The Vrain Lucas Affair: A Great Swindle in Autograph Letters in the Nineteenth Century

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

I invite you to discover one of the greatest hoaxes ever worked on old documents: the Vrain Lucas affair.

Michel Chasles (1793–1880) was a French mathematician to whom we owe important work in geometry. His name is attached to Chasles’s relation (ab + bc = ac in a quadrilateral), and we also owe him Chasles’s theorem. He coined the term homothety. But in the small world of bibliophilia and autograph collecting, the name of Chasles is tied to the incredible swindle of which he was the victim at the end of the nineteenth century, and therefore, inescapably, to that of the brilliant forger Vrain Lucas.

The swindle began in 1861 and would last several years. At that time Michel Chasles was 68 and a member of the Académie des sciences, elected in succession to Guillaume Libri, the notorious thief of manuscripts, which is rather comical. Heir to a rich family of timber merchants and a former pupil of Monge, he had had a chair of geometry created for him at the Sorbonne. A confirmed bachelor, he devoted his life to mathematics, and he was said to be of a very gentle, very friendly nature.

Vrain Lucas (1816–1881) was his opposite. Of very modest origins, he nonetheless learned to read and write. A self-taught man, he would be, in the words of the account I follow, “successively an attorney’s clerk, a clerk of the court at Châteaudun, then an employee of the mortgage registry in 1847. In 1852 he went to Paris to obtain a post as cataloguer at the Imperial Library (today’s BnF) but was not accepted, on the pretext that he did not hold the baccalauréat. He also applied to the Auguste Durand bookshop, to which he was recommended, but was not taken on, on the ground that he knew no Latin. Having a family to feed, he accepted a post as canvasser at the genealogical firm Courtois-Letellier, whose main business was to produce false pedigrees of nobility for bourgeois short of titles. There he acquired an uncommon skill at counterfeiting supports and handwriting, notably by ageing inks and papers with candle smoke and dirty water…”

In 1861 Vrain Lucas approached Chasles on the strength of their common origins, the Eure-et-Loir. He knew that the mathematician was a lover of historical documents. Chasles shared with Vrain Lucas his passion for such documents and confided his dream of writing a book founded on authentic ones. Vrain Lucas came back to see him soon afterwards with three letters, from Molière, Racine and Rabelais. It was the beginning of a chain of events that would last nearly 6 years and involve more than 27,000 forged letters sold by Vrain Lucas to Chasles, for close to 150,000 francs of the day (nearly 600,000 euros today according to Frédéric Castaing).

Curiously, and this is one of the questions the affair raises, a relationship was born over a few years between two men whom everything separated: a forger who found in it a way to express this form of art and to provide for his needs, and a member of the Institut, fascinated by letters, some of which touched directly on his favourite field, mathematics, and which would be the undoing of them both. Like any amateur offered unique documents, Chasles probably lived there the best years of his life as a collector, and one may imagine that the bond with Vrain Lucas was one of dependence, founded on trust…

It seems today that a swindle of such scale, and of such length over the years (27,000 letters, over 6 years), could in a way exist only because the one was Chasles and the other was Vrain Lucas; they somehow found each other.

The affair broke on 15 July 1867 at the Académie des sciences, when Chasles presented his letters between Pascal and Newton, which called into question the Englishman’s theory of gravity. At once improbabilities appeared, and to answer the sceptics Vrain Lucas fed Chasles further letters: whenever a letter or one of its passages was challenged, Chasles warned Vrain Lucas, who supplied other letters to answer the objections. It was a vicious circle; the controversy swelled; it was a bubble that would end by bursting… and it raises the question of how far Chasles was really deceived at a certain point.

One of the key objections to the Pascal and Newton letters was that at the time they were supposedly written, Pascal was about thirty… and Newton eleven. The controversy was enormous, it crossed borders, yet, remarkably in hindsight, the debate went on. But the machine was running, and for nearly 2 years Vrain Lucas answered the objections of Chasles’s detractors. A mad story when one considers it more than a century later: the Académie française itself took Michel Chasles’s side.

Concerning Newton and Pascal, members of the Institut pointed out to Chasles that the handwriting of the documents presented was very different from that of the letters historically certified as written by Pascal. Faced with the doubts arising in the minds of the academicians, Chasles was obliged to state that he had the letters from Vrain Lucas. In 1869, fearing that important pieces would escape him, Chasles had Vrain Lucas watched by the police for a month. Chasles was demanding three thousand more pieces from Vrain Lucas, who was slow to supply them; the mathematician feared that he would sell these priceless pieces abroad and resolved to have him arrested for fraud and breach of trust. It is incredible to note that, at the edge of the abyss, Chasles still seemed to believe in the authenticity of the letters.

Arrested on 9 September 1869 for fraud and breach of trust, questioned and quickly exposed with the help of two palaeographer experts, Henri Bordier and Émile Mabille, the forger confessed. During the trial the imperial prosecutor, to the stupefaction and then the hilarity of the courtroom, read out the following forged autographs: a letter from Archimedes to Hieron; a letter from Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, to Aristotle; a letter from Thales, sage of Greece, to Prince Ambigat, king of the Gauls; a letter from Queen Cleopatra to Julius Caesar; a safe-conduct from Vercingetorix for Pompey; a letter from Lazarus the risen to Saint Peter; a letter from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus the risen; a letter from Charles Martel to the duke of the Moors; a letter from Charlemagne to Alcuin.

On 16 February 1870, Vrain Lucas was sentenced by the 6th criminal chamber of the Seine to two years’ imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs, together with the costs. Over a period of sixteen years he had forged more than 29,472 autographs, letters, documents and manuscripts attributed to 660 personalities, ranging from classical Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment, and in all he had extracted nearly 140,000 gold francs from his victim.

On 13 September, Chasles had to acknowledge that he had been fooled and to explain how he had bought so large a number of forgeries from Vrain Lucas and how much money he had lost in this unfortunate affair, which in addition had made him a laughing stock among his colleagues of the scientific community.

After the trial of 1870, the 27,320 forged autographs sold to Chasles by Vrain-Lucas were destroyed, with the exception of a small number, which Bordier and Mabille gave “with the permission of the judicial authority” to the manuscripts department of the BnF (the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French national library) and which were gathered in a single volume of 180 folios, kept under the shelfmark N(ouvelles) A(cquisitions) F(rançaises) 709, that is, New French Acquisitions. You can find it here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b525049362

In 1872, after leaving Mazas prison, where he had written a plea in his defence, Vrain Lucas committed other offences (thefts of rare books from libraries, breaches of trust) and was arrested on 18 February 1873, then sentenced again to three years in prison. In 1876 he received another four years. Once his last sentence was served, he returned to Eure-et-Loir and dealt in old books at Châteaudun, where he died in 1881.

Michel Chasles and Denis Vrain-Lucas gave Alphonse Daudet enough to feed his novel L’Immortel, published in 1880.

That volume is gripping, and reading it we cannot help thinking that we are in front of a body of work in its own right: more than 27,000 letters and autographs in all, even if only 180 survive, and they do have a family air.

The reader faces an ensemble that is fantastic in the literal sense of the word, and the more improbable and incredible the letters, the more one is staggered by the titanic labour Vrain Lucas accomplished.

We know, of course, the letters between Pascal and Newton that would bring about Vrain Lucas’s downfall and Chasles’s humiliation, but we are left speechless before the forger’s imagination: a safe-conduct granted by Vercingetorix to Pompey (“J’octroye le retour du jeune Trogues Pompens auprès de Jules César son maître et ordonne à tous qui ces lettres verront le laissez-passer librement et l’aider au besoin.” [I grant the return of young Trogues Pompens to Julius Caesar his master, and order all who shall see these letters to let him pass freely and to help him if need be.]), letters from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, from Lazarus to Saint Peter, from Mary Magdalene, from Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, from Joan of Arc… but also letters whose supposed authors were Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Joan of Arc, Rabelais, Charles V, Shakespeare, Galileo, Montesquieu, Cicero and Dante Alighieri — all written in a fanciful Old French.

In the end, the bigger the lie, the easier it goes down, and one may wonder what those years were like for Vrain Lucas, facing this titanic labour, which took up a large part of his nights, moreover, under Chasles’s pressure.

In prison, Vrain Lucas also wrote a memoir of four leaves on the reasons that had led him to produce the letters: “Galilée, Pascal, Newton, mémoires, motifs qui m’ont fait agir” [Galileo, Pascal, Newton, memoirs, reasons that made me act]. We discover, amused, that Vrain Lucas presents himself as driven, almost a victim, by the pressure Chasles exerted with his orders for new documents. The relationship between the two men remains astonishing, for we know that Chasles visited Vrain Lucas in prison after his sentence, bringing him treats to help him bear the harshness of his incarceration.

In the excellent programme France Culture (the French national public radio) devoted to the subject, one of the speakers underlines a point I find rather delightful… What if the affair had not broken, and if a century later Chasles’s family had put these letters up for sale, what would we have known of Vrain Lucas, a swindler it is true, but also the author of a certain thumbing of the nose at the establishment?

Amusingly, a letter by Vrain Lucas was put up for auction in Toulouse in April 2017. It was described thus:

VRAIN-LUCAS (Denis). 1816-1881.

… Autograph letter signed “Galileo Galilei, to Mademoiselle de Gournay”, woman of letters and friend of Montaigne. 2 pp. on 1 leaf, 15 x 20 cm. A letter with a falsely learned air, in which Galileo praises the merits of an Italian translator: “Mademoiselle, en réponse à ma lettre du 3 juillet dernier, que je vous adressay en vous envoyant un exemplaire du grand livre de l’Enéide de Virgile, traduit en latin par Jean André dell Anguillara, et par laquelle je vous disois que la langue italienne devoit beaucoup de ses beautés à ce traducteur, qui avoit en mesme temps traduit les Métamorphoses d’Ovide en stance de 8 vers, le mesme qu’il la fait pour le premier livre de l’Enéide /…/.?Le traducteur dites-vous a employé une stance de huit vers pour rendre ce seul vers d’Ovide dans la description du chaos quaque fuit tellus illic et pontus aër. Et vous ajoustez que Du Bartas dans sa Semaine n’en a employé que quatre /…/.?J’admets Mademoiselle votre observation /…/.?Je suis Mademoiselle votre très humble, très dévoué et très affectionné Galileo Galilei” [In substance: Galileo answers her letter of 3 July, to which he had attached a copy of the Aeneid translated by Jean André dell Anguillara, whose eight-line stanza she finds too generous next to the four lines Du Bartas needs in his Semaine; he grants her observation and signs himself her very humble, devoted and affectionate servant.] In yellowish ink, on laid paper artificially aged, 2 old fold marks, 2 wormholes, a small loss in the margin and a large foxing stain at the centre. Later tear over 10 cm, without loss, partly restored.

The signature Galileo Galilei is identical to that of the 4 letters of the Fonds deposited by the Public Prosecutor’s office at the BnF, two of them addressed to Mlle de Gournay, one of which speaks of Petrarch and of Dante’s Mystic Rose, the other of Guido Cavalcanti and Shakespeare.

Vrain-Lucas autographs in private collections are very rare. Indeed, part of the “Chasles collection” was deposited by the Ministry of Justice at the Bibliothèque nationale. The others were in principle destroyed.

It was estimated at 1,500–2,000 euros. I regret that I do not have the hammer price.

H

Sources:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b525049362

https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/une-histoire-particuliere-un-recit-documentaire-en-deux-parties/laffaire-vrain-lucas

Wikipedia

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When They Guillotined the Booksellers: Paris, Spring 1794

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Barthélémy d’Arcole, Inspector of Bibliophilic Aesthetics and Modern Heresies to the Guild of Bibliopolicés.

There is, in the history of French bookselling, a spring that nobody celebrates. It is the spring of Year II of the Revolutionary calendar. Between January and May 1794, in the weeks leading up to the fall of Robespierre, five Parisian book dealers went to the scaffold for doing what their trade had taught them to do: print, sell, ship, display in the shop window. None of them had taken up arms. None had conspired. All kept shop at the Palais-Royal, on the quai des Grands-Augustins, or in the Saint-Honoré quarter. The offence held against them was not plotting but having let printed sheets circulate. The indictment was not about their deeds but about their catalogues. They were condemned as booksellers.

The names are little known, and even well-informed bibliophiles meet them only in a footnote in Mellot, or in the work of Annie Duprat, on which I draw here. They are: Jacques-François Froullé, printer-bookseller on the quai des Grands-Augustins; Thomas Levigneur, his occasional partner, who set up shop within the very galleries of the Convention; François-Charles Gattey, bookseller at 14 Palais-Royal; Michel Wébert, bookseller and dealer in caricatures, also at the Palais-Royal; and finally a woman of whom the archives have kept only the name of a widow, la veuve Lesclapart, bookseller in Paris. Five people, five fates, one era and, give or take a few weeks, the same end.

Three of these five booksellers fell for the same book. It is a pamphlet that every eighteenth-century enthusiast should know, if not as a bibliographical object then at least as a historical document: the Liste comparative des cinq appels nominaux faits dans les séances des 15, 16, 17, 18 et 19 janvier 1793 sur le procès de Louis XVI [Comparative list of the five roll-call votes taken in the sessions of 15–19 January 1793 on the trial of Louis XVI]. The title looks dry. The contents are less so. It is a compilation of the votes of the deputies of the Convention on the death of the king, accompanied by a Relation des vingt-quatre heures d’angoisses qui ont précédé la mort de Louis XVI [Account of the twenty-four hours of anguish that preceded the death of Louis XVI] and by a footnote, modest in appearance, that would feed a French legend for two centuries: that of the “majority of a single vote”.

That footnote, more than anything, is what condemns. Royalists found in it the proof that the king had been murdered by a procedural stroke and not by the will of the people. The revolutionary authorities saw in it a manoeuvre, and the most dangerous of all, since it struck at the very legitimacy of the regicide. The pamphlet was printed by Froullé and Levigneur as early as April 1793. It spread. It travelled. Levigneur admitted having sold it openly at the door of the Convention, under the eyes of the people’s representatives, adding that after a few reproaches he had withdrawn it. Froullé, more deeply involved, confessed to having disposed of two thousand copies. Asked why he had not read the Relation des vingt-quatre heures before inserting it, he answered simply that he had not thought it dangerous, “by virtue of the freedom of the press”.

The argument carried little weight. The law of 29 March 1793, whose reach Froullé had perhaps not measured, imposed the death penalty on the authors and distributors of writings tending to restore the monarchy. Both booksellers were arrested on 8 Ventôse, Year II. Fifteen copies of the Liste were found at Froullé’s, along with twenty-seven suspect pamphlets and, a detail that did not help, a packet of cartridges. They were guillotined on 13 Ventôse, Year II (3 March 1794).

François-Charles Gattey did not fall for the Liste. He fell for the Actes des Apôtres, the great royalist journal launched in 1789 by Peltier, Suleau and their friends, of which he was the appointed publisher. Gattey was no latecomer to trouble with the Revolution. He had been at odds with the book-trade authorities since before 1789, and had even known Charenton for breaking the rules of the trade, which made him, in the profession, one of those disreputable booksellers whom the whole Palais-Royal knew. In May 1790 the commissioner Toublanc seized six packets of the Actes des Apôtres in his shop. An anonymous pamphlet appeared shortly afterwards under the eloquent title L’aristocratie du libraire Gattey punie par le peuple ou supplice des Actes des Apôtres [The aristocracy of the bookseller Gattey punished by the people, or the torment of the Acts of the Apostles].

Gattey carried on. He published, he sold, he distributed. The Revolution hardened around him and he changed nothing in his trade. Arrested in Year II and tried for active royalist propaganda and for supposed links with the counter-revolutionary networks of the colonies (he had correspondents in Saint-Domingue and in the Île-de-France), he went to the scaffold on 25 Germinal, Year II (14 April 1794). His case illustrates a second category of hunted bookseller: no longer the distributor of one particular text, but the merchant identified with an entire catalogue.

That leaves the last two. Michel Wébert, bookseller at the Palais-Royal, a native of Saverne, sold royalist caricatures, some of them engraved in such a way that weeping willows and funerary urns encoded tributes to the beheaded king. The veuve Lesclapart, of whom almost nothing is known, kept a shop in Paris. Both were guillotined on the same day, 20 May 1794. The charge against Lesclapart is laconic: having sold the Liste comparative. Having sold. Not printed. Not distributed through a network. Sold, as a bookseller sells whatever is on the shelves of her shop.

For the bibliophile, the name Lesclapart is not neutral. Under the Ancien Régime, Pierre-Antoine Lesclapart had been “marchand relieur-papetier-colleur et en meubles privilégié suivant la Cour” [merchant binder, stationer, paper-hanger and furnisher with a privilege to follow the Court]. At his death, around 1781, the privilege passed to Honoré-François Jollivet. Now this same Jollivet wrote to the Convention twelve years later, offering to strip the gold of the royal arms from the volumes of the Bibliothèque nationale at the rate of two sols a volume. Whether or not the widow Lesclapart guillotined in 1794 was the direct widow of the former binder to the Court (the Paris archives, largely destroyed in 1871, do not allow a formal answer, and the hypothesis would need checking in the central records of the notaries), the name alone is enough to draw, across the revolutionary decade, a strange symmetry. On one side of the privilege, a man prospers by offering to undo the bindings he was commissioned to serve. On the other side of the same name, a woman dies for having sold, as she had always done, what her shop sold. The coincidence of names here looks like a judgment.

It remains to understand why these five booksellers, and not the many others whose shops were searched between January and May 1794, went to the guillotine. The booksellers Garnéry and Desenne, suspected of the same complacencies, were released shortly after Thermidor. The distinction lies not in the gravity of the trade but in the moment of the arrest. Froullé, Levigneur, Gattey, Wébert and Lesclapart fell within the narrow window between the law of 29 March 1793, which made royalist propaganda a capital offence, and the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor. A few weeks more, and they would have come through as Desenne and Garnéry did. A few weeks less, and the law would not yet have been passed.

The lesson, for the bibliophile, is archival rather than political. Books outlive their sellers. The Liste comparative can still be found today at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (shelfmark Lb41 354) and turns up regularly at public sales, with no catalogue mentioning that it cost five heads to those who circulated it. The copies of the Actes des Apôtres still met with in the trade rarely bear any trace of their executed publisher. For Wébert and Lesclapart it is worse: their stock was dispersed without any bibliographical note preserving their names beyond a mention in Mellot. The book survives. The bookseller passes.

Five guillotined in four months, for a few printed items. It is little, set against the 17,000 victims of the Great Terror. It is a great deal, set against a trade whose Parisian shops numbered a few dozen among practising printers, and a few hundred at most among all the merchant booksellers. And it is enough to be remembered, in a milieu that by tradition prefers its glorious binders to its martyred booksellers.

Principal sources: Annie Duprat, “Un réseau de libraires royalistes à Paris sous la Terreur”, Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 321, 2000, pp. 3-26. Jean-Dominique Mellot and Élisabeth Quéval, Répertoire d’imprimeurs-libraires XVIᵉ-XVIIIᵉ siècle, Paris, BnF, 1997. Archives nationales, W 332 (Froullé/Levigneur file) and W 345 (Gattey file).

GUILDE · BdA/MARTYRS-LIBRAIRES