In the 1880s, the French police knew that Allmayer was moving across the Continent; they caught wind of his passage only after his departure, trailed him from city to city, and invariably missed him by a matter of hours. Yet the fugitive bore none of the marks of a man recognizable by brutality. Arthur Griffiths depicts him as well-dressed, engaging, and well-educated, capable of gaining admittance by turns as an officer, an aristocrat, or a merchant. This faculty for shifting persona sustained a protracted career of fraud, extending from his father’s offices to the grand hotels and counting-houses of Europe’s capitals.
Griffiths presents the affair retrospectively, situating it within the 1880s without assigning dates to each episode. The narrative follows his chapter; the facts and monetary sums remain those furnished by the author.
The Son and the Regiment
Allmayer had been placed as a clerk in his father’s office. Whilst still an adolescent, he purloined a chequebook; one of the drafts, bearing his father’s forged signature, was presented to the bank and duly honoured. The fraud was uncovered and the youth reprimanded, though no judicial consequence is recorded. He soon offended again, this time by intercepting a registered letter containing banknotes and casting suspicion upon an innocent stranger. In the end, his father procured his enlistment in a regiment of dragoons.
The army did not mend his ways. Allmayer squandered the money of others to purchase goodwill and, in order to settle his debts, robbed his own captain. He escaped from the military guardhouse, thereby delaying his court-martial, but was ultimately sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at the Cherche-Midi, the military prison of Paris. Upon the expiration of this sentence, he was dispatched to a disciplinary battalion in Algeria. This sequence of events is noteworthy: Algeria was not the place where, according to Griffiths, he served the five-year sentence; it was rather the destination of his disciplinary posting following his incarceration in Paris.
Upon his return to Paris, Allmayer obtained his family’s forgiveness and was received back into the domestic circle. For a time, he led a regular life. His friends even endeavoured to secure him a respectable position. His family resided at Chatou, and the railway journey to the Gare Saint-Lazare afforded him the opportunity to renew an acquaintance with Edmond K., a former schoolfellow. The latter opened the offices of his Parisian firm to him. Letters soon began to vanish following Allmayer’s visits, though K. possessed no tangible proof against his friend.
The Draft for Sixteen Hundred Pounds
The affair came to light when another Parisian banker, designated solely by the initial C., received an enquiry by telephone purporting to come from K. The caller wished to ascertain at what rate C. would discount a bill of exchange for 1,600 pounds sterling drawn upon a London house and endorsed in K.’s name. The banker believed he recognized K.’s voice and readily consented, having long desired to enter into commercial relations with him. He named his terms; twenty minutes later, a messenger delivered the draft and collected the funds.
On the following day, C.’s London correspondent returned the draft so that a minor irregularity in the endorsement might be rectified. When the document was laid before K., the latter declared that he had never signed the endorsement and recognized the bill as one that had vanished from his offices two months earlier. He had received none of the money disbursed by C. Suspicion fell upon two clerks who had on occasion imitated their employer’s signature in jest; placed under arrest, their guilt seemed all but assured.
Allmayer had taken a keen interest in the enquiry with all the zeal of a devoted friend. He accompanied K. to the Préfecture and was examined by the examining magistrate. Drawing the judge aside, he purported to divulge the truth: K. himself, he explained, had abstracted the draft under the pressure of financial distress. The banker was recalled before the magistrate and confronted with this accusation. Flustered, he protested his innocence, but his hesitation was construed as an admission of guilt; he was committed to Mazas. The judge, not entirely persuaded by Allmayer and aware of his past history, ordered him remanded in custody as well.
Both men were soon released following the intervention of the Allmayer family, who suspected their son and chose to settle the matter privately. Allmayer deemed it prudent to leave France. The truth subsequently came to light: he had enlisted the services of a former comrade from the disciplinary battalion in Algeria. He had conducted him to a public telephone office and instructed him to ring C., pretending to speak from K.’s offices. The former soldier had then delivered the stolen draft and pocketed the cash. Allmayer retained the lion’s share; his accomplice received 200 pounds and a new suit of clothes. On the following day, Allmayer warned him that all had been discovered and sent him fleeing to Algeria. When the confederate was arrested and brought back to Paris, he had been found in Africa carrying a telegram in which Allmayer warned him that “Joseph,” the detective dispatched on his trail, was pursuing him, and advised him to make for New York.
An Order Fabricated at Mazas
Allmayer returned to prison, this time to Mazas, and there devised an escape without breaking a single lock. The magistrate examined him regularly in his chambers at the Préfecture. During these transfers, the prisoner purloined a sheet of official stationery and an envelope, slipping them among his own papers. He had observed that an order of release could be drawn up as a simple letter on administrative paper. In his cell, he fabricated such an order, forging the signature of the examining magistrate.
He lacked only the official seal. During an examination, Allmayer, with a sudden gesture, upset the inkstand over the uniform of the guard stationed beside him. He pointed to the water bottle; the guard rushed towards it, the magistrate and the registrar followed the commotion with their eyes, and Allmayer applied the seal, which he had already pocketed. It remained only to convey the letter to Mazas through an official channel. As he left the chambers, he feigned having forgotten something, stepped back into the room, and re-emerged with the forged warrant, which he handed to the guard, complaining that the magistrate was treating him like an errand-boy.
The governor of Mazas soon received the document and came to announce to Allmayer that the judge had ordered his liberation. That very evening, the escapee had reached Brussels. The French extradition formalities had not been strictly observed; Belgium nevertheless refused him refuge and escorted him to the German frontier. Thence he made for the nearest seaport and embarked for Morocco.
A retrospective source from 1903 reproduces the order dated 30 November 1886 and mentions his committal on 23 October. This reference dates the escape itself, not the entirety of his career.
The Names, the Sheep, and the Banknotes
Allmayer made frequent journeys between Morocco and France, moving freely through the capitals of Europe. He assumed various titles of nobility, styling himself in turn the Viscount of Bonneville, the Count of Motteville, or the Count of Maupas; in commercial transactions, he presented himself more modestly under the names of Meyer or Mayer. Griffiths relates that he bought and sold sheep and wool with an expertise that astonished even the merchants he swindled. This practical proficiency gave colour to his pose as a solid man of business.
In Paris, under the name of Eugène Meyer, he spoke of a supply of armaments destined for the Sultan of Morocco. He asserted that an eminent Parisian banker owed him 30,000 pounds and held his acceptance for that amount. Those present would have gladly discounted the debt, but the sum was too considerable. Meyer proposed dividing it into smaller bills of exchange, which he produced and successfully negotiated. They were forgeries. The holders were arrested, whilst Allmayer was already far away. He wrote to the newspapers to exonerate his unwitting dupes and offered to surrender himself if the police would guarantee him a safe-conduct; the police refused, and the others were convicted. This fraud in commercial paper concerning armaments was distinct from the subsequent sheep affair in Marseilles.
In Marseilles, he defrauded the merchant R. of 20,000 francs by promising him a contract to supply sheep to the French government. To secure the concession, he claimed, this sum had to be delivered anonymously to a high-ranking official. Allmayer wrote the address upon an envelope before R.’s eyes; the merchant placed the banknotes inside and believed he had left it upon the blotting-pad. But Allmayer had substituted an identical envelope, keeping the one containing the money. According to Griffiths, the official subsequently received an envelope stuffed with scraps of old newspaper cut to the size of banknotes, and understood the incident only upon receiving the merchant’s formal complaint.
The Final Arrest
The police tracked Allmayer across the length and breadth of Europe: Belgrade, Genoa, Paris, Lyons, Aix, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Courtrai, and Le Havre. He posed as a cavalry officer, a viscount, or a gentleman of leisure; at Bordeaux, warned directly by the police commissioner himself, he had ample time to decamp. The detectives traced his movements to Le Havre and finally ran him to earth on the Boulevard de Strasbourg, impeccably attired and accompanied by a woman. He denied his identity, but was placed under arrest and conveyed to Paris.
At the Conciergerie, under close surveillance, he made a final attempt to secure his release by claiming to know where a gang of thieves had concealed their plunder. He sought to lure the police to the Rue Saint-Maur, where confederates were to effect his rescue. The authorities verified the story and frustrated the plot. At his trial, Allmayer played the part of a broken, half-witted invalid, laying the blame for the frauds upon an escaped convict. Griffiths asserts that this performance earned him the lighter penalty rather than the maximum sentence. He was sentenced to twelve years of transportation and dispatched to the Îles du Salut, where he served as an infirmary attendant in the hospital and became a favourite among his warders.
The chronicler concludes that Allmayer owed his success to his consummate talent as an actor: he knew precisely what face to present to a soldier, a merchant, a policeman, or a magistrate. In this portrait, the gaol does not reform the man; it merely supplies him with fresh parts to play. Yet the judicial reckoning remained definitive: the man who had delivered a prisoner by means of a forged order was at last transported under the weight of an unappealable sentence. The exact dates of these numerous episodes, like the ultimate fate of all those he plundered, remain outside Griffiths’s narrative; to supply them would be to invent an aftermath which the historical source does not warrant.