In late December 1825, a coachman named Block demanded of James Thalreuter the payment of seventy florins long overdue. Thalreuter produced a promissory note for 450 florins, ostensibly bearing the signature of Advocate Schroll, pledging to settle his arrears the moment the draft was honoured. Block sought out Schroll to verify its authenticity. The advocate roundly disowned the instrument and laid the matter before the magistrates. The subsequent investigation brought to light that the youth, then sixteen years of age, had, since the preceding summer, spun an elaborate fable of princely descent to despoil his adoptive parents of their fortune. Feuerbach recounts the interrogations, the official verifications, and the malicious falsehoods that so vastly widened the scope of the proceedings.
James had been born out of wedlock at Landshut in 1809, the natural son of Barbara Thalreuter and Lieutenant-Colonel von Rescher, who had formally acknowledged him. His mother perished that same year. Called away to the Russian campaign, his father entrusted the infant to Baron von Stromwalter, a trusted family friend. The baron and his lady reared the boy as their own. The baroness held the greater part of the household’s wealth; her husband, aged and self-effacing, seldom acted without her counsel. Their affection for James, however, was unequally matched: the baroness made light of his falsehoods and his youthful indiscretions, granting him unrestricted access to her purse and the household valuables.
This boundless indulgence exacted an ever-heavier toll. James contracted debts, made off with family heirlooms, and purloined no less than seven hundred florins from his guardian’s escritoire. Upon discovering the theft, she forgave him. The keys were subsequently removed from his reach, yet this precaution did nothing to arrest his design. In the early summer of 1825, he began to regale her with an altered tale of his nativity: he gave out that he was the true-born son of a reigning duke—designated in the primary source merely by the initial B.—entrusted in secret to Colonel von Rescher to shield him from a dynastic rival who had already dispatched an elder heir by poison.
The baron and his wife were nevertheless in possession of his authentic certificate of birth. James overrode this documentary proof by means of a series of letters purporting to come from the sovereign duke and a confidential equerry, one von Hautbing. These missives he delivered in person, penned in an illegible, crabbed hand, reading them aloud himself to his adoptive mother. Now they conveyed the duke’s gratitude for the shelter afforded the young prince; now they pledged vast sums of money, or announced an impending visit that never came to pass. James would explain that the remittances were delayed, or that his father had been summoned away before their arrival. The letters were never confided to an independent courier, nor did any member of the family ever clap eyes upon the personages thus invoked.
He further produced pretended gifts from the illustrious duke: strings of pearls, a casket, and gold earrings. The pearls were glass baubles, procured from a toy-shop with stolen funds; the earrings had been purchased out of the baroness’s own purse. He earnestly dissuaded the couple from submitting these jewels to a lapidary, warning that such vulgar suspicion would mortally offend the reigning house. The trinkets were subsequently pledged as collateral for loans, the deluded parents still clinging to the belief that they betokened their approaching opulence.
To this fable James annexed a second: the imminent alliance of their son, Lieutenant von Stromwalter, with a maiden of the noble house of von Waller. He asserted that the betrothal had been sealed, enjoining upon the parents the strictest secrecy lest the surprise be marred. Forged letters conveyed felicitations in the names of the duke, of Hautbing, and of a general. Presently, he demanded funds to furnish the military caution-money exacted prior to any officer’s marriage. The baroness delivered to him 2,700 florins. Other exactions swiftly followed: the lieutenant had supposedly been arrested for sedition, then beset by pressing creditors, then compromised by a young woman with child. The distracted mother sold off her furnishings and placed the proceeds in his hands.
The son, serving at a distant garrison, could confirm none of these occurrences. James systematically intercepted the post, or penned replies in his mother’s stead. On one occasion, when the lieutenant wrote expressing alarm at reports of his adoptive brother’s extravagant disbursements, James seized the letter before the baroness had seen it and drafted the response himself, merely procuring her signature to a postscript she had not read. Thus, the son’s silence, which ought to have dispelled these chimeras, was cunningly forged into their confirmation.
The baroness sold her securities, pledged her goods, and at length parted with her small estate of Schwaig along with her remaining revenues. James invariably assured her that these sacrifices were purely provisional, or intended to establish the young officer’s future household. He would likewise lay papers before her to sign, concealing the text with his palm and protesting that it was all in jest; these instruments proved to be bills of exchange, which he promptly negotiated. In a short space of time, he extracted between six and eight thousand florins from his adoptive parents, according to the estimates deduced by Feuerbach from the trial records. These sums he squandered upon lavish entertainments and presents, while the aged couple sank deeper into penury.
The initial judicial summons arose not from the Stromwalters, but from Block. On 5 January 1826, Schroll entered a formal declaration that the note was a forgery. A search was decreed, and James was apprehended on 11 January. On the very next day, the baroness appeared before the magistrate to plead for his release. She admitted that he had taken from her at least seven hundred florins, but declared that she had forgiven him and stood ready to discharge his liabilities. When James confessed to the forgery and his many deceits, the couple at last grasped that the legend of the hidden prince was an empty fraud. Yet their initial conviction proved hard to eradicate: they still cherished the lingering hope that the duke might yet appear to retrieve their fortunes.
Under his initial interrogations, James acknowledged the thefts, the forged drafts, and the deceits. Yet he presently alleged that Stang, the toy-dealer, had acted as his instigator and accomplice. He further denounced an innkeeper named Brechtal and several others, charging them with fraud, forgery, and even a conspiracy to poison. His depositions were so replete with circumstantial detail that the authorities opened fresh inquiries and instituted searches of several dwellings. Goods were seized from the individuals he had denounced. The dossier swelled with every new document James promised to reveal or every fresh name he submitted to the court’s scrutiny.
A rigorous examination demolished these allegations one by one. A lottery ticket he denounced as counterfeit proved entirely genuine. Utensils he alleged to be plated were found to be solid silver; effects he claimed had been stolen from the Stromwalters had belonged to Stang for years. The secret keg said to conceal compromised property was utterly fictitious, and the vials he described as filled with deadly poison contained nothing more sinister than pomade and hair-oil. Respectable citizens had been arrested solely upon the boy’s word; several were set at liberty when his assertions proved wholly devoid of truth.
James retracted certain charges only to maintain others in the face of glaring contradictions. In the end, he confessed that he had invented the greater part out of petty vindictiveness. His grievances varied with his victims: one had crossed him in a dispute, another had censured his arrogance, a third had charged him too dearly for his purchases. After six-and-twenty interrogations, he admitted that his accusations against Stang and Brechtal were fabrications out of whole cloth, and that his successive justifications were equally false. The court had been compelled not merely to investigate his original forgeries, but to dismantle the entire labyrinth of new fables he had introduced into the record.
On 25 September 1826, the tribunal sentenced him to eight years of penal servitude for forgery, theft, and associated frauds. He died in 1828 within the Munich house of correction, long before the expiry of his term. The pretended prince did not live to see his twentieth year. The Stromwalters had bartered away their patrimony for an illusory fortune heralded in illegible letters. It had required only that Block carry a single slip of paper to the man whose name it bore for this vast paper realm to dissolve into nothingness.