The Penultimate Problem

December 12th, 1891, Meiringen: The Death of the Great Detective

Dark was the day that Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, loyal friend and flatmate of detective Sherlock Holmes, reported the death of the world's only consulting detective at the hands of his greatest foe. Though Conan Doyle was eventually knighted for his recounting of Holmes' heroism, most noted that a piece of the man died on that day, and the spark was gone from his person. 

Ever the center of controversy, Conan Doyle's muse, the mercurial Mr. Holmes, had divided London society: some claimed he was a genius of the first rate, owing, perhaps to the touch of Dwarven blood that ran in his veins; others believed him a menace, undermining Scotland Yard and too obsessed with petty feuds and personal glories to be of much use to anyone. But through the eyes of his biographer, the Scotch army doctor Conan Doyle, Holmes' skills as a consulting detective always seemed to outweigh his notoriously difficult personality and his barely masked contempt for his counterparts in the Yard. 

So while some journalists, like the infamous Robert D'Onston Stephenson, sought to expose Holmes as a criminal, a Chalkholm Clan sympathist (despite their contributions, the British Dwarven clans were never much liked), and a charlatan, Conan Doyle's command over the pen always cast the Great Detective in the most intriguingly sympathetic of lights, and ensured that the public would turn on any who disparaged him.* In essence, there could be no Holmes without Conan Doyle, just as there could be no Johnson without Boswell.

So when Dr. Conan Doyle and his wife returned from the continent with news of Holmes' death, such was the outcry that, for decades after, many refused to believe that the man was dead, bullying and threatening his closest friend in hopes of revealing his location. The publication of the last of Conan Doyle's Holmes memoirs, however, put most into a generous mood, seeing that, Christlike, the Great Detective had sacrificed himself to save them from a great evil.

Even now, as we have the benefit of hindsight in piecing together the life of Professor James Moriarty, comprehension fails at the notion of understanding his motivations. Perhaps, just as Holmes was, Moriarty was driven by detached love of reason, certainly the parallelism is charming, but we may never truly know. What is certain is that he was born in Dublin in 1832, and studied mathematics and astronomer under the venomous auspices of Carl Friedrich Gauss at the University of Gottingën. We know that he was a fierce rival of Simon Newcombe, going so far as to write libelous invectives calling Newcombe's scientific credentials into question. 

The trail gets colder once he emigrates to America, accepting a position at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. We know that he had the position for less than a year before disappearing and showing up some twenty years later in London, well-established as the Napoleon of crime. All the rest is speculation: his close partnership with Adam Worth, his ties to the Si-Fan triad and their representative Henry Ashleighton, his position as the head of the British Illuminati, the existence of an illegitimate daughter, Quinntessa Moriarty, supposedly fathered on the American spy, Irene Adler, even his supposed involvement with Ambrose Dexter and the Church of Starry Wisdom are all conjecture. 

Conan Doyle claimed ignorance to the vast majority of Moriarty's activities, merely articulating that Holmes had uncovered a lifetime's worth of damning evidence, and had been so thoroughly blackmailed by Moriarty and his protege, Sebastian Moran, that the ill-advised meeting at Reichenbach Falls was the only viable solution. While this was sufficient for the Holmesanite public, Scotland Yard, backed by Mycroft Holmes' parliamentary inquiry committee, spent years after Reichenbach searching for answers and, if any were forthcoming they were not shared with the public.

Indeed, even the supposed resurrection  of the Great Detective in the next century brought no answers as Holmes was thoroughly tight lipped about his deceased rival, and Conan Doyle, clearly betrayed by his friend's decision to live in hiding after faking his death, seemed to be outside Holmes' confidence. 

Whatever the master plans of Moriarty, lay they in economic ties to organized crime in China and America, or in apocalyptic designs divined from gazing at the stars and studying non-Euclidian geometry, they died with him, and the greatest mind of a generation nearly died to both foil and obfuscate them.

*Many claim that Stephenson's being investigated as a suspect during the Whitechapel Horrors was the result of a Holmesanite seeking to enact his revenge. Given how much Holmes clashed with the Yard during their joint investigation of those murders however, it is unlikely that anyone in the police would have cause enough to love the consulting detective to the point of besmirching his prime detractor.

The Grizzly Ascendant

January 1st, 1859, San Francisco: Emperor Norton Seizes Control of the Bear Flag Republic

In order to understand precisely how a failed, British South African Jewish businessman and itinerant man about town became the most shrewdly autocratic leader of the 19th century, idolized by Otto von Bismarck, and envied by US and CS presidents for half a century after, it is necessary, first, to accept the power of magic, and understand that the white man has almost never been privy to its secrets. 

Joshua Norton, the London-born, South African entrepreneur arrived in North America in 1849, just after the rocky first year of the so-called Bear Flag Republic, which stretched from San Diego in the South to the Humboldt Redwoods in the North, and contained the great cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento, the latter two rich from the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Norton's disastrous trade investments ate up his entire inheritance and bankrupted him, forcing him to wander the streets of San Francisco subsisting off of the charity of strangers, and spending his nights in a working class flophouse overlooking the East Bay. 

From these first auspicious, then inauspicious circumstances, Norton eventually fled the city, wandering into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, cobbling together what little he had left in exchange for gold panning equipment, and a tiny plot of land near the Devil's Postpile. Despondent when his claim proved dry, Norton wandered into the wilderness near Mammoth Lakes, ostensibly mad or suicidal, and certain to never be seen again. 

In late 1858, he returned to San Francisco, riding upon the back of a monstrous, ancient grizzly bear, larger even than the storied bears of Kodiak island. He had attained a feral look, his clothes filthy and patched with untanned animal skins. It is said that he rode his beast straight uptown to city hall where he demanded that the city immediately submit itself to his rule. 

To the vast surprise of the people of Alto California, the bear Flag Senatorial Council agreed and then-Speaker Aeschylus Praiseworthy handed over the golden staff of rule to the bear-riding usurper. We may attribute some of this braggadocio and embellishment to frontiersman tall tales, but whatever the exact circumstances of the meeting, Norton announced on the first of January 1859 that he was Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. 

His rule might have been short, but for the increasing tension between Yankee and Southern American states on the opposite coast, boiling over into open war in January of 1861. Unable to fight a war on two fronts, the Lincoln presidency put the reclamation of the West on hold and, instead, fought against the Confederate states, a slow war of attrition that ended in Union defeat, some say because they lacked the resources that the California coast might have contributed if Presidents Buchanan or Lincoln had dealt with the Bear Flag Empire decisively. 

By the time the Civil War was over and the newly formed Confederate States of American were drawing their borders with the Union, neither nation had the strength or the will to recapture the West and, where once had been one mighty American nation, now there were three. Norton had kept the California coast out of the war and, in doing so, had the resources to capture much of the American frontier during the chaotic years of American recovery, drawing the now-familiar boundaries of the Empire, which claimed all of Baja and Alto California, the Sonoran desert from Chihuahua to Sinaloa in the South, to the Rio Grande River and the Rocky Mountains in the East, to Vancouver Bay and Calgary in the North. By 1870 the Bear Flag Empire was the largest, if least populous of the American nations.

Norton's charisma was obvious, and his tactical genius a surprising perk, but much of Norton's continued hold over the once-lawless American West was preserved by dint of his terrifying strength as a practitioner of magic. Whatever had happened to him in the Sierras, he now showed all the hallmarks of what the ancient Brittons would have called a Bear-sarker, a sort of ursine shaman, given over to terrible fits of rage in battle, and having command over the great beasts that decorated his Imperial heraldry. 

Many questioned the source of his power, and most seemed to settle on the intervention of the Woodsman God of the Americas. Known by a hundred different names among nearly every tribe on both American continents, the accepted nomenclature of the 19th century was the Alonquin honorific, Powhat Buyigan, or Paul Bunyan as the Quebeçois transliterated it. Alongside his monstrous companion, Babche, the great Hodag.*

More than a source of personal power, Norton's status as Powhat Buyigan's chosen granted him a modicum of respect among the various tribes of Indians who had been systematically exiled, murdered and imprisoned by the American and Mexican states that previously held dominion. Norton re-enfranchised the Navajo, Zuni, and Shoshone tribes, granting them semi-autonomous states within the Empire, brought the Dwarven Hopi and Pueblo into his councils, and paid reparations to the Elven Chinook and Salish. In short, Norton was a fearsome object lesson in what happens when the power of Savage Magic was wedded to the keen mind of the White Man.

When he died on January 8th, 1880, sixty-three years of age, and twenty-one years into his Pax California, he was the closest thing the world had to the glories of old Rome. He was Caesar and Hannibal both.  His funeral drew mourners from across the world, and nature itself seemed to bow her head, as a total eclipse of the sun blessed the last day he lay in state. 

*Though many legends painted Powhat Buyigan as a benevolent or, at least, indifferent deity, the destruction wrought by European settlers had given the God a darker aspect in more recent centuries.  Alonquins spoke in hushed whispers of the Wendigo, a monstrous aspect that dined on human flesh and reveled in carnage and cannibalism. The Sierras seemed to be a particularly fruitful stalking ground for the spirit, accounting for both the Donner-Reed disaster in 1846 and the Fort Spencer Massacre the following year. One wonders if Norton was chosen by the good-natured woodsman, or the flesh-craving cannibal.

The Ghost of Whitechapel

April 24th, 1891, London: The Last of the Ripper Murders

Was Sir William Gull truly Red Jack? Though he was never arrested or charged, pilfered Masonic notes indicate that he was privately tried, convicted, and lobotomized for his brutality. But if that was the case, he could only have been responsible for the so-called "canonical five." Others claim it was sweet, simpleminded Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, that donned the Leather Apron and became the Whitechapel Whorereaver. Such accusations prioritize the myth of the gentleman murderer, a dastardly lie, no doubt spread by the lower classes.

But on the other end of the social spectrum, there are equally problematic theories. Those who follow Holmes and Conan Doyle's belief that it was a woman look mostly to the widow, Mirah Deronda, whose older brother, Ezra Mordecai Cohen, was one of the most notorious of the Whitechapel Kabbalist sorcerers who held sway over the London Jewish community in the late 1860s. Others simply shrug and claim it was Joseph Barnett, the jealous lover of victim Mary Kelly. Such thoughts endorse Occam's razor in stripping the murders of their conspiracy theorist leanings, but they do little to explain the occult notation and deft surgical precision with which the Ripper acted. 

The truth of the matter is, we have no good answer for who or what perpetrated the Whitechapel Horrors, though three credible theories stand out as both sound and likely:

The Whitechapel Demon: The first of these theories, suggests that Leather Apron was no man, but a spirit--the acrobatic London stalker commonly called Spring-heeled Jack. By invoking the name of the elusive fiend, however, we essentially admit that we know nothing more. Spring Heeled Jack remains a mystery--is it a man in a suit? Is it a spirit of the night? A great bat winged monster? A Spring Heeled Red Jack is not unlikely, but knowing does not truly answer our queries. Besides, we have enough unpleasantness to lay at the feet of the black-clad beast, without adding the murder and dismemberment of at least five prostitutes to the tally.

The Whitechapel Monster: The second theory takes on John Utterson's assurance, in his 1886 memoir, that Dr. Henry Jekyll, committed suicide. It urges us to believe that Jekyll faked his own death and that Red Jack was none other than Jekyll's shadow-self, Edward Hyde. Hyde's proclivities during the time of his experimental existence certainly included both the visiting of demimondaines and the brutalization of the fairer sex (just ask Mary Reilly), but a few inconsistencies remain. Why, for instance, kill MP Carew if the ripper murders were truly an expression of contempt for women? 

The Whitechapel Hatter: The last theory, by far the strangest, and the one I personally endorse, suggests that the Ripper was the worst kind of fiend--a seemingly kind old man. Not just any man, mind you, but the Reverend Charles Dodgson who, under a pseudonym, delighted children and adults alike with his fanciful books of rhymes and riddles. 

Always a lover of anagrams and wordplay, proponents of this theory draw direct connections between notes left at crime scenes specific passages in Dodgson's books. The murder sites suggest mathematical puzzles of which the Reverend was exceedingly fond, and, most damning of all, the so-called Ives testimony in which accredited medium, Vanessa Ives, reported that the face of Dodgson appeared to her during an inquiry into the ripper, appearing from the shadows first as eyes and a ghastly smile. Sadly, by the time this vision was received in January of 1899, Carroll was dead, and the ripper's victims cold in the ground and near-forgotten.

There are those who claim that Dodgson, never a robust man, and certainly frail by 1891 when Carrie "Shakespeare" Brown, the last of the non-canonical victims was killed. To that theorists, and this author, give a tragic rejoinder, the final piece of the ripper puzzle. The disappearance of Alice Liddell soon after her eighteenth birthday in 1870, was considered by most to be the result an elopement or perhaps a drowning. The most uncharitable suggested her defilement or murder at the hands of Dodgson, and certainly, his unsavory closeness to the family did little to dispel those accusations. But if we are to believe that the Great Detective was not without insight into the case in supposing Red Jack to instead be Red Jane, a darker picture emerges. An Alice Liddell working in tandem with her benefactor/tutor/lover, carrying out his twisted decrees, appears to be the link between the Ives testimony and the Great Detective's theory. Whether the ripper murders ceased because of her actual death, or some other reason, we may never know. But it is now often whispered that, though the infamous ripper letter was addressed "From Hell," it came by way of Wonderland.

A Stately Pleasure-Dome Decreed

March 30, 1867, Juneau: The Purchase of Alaska and the End of The Orcish Problem

Orcs were long viewed as the great failure among the races of man: too dim to be architects of their own destiny, too savage and violent to be enslaved alongside Negroes and aboriginals, too large and fearsome to be ignored. In short, they were a doomed race, fit for short-term exploitation and long term genocide. Yet, Orcs held among them, knowledge of their own storied past, of their time of supremact among the steppes of central Asia, when their brightest and most ruthless warlords hammered them into armies worth fearing: the Golden Horde, the Khanates of Genghis and Chagatai, and, especially, the dominion of Kublai Khan, emperor of half the world. 

And so it makes sense that, in trying to solve the tricky social riddle of the so-called Orcish Problem, an appeal to the most famous orc that ever lived would rank highly among the solutions. Beginning in the 17th century, the great politicians, men of industry and philosophers of the West recognized the dangers that a growing Orcish population represented. Orcish clans in the jungles of the Americas, darkest Africa, and aforementioned Russian steppes were of little threat, but industrialization and the spread of European colonial power brought White men, dwarves and elves into direct conflict with primitive orcish tribes, and by the Enlightenment, White orcs, that most problematic of figures were a staple of European cities. 

Unlike the mulatto or the the mestizo, and other degenerate mixes, the White Orc, with his musky ardor, his monstrous tusks, and his beastly strong physique, could neither be broken through the yoke of slavery, nor taught complacency through the presence of a loving family and the strict guidance of the church and the schoolhouse. By the early 19th century, with industry creating vast slums, and social conventions struggling to keep apace, those with Orcish blood comrprised nearly thirty percent of the population of the great metropoles and many feared their ascendancy within a hundred years' time. Thus, the great moral philosophers of the age: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and others all contributed to the debate over the Orcish Problem. 

Ironically, it was not a great philosopher who solved the issue, rather it was a pair of politicians. Grand Duke Konstantin of the Czarish House of Romanov, in collaboration with American Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, negotiated the sale of the Alaskan region of North America, which Seward then declared to be an American protectorate and a new homeland for the Orcs. Billed as "New Xanadu," after Kublai Khan's summer palace of Shangdu, the idea grew in popularity and the proposed nation grew in size as England, enthused by the prospect of a solution to the Orcish problem, donated large swaths of the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador to the cause--infertile lands that had space enough for Orcish expansion, but posited no real loss from an economic standpoint. 

In 1876, the forced relocation of North American and European Orcs began en masse. Ships departing for Saraj (formerly Anchorage) in the West, and Khanistan (formerly St. Johns) in the East, were loaded up with Orcish women and children, and the few tractable bulls that could be persuaded. Propaganda promised good jobs, a modicum of political autonomy and the non-interference of men, elves and dwarves in daily life, but the harsh realities of the Polar nation soon belied the rosy picture of an Orcish paradise. As word of New Xanadu's false promise spread back  Europe and America, rioting broke out, orcs met with police resistance and wholesale extermination of Orcs was practiced in more than a few beleaguered cities. 

By February 1881, the forced relocation efforts were declared outmoded and the program officially ended. Many politicians of the time looked out in dismay at the orcs that still infested the slums of London's East End, New York's lower East Side, and Chicago's Southside, but by the end of the century "Seward's Folly" began to show dividends. New Xanadese frontiersmen had discovered gold in Alaska and the Yukon and, with real reason to seek out the icy noman's land, Orcs, now cautious and proprietary about their suddenly valuable nation, encouraged their brethren to join them. By the end of the century, only a fraction of the populations of Europe and America consisted of Orcs. The problem had been well and truly solved. 

The Howling out of Spanish Town

March 12th, 1818, Bakewell: The Destruction of Thornfield Hall

Most in Derbyshire have only the vaguest memories of stately Thornfield Hall, and its unworthy master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. It is now a mouldering ruin, picturesque in its way. But it is the epicenter of a world spanning tale of horror, the remnants of which still lurk in the English countryside to this day. Rochester's murder by his first wife, Bertha Antoinette Mason-Cosway, led many researchers back to her family in Spanish Town, Jamaica where the Masons were wealthy creole planters. Historians confirm that a vein of madness ran in the family, more pronounced with each subsequent generation. The match between Rochester and Bertha was proposed by her father, though Edward ultimately agreed in recompense for a significant dowry. In bringing her back to England, however, he could never have known the destruction he was bringing back from the colonies.

Rochester wrote extensively of the howling and screaming that his wife was prone to, snarling like an animal and clawing at the faces of strangers if not calmed properly with ether. He took to locking her in his attic, hoping that one of her episodes would one day prove fatal. They did, though she took his life in the process and burned down Thornfield.

This would have a remained a dark chapter of provincial history, with little import (save as a curio in the published memoirs of Jane Rivers, the famed missionary) were it not for the later writings of one M. Paul Emmanuel, who researched the Mason madness during his time spent in Jamaica. Paul, a Spanish-born Labassecourien professor, spent 1850-1853 in Spanish Town managing a plantation and growing more and more curious about the way Arawaks, White men and West Africans alike, shunned the Masons.

What Paul Emmanuel discovered was nothing short of remarkable. Since the Spanish conquered the Taino, the locals claimed that their god, Opiyelguobiran, was missing, fled into a lagoon. Opiyelguobiran was the Taino's sacred guardian of the dead, a literal watchdog who must be enticed and then bound to sacred spaces, lest doom come to those who had loosed him. 

The Mason property was littered with sacred chalk drawings of the god, curious stone idols, and their servants talked of dark rituals and blood sacrifice made around fire pits by the edge of the Spanish Town lagoon. Emmanuel's inquiries appear to have led him into direct, physical confrontation with the Masons, owing both to the degenerate family's violent brand of madness, and what can only be described as M. Paul's irascible, easily inflamed temper.

Though a devout Cstholic, Emmanuel wrote that he had experienced, both in Villette and Spanish Town, events that confronted him with the reality of vengeful spirits, that no Christian God had sanctioned. He became obsessed with attempting to decipher precisely what was and was not true of the myths. Of most especial interest was the talk of a prophecy, the mention of the Taino's fear of having loosed Opiyelguobiran upon the island, resulting in the eradication of all Arawak peoples by the invading Spanish. And the suggestion that Opiyelguobiran would always hunger for new lands to conquer, new dead to watch over. And the god found men to in hide in, a stowaway waiting to manifest.

By the time Paul Emmanuel was on his way home, he realized it was too late. That the monster dog was already in him. It had noted his interest and was determined to cross the Atlantic. Survivors from the wreck of the SS Josephine, reported that it was not the storm which sank the vessel off the coast of Labassecour, it was a determined little scholar, with a wrench, headed for the engines. Those as far away as the Labassecourien capitol of Villette said that storm howled unnaturally, like a banshee keening its necrophonic squeal

As for the legacy of Bertha Mason, Rochester was long dead by the time the hounds began to be spotted in England. Dark, canine shapes scuttling through the underbrush, howling on the moors as far away as Exeter, and even in the faraway fields of Devonshire, where an especially monstrous beast was said to stalk the grounds of Baskerville Hall. This so-called Yeth Hound would remain upon the grounds, terrifying its residents  until the intervention of the Great Detective, early in the next century.

Prometheus Unbound

August 15, 1886, Pittsburgh: Grand Opening of Tesla-Frankenstein

When biographer Mary Shelly ended her scathing indictment of the Swiss vivisectionist, Victor Frankenstein, with his imminent voyage to Greenland the better to track down his creation, most assumed that both doctor and protege would perish in the frozen wastes. Though several expeditions, including the doomed voyage of Sir John Franklin and his HMS Terror, sought to recover news of the infamous pair, none was forthcoming until 1885 when the errant Adam Frankenstein arrived with much fanfare on the docks of Cleveland, Ohio, after a three month voyage south.

Most could not have predicted the transformation in the world's most famous revenant. The descriptions given by Shelly alongside the late Doctor's notes suggested that Adam Frankenstein's reanimation had occurred through the concoction of an elixir vitae in close combination with a primitive water powered galvanizer. The Adam Frankenstein that arrived by steamship was utterly remade: his limbs reinforced by magnetized steel, his heart powered by all the force of the new electrical age. 

The next year, Serbian scientist and protege of the great Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, announced that he and the younger Frankenstein would be launching a jointly held power company, publishing the details of their long correspondence over the previous decade. Dissatisfied with his ill-treatment at the hands of electromantic capitalist, Edison, Tesla had put forth considerable funds to advertise himself to the younger Frankenstein as a mechanic of sorts, updating the original doctor's designs and making him much more capable in the new age of science. Frankenstein had been wary at first but, upon seeing some of Tesla's designs, could not help but accede that the time had come to leave his settlement just north of Thulic Qaanaaq. 

The Tesla-Frankenstein Power Company (later the TF Polyphase Company, by then a subsidiary of Westinghouse) came to represent everything hopeful about the burgeoning field of electric magnetism. It also set off a sometimes secretly violent "Current War" with Tesla and Edison on the one side, and Edison's Bear Flag Dynamics on the other. This brought the issue of race to the forefront, which would prove to be the undoing of the burgeoning alternating current partnership.

Edison's ties to the Elven community, through his mother, were at their ugliest and most visible (his slightly arched ears aside) in his condemnation of what many elves called the Tusked Abomination, a reference to Frankenstein's Orcish face and brain.* This set off a firestorm of controversy, smear ads against TF Polyphase incited hate crimes--the burning of factories, The Confederate States of America boycotting their company, and a lengthy screed written by John Fiske on the subject of Orcish inferiority. Eventually Adam Frankenstein was forced into resignation and Tesla followed soon after. Frankenstein moved his interests to Xanadu, where the Orcish Government offered to fund his research, albeit at a much lower price than did him any good. 

*Though, to be clear, the matter of Adam Frankenstein's brain was never fully explored. Shelly reported that Victor Frankenstein sought to use Orcish parts since most of the itinerant laborers in the alps had no family and the "well-known mental deficiency of the Orcish breed" ensured that his creation would not be able to replicate the experiments. 

The Death of the Crimson Marquis

December 2, 1814 Charenton-Ste. Maurice: The Alleged Death of the Crimson Marquis

When Madeleine le Clerc fled from Charenton asylum, most considered her the last, bespoilt victim of the infamous "Crimson Marquis," Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. We now acknowledge the truth to be far stranger.

The Marquis had lived as a political prisoner of Le Bonaparte, in Charenton Asylum for the last thirteen years of his life, a fading, debauched relic from a France before the terror. But, in his final days, the staff and inmates of the Sanitarium noted a remarkable change in the behavior of the beastly creature: now and then he would cry out for mercy, ask for forgiveness for a myriad of his sins, even begged for the local Monseigneur to attend to the welfare of his soul. When he at last expired, several nurses swore that he looked relieved, as though finally free of a lifetime of torment.

In the weeks that followed, after Le Clerc disappeared, the Marquis' own son, Donatien Claude Armand, began to employ a small army of gendarmes, the better to protect him from intruders that he claimed bedeviled him at night. When a vault at Chateu de Lacoste was found violated and emptied, Claude Armand had all his father's writings burned, and began to divest himself utterly from his family's legacy and titles. Among the belongings pilfered, amidst innumerable decrepit tomes and devices of pleasure, a life size pink marble statue of Narcissus dating back to pre-Augustan Rome. How the statue was removed without the aide of a carriage and team of horses, the gendarmes could not fathom.

Tracking the provenance of the statue was difficult without the original, but Charles August Swinburne, said to be the Marquis' spiritual and poetical descendant, claims that it was once in the possession of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester. From there it was traced back in labyrinthine, and often fashion to many of the great and vicious decadents of ages past: Elizabet Bathory, Pope Innocent XII, supposedly even Caligula himself.
The story would remain curious but unremarkable were it not for the testimony of a French Indochine hotelier in 1896 who claimed that a remarkably well-preserved Madeleine Le Clerc was a guest of his establishment in Saigon for some ten years, during which time she did not appear to age a day. Using the name Justine, the hotelier claimed that she met with all manner of men and women, making noises "frightful enough to wake the dead" at all hours of the night. The vast majority of these especial guests were not seen after visiting this "Justine Inimitable."

The hotelier claims that he hired a team of coolie to investigate this woman's comings and goings and they discovered a clearing in the jungle that she frequented. At the center of this clearing was a statue, wrough in pink marble, and scrificed on its altar were dozens of bodies in various states of decay. The coolies ran, says their employer, but not before noticing that one of the bodies, old and wizened, was unmistakably Le Justine. This suspicious amateur investigator decided to cease all inquiries, when someone who had been a guest of the curious woman checked out of the hotel on the behalf of the long time guest, and was last seen leaving town along a jungle road, a new paramour on his arm.