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It was not until Miss Menemon's engagement to John Usselex was madepublic that the world in which that young lady moved manifested anyinterest in her future husband. Then, abruptly, a variety of rumors werecirculated concerning him. It was said, for instance, that his real namewas Tchurchenthaler and that his boyhood had been passed tending geesein a remote Bavarian dorf, from which, to avoid military service, he hadsubsequently fled. Again, it was affirmed that in Denmark he was knownas Baron Varvedsen, and that he had come to this country not to avoidmilitary service, but the death penalty, which whoso strikes a princeof the blood incurs. Others had heard that he was neither Bavarian norDane, but the outlawed nephew of a Flemish money-lender whose case hehad rifled and whose daughter he had debauched. And there were otherpeople who held that he had found Vienna uninhabitable owing to thenumber of persistent creditors which that delightful city contained.
In this conflict of gossip the real facts were as difficult of discoveryas the truth about Kaspar Hauser, and in view of the divergence ofrumors there were people sensible enough to maintain that as theserumors could not all be true, they might all be false. Among the latterwas Usselex himself. His own account of his antecedents was to theeffect that his father was a Cornishman, his mother a Swiss governess,and that he had been brought up by the latter in Bâle, from which cityhe had at an early age set out to make his fortune. Whether or not thisstatement was exact is a matter of minor moment. In any event,supposing for argument's sake that he had more names than are necessary,has not Vishnu a thousand? And as for debts, did not Cæsar owe a hundredmillion sesterces? But however true or untrue his own account of himselfmay have been, certain it was that he spoke three languages with thesame accent, and that a decennary or so after landing at Castle Gardenhis name was familiar to everyone connected with banks and banking.
At the time contemporaneous to the episodes with which these pages haveto deal John Usselex had reached that age in which men begin to take a