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Updated: June 1, 2025
He might have been the dupe of some political schemer." "But what interest could such a schemer have in giving Dorlange the many advantages he has derived from the recognition?" "Ah! my dear fellow, in political manners all queer proceedings are possible; there is no such fertile source for compilers of causes celebres and novelists.
None can read the quaint, minutely-detailed record of these "causes celébres" that shook the little households as with a great wind, without a smile, or resist the conviction that no scheme of an English Utopia can safely be pronounced perfect without some such modest tribunal to afford vent for that ever-germinating desire for battle inherent in the race.
First in time among these causes célèbres was the Schoeppe case, the facts of which may be briefly summed up as follows: Dr. Schoeppe, a young German practicing medicine in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, became engaged to be married to a Miss Stennecke, a maiden lady of sixty years of age.
To divers worn copies of Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Ovid, Cæsar's Commentaries, and Catullus; to ditto ditto of Homer, Lucian, Aristophanes, Balzac, Anacreon, Bacon's Essays, and Moore's Melodies; to Dwight's Theology uncut copy, Heine's Poems very much thumbed, Saint Simon very ragged, two volumes of Les Causes Célèbres, Tone's Memoirs, and Beranger's Songs; to Cuvier's Comparative Anatomy, Shroeder on Shakespeare, Newman's Apology, Archbold's Criminal Law and Songs of the Nation; to Colenso, East's Cases for the Crown, Carte's Ormonde, and Pickwick.
For dialogue I would depend upon such scraps of actual speech as were chronicled in each case, amplifying it by translating into terms of speech the paraphrases of contemporary chroniclers. Such was the task I set myself. I am aware that it has been attempted once or twice already, beginning, perhaps, with the "Crimes Celebres" of Alexandre Dumas.
All large cities furnish daily material for tragedy, and life there, keenly observed and aptly narrated, proves continually how much more strange is truth than fiction; but the impressive manners and melo-dramatic taste of the people, as well as their intricate police system, bring out more vividly these latent points of interest, as a reference to the Causes Célébres and the Memoirs of Vidocq illustrate.
The Jansenist Abbe Barral, in his Dictionnaire Historique, Litteraire, et Critique, des Hommes Celebres, thus speaks of our author and his work: "He composed for the instruction of the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, and Berri several works; amongst others, the Telemachus a singular book, which partakes at once of the character of a romance and of a poem, and which substitutes a prosaic cadence for versification.
I don't myself much mind what morals a man teaches, so long as he preserves the morality of beautiful form, but at the rate we are now going, literature seems likely to become a series of causes célèbres chronicled in the language of the penny-a-liner. And over and above this is the dirty habit, growing upon many able men, of examining their secretions, always an evident sign of hypochondria.
A more extraordinary case never occurred in this country, nor is it equalled in strange interest by any trial in the French Causes Célèbres or the English State Trials.
There is something almost sadistic in the combination in her character of erotic sensibility with extreme cruelty. Vitalis and Marie Boyer I found the story of this case in a brochure published in Paris as one of a series of modern causes celebres. I have compared it with the reports of the trial in the Gazette des Tribunaux.
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