FROM HOWL Foil 'RECIPROCITY' TO PRESENT DAY 237 



Detective Case,' which brought to Ught the rotten moral 

 condition of the most important and most trusted among 

 the various branches of our police force. 



Madame de Goncourt was a lady, a widow, living 

 at Chateau de Goncourt, which is described with some 

 vagueness as being 'about 100 miles distant from 

 Paris.' There, in her rural retirement, she received a 

 circular and other documents from a firm of English 

 swindlers, living — or having a place of what they were 

 pleased to term business — in London, and holding, no 

 doubt, that, as the Claimant would have put it, some 

 French widows ' has plenty money and no brains.' So 

 impressed was she by the advantages set forth in those 

 documents tliat at various times during the year 1876 

 she transmitted to the enterprising English firm of 

 swindlers no less than 10,000/. to be invested in bets 

 upon horse races. This shows how deeply the sport of 

 horse-racing (especially as a medium of investment) had 

 impressed the French mind by this time, and how widely 

 spread among all circles of French society was the fancy 

 for the Turf as a pecuniary speculation ; else it could 

 never have occurred even to the most enterprising 

 English swindlers to propound their plan to a French 

 widow a hundred miles from Paris, or to her to make 

 them her agents. Some thirty years previously such a 

 French widow would not have known wliat 'the Turf 

 meant, and the documents of the English swindlers 

 would have been as incomprehensible as a cuneiform 

 inscription to her. Even as it was Madame de Gon- 

 court seems to have been a little "• fogged ' and to have 

 been imposed upon by the term used by the swindlers, 

 who assumed the style and title of ' sworn bookmakers,' 

 which she appears to have confounded in some way 

 with ' sworn brokers.' However the firm evidently 



