an acquaintance with the practical deceptions undertaken by calligraphers and printers. And like Ireland, he struck just at the right moment to fool an enthusiastic old man into believing he had the one thing he most wanted.

Exactly how Lucas met Chasles is not clear, but in 1861 they made their first transaction. The letters supposedly from Pascal were the first to be produced, which suggests Lucas had done his research and targeted his subject quite carefully. Perhaps he thought – or had heard – that the old professor was losing his grip on reality as he approached his seventh decade? Certainly, Chasles’s failing mind is the explanation some choose to give for his being fooled so spectacularly. Yet he was still doing important work in mathematics throughout these years, so it is more likely that Lucas was playing on his inflamed sense of intellectual nationalism, a fervent vein of which was running through France at that great time of nation-building in Europe.

Whatever the reasons behind the old man’s uncharacteristic credulousness (and after a career of questioning and analysing everything before him, it really is perplexing), an alternative explanation, that he might have been in league with Lucas, is impossible to believe, because he had all the money and prestige a man could hope for. But he had the desire and the capital for more and more of Lucas’s forged documents, and this meant that the hoaxer was working flat out in the library to create texts which not only sounded, to his mind, convincing in their style, but looked the part too. To this end, he employed the techniques of many hoaxers before and since, toasting the leaves in front of the fire to achieve a sepia tint and submerging some in water – which technique he was overzealous at, and therefore invented the story of Boisjourdain’s shipwreck. The precise means by which Lucas claimed to be obtaining the documents are even more reminiscent of William Henry Ireland, the Shakespeare hoaxer: he said he went to collect them from an old man who wished to remain nameless, and whom he would never betray by naming.

This ‘
vieux monsieur
’, it seemed, could not only come up with more of the exact type of document Chasles most wanted at the drop of a hat, but had in store a series of increasingly unbelievable letters from antiquity. And while the sad story of the old professor being duped into thinking the French were the greatest scientists in the world can just about be explained, the tale of his spending thousands of francs on letters like the one below is nothing short of incredible:

Queen Cleopatra

to her dearly beloved Emperor Julius Caesar

[. . .] Our son Caesarian is doing well. I hope that soon he will . . . voyage from here to Marseilles, where I intend to have him instructed both because of the good air that one breathes there and the fine things that are taught there . . .

Cleopatra

Next, another famous woman of antiquity – Mary Magdalene – sends a postcard home from a trip to la Belle France:

Magdalene to her dearly beloved Lazarus.

[. . .] we are very fond of . . . these provinces of Gaul . . . these Gauls, who we were told are barbarous peoples are not at all that way . . . it must be from there that the light of learning must come

Magdalene

Charlamagne is another important figure given the opportunity to speak up for the Gauls, and in a letter dated 20 August 802, and executed in a bizarre faux-medieval script purporting to be the hand of the great man himself, he thanks the scholar Alcuin of York for sending him:

proof . . . of the stay of Hercules among the Gauls and that he married Galatea . . . What reason could anyone have not to believe in this union? . . . why must we have less regard for the Gauls . . . than the nations that are foreign to us?

The letters from Joan of Arc to the Parisians, Rabelais to Martin Luther and of course the scientists Pascal and Galileo are less surprising to find written in French, but although their handwriting looks vaguely of the right period, it is impossible to comprehend, now, how a man of Chasles’s stature would be willing to pay for their bogus autographs. If we are charitable to him, we can assume he knew full well they were bogus but, believing Lucas to have access to genuine manuscripts as well as these, decided to keep him sweet by buying everything he offered. Or perhaps Chasles, buying into what was, after all, a fairly well-designed story of traceability, believed them to be copies made in the time of Boisjourdain of letters which had really existed? Or, despite being a mathematical genius and a gentleman, he simply had a terribly blind and soft spot for ancient history.

Either way, Chasles parted with enough money over the years to make Lucas a rich man. However, such was the demand for more and more manuscripts that he hardly had time to spend it. Little is known about his personal life, but at the investigation over the Pascal letters during which he was finally hauled before the Academy, it was attested that he spent all day every day in the library, taking brief, solitary meals in a nearby café but otherwise keeping himself to himself. Whatever his private proclivities or spending habits were, or whether he was sending the money home
to Lanneray, may never be discovered. Yet he did not give the impression of being a rich man, and when, finally, the Academicians and a humiliated Chasles called his bluff and had him arrested, he wrote in a letter of confession that mere financial gain had not been his only motivation. This letter may be the only truthful text France’s master hoaxer ever wrote, and it accounts in some way for why he did what he did and, considering he disappears completely from the public record after being sentenced to two years in prison in February 1870, it serves as a typically odd epitaph for this most peculiar of literary hoaxers.

Maison Centrale de Poissy, 13 August 1871.

To my most respected Sir, . . . Michel Chasles,

. . . I address you with the hope that you will find it in your heart to pardon me . . .

I alone had penned the letters . . . widely believed to be from the hands of Pascal, Newton . . . and others – letters that you took to be the authentic voices of the past . . . I have at all times acted with patriotism . . . and in the service of science . . .

T
HE EXUBERANT MARK
Twain, the English-speaking world’s best-loved chronicler of the madness of the late nineteenth-century America, was something of a hoaxer all his life. He flitted between careers, names and personae, leaving many in doubt as to who he really was; and for his readers this innate ventriloquism is surely part of his appeal.

If you have never had the pleasure of reading any of Mark Twain’s journalism, here is an example of the kind of writing his devoted band of followers in 1860s Nevada grew to love. It tells of an accident which befell his editor and friend, Dan DeQuille:

Our time-honored confrere, Dan, met with a disastrous accident, yesterday, while returning from American City on a vicious Spanish horse, the result of which accident is that at the present writing he is confined to his bed and suffering great bodily pain. He was coming down the road at the rate of a hundred miles an hour (as stated in his will, which he made shortly after the accident), and on turning a sharp corner, he suddenly hove in sight of a horse standing square across the channel; he signalled for the starboard, and put his helm down instantly, but too late . . . Dan was wrenched from his saddle and thrown some three hundred yards (according to his own statement, made in his will, above mentioned), alighting upon solid ground, and bursting himself open from the chin to the pit of the stomach. His head was also caved in out of sight, and his hat was afterwards extracted in a bloody and damaged condition from between his lungs; he must have bounced end-for-end after he struck first, because it is evident he received a concussion from the rear that broke his heart; one of his legs was jammed up in his body nearly to his throat, and the other so torn and mutilated that it pulled out when they attempted to lift him into the hearse which we had sent to the scene of the disaster, under the general impression that he might need it; both arms were indiscriminately broken up until they were jointed like a bamboo; the back was considerably fractured and bent into the shape of a rail fence. Aside from these injuries, however, he sustained no other damage. They brought some of him home in the hearse and the balance on a dray. His first remark showed that the powers of his great mind had not been impaired by the accident, nor his profound judgment destroyed – he said he wouldn’t have cared a d–n if it had been anybody but himself . . . Dan may have exaggerated the above details in some respects, but he charged us to report them thus, and it is a source of genuine pleasure to us to have the opportunity of doing it. Our noble old friend is recovering fast, and what is left of him will be around the Brewery again to-day, just as usual.

In the early days of his career, before he had started writing in earnest and when he still went under his given name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Twain had travelled to Nevada as assistant to his brother Orion, whom Abraham Lincoln had made territorial secretary. The role of assistant was, however, decidedly nominal, and provided him with little to do. Worse still, it was presenting him no obvious way to raise enough money to pay off the considerable debts he was accruing, so he began to search for some more rewarding outlet for his profusely creative intelligence than taking notes and filing documents for his older brother.

Being a young, energetic man in Carson City in 1861 must have been exciting. The city itself, full of prospectors and schemers, investors and get-rich-quick merchants, was the epitome of the optimistic young American town. Twain describes life there in his wonderful book,
Roughing It
:

Joy sat on every countenance, and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every eye, that told of the money-getting schemes that were seething in every brain and the high hope that held sway in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wide-open gambling palaces, political pow wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky mill every fifteen steps . . .

This piece of writing was no hoax – times were flush, and Samuel was determined to enjoy himself as much as possible. But in the back of his mind was the thought of his mother and sister back home, wondering if he would make something of himself like his brother had. Their expectations, coupled with his desire for beer money, led him to hatch a plan which would not only start him off on his writing career but give birth to the man called Mark Twain.

The two main local newspapers at that time, the
Territorial Enterprise
in Virginia City and the
Evening Bulletin
, were locked in competitive rivalry, each seeking the best stories and the best writers with which to lure a reading public hungry for gossip. In the summer of 1862 Samuel – initially under the pen-name Josh – began writing to the letters page of the
Enterprise
. These letters were amusingly told tales of the doings of local businessmen, socialites, animals and policeman, and it was not long before the paper’s editor saw in him a talent that would enchant his readers and possibly steal a few from the
Bulletin
. ‘Josh’ was duly offered the job of local reporter, and charged with running around town talking to people, drinking with them (not hard for the liquor-loving, sociable younger brother of the more serious Clemens) and writing up what they told him. For this he was to be paid no less than $25 a week which seemed to him a ‘sinful and lavish’ amount.

After a respectful period of time reporting on the genuine doings of the local community, Twain realized that his colleagues in the newsroom, not least his friend and mentor William Wright (who wrote under the name Dan DeQuille) took a peculiarly relaxed approach to journalistic integrity. The reporting of hard facts, especially on a slow news day, would always come second place to giving the readers what they wanted, which was blood, guts and scandal. Years later, in an autobiographical piece for that very same newspaper, he would unashamedly recall the ‘feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling slaughter, mutilation and general destruction’.

Twain would always claim astonishment at the gullibility of his readership, whom he never expected to swallow his tall stories without a pinch of salt. But his naturally playful, anecdotal style, even when reporting something that really happened, probably coaxed his readers into thinking he was just one of those people to whom extraordinary stories seemed to gravitate.

Perhaps the most famous of his invented news stories, and the one which, knowing the author’s mischievous sense of humour, seems almost impossible to take seriously, was nonetheless taken as gospel by most who opened their paper on the morning of 4 October 1862 to read this report, now under the byline Mark Twain:

A petrified shah was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stone mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which had evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner – which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savant who has examined the defunct.

The body was in a sitting position, and leaning against a huge mass of droppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb rested against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefinger pressing the inner corner of the left eye, and drawing it partly open; the right eye closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread out. This strange freak of nature created a profound sensation in the vicinity, and our informant states that, by request, Judge Sewell at once proceeded to the spot and held an inquest on the body. The verdict was that ‘deceased came to his death from protracted exposure’.