Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1875 — A Great Adventuress. [ARTICLE]

A Great Adventuress.

A female adventurer of no ordinary description has just come to grief in Paris. Some time ago she cut a dash at Pau, where she succeeded in getting into the good graces of distinguished families. She lived in fine style, but she paid nobody. Her debts then amounted to £I,OOO, but she was soclever that when any of her creditors dunned her she invariably pacified them with some promising story, and in one or two cases succeeded in borrow ing money from them. For example, instead of paying her doctor she got him to advance her £2OO on the belief that she was to come into her long-expected fortune. One of her principal victims at this period was a Mme. Ducout, to whom she introduced herself as the Countesse de Kersabiec, and said that Lord Palmerston had been one of her most intimate friends, that Lord Stanley had been charged with the administration of her fortune, which amounted to £20,000, but which she could not get at for the moment on account of a technical lawsuit. About this time Marie Gribaumont, her cook, fell ill and died in a few days, worth £7OO, which she had saved up. Our heroine at once set to work to obtain this money. She produced a false I. O. U., sent it to the lawyer and ordered him to see that the family of her deceased cook paid it, but before the matter came before the court she disappeared one night with all the money and valuables belonging to the cook. She now turned up again in Paris, where she made fresh victims, and then went to Versailles,' where she made debts and dupes on all sides, when her old Pau creditors, who had lost all traces of her for years, found her out and she was arrested. Her trial has only just come off. She appeared in court calm and collected, and gave an account of her strange, eventful life. The jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, 3,000 francs fine, and to the surveillance of the police for the rest of her life. She received her sentence with the utmost indifference, and left the court putting on her lavendercolored gloves as coolly as if she was going on an afternoon’s walk instead of to the prison cell.