DUPED PRINCES

Greymouth Evening Star, 13 October 1928, Page 9

DUPED PRINCES

BOLD BEAUTY’S ADVENTURES The attempt to murder the ex-Coun-tess Ferdinand Fischler von. Treuborg, who was shot at and dangerously wounded recently in Berlin by a man with the false name of Count von Arnim, has riveted public attention in Germany on woman who was one of the most daring and successful adventuresses of her time. The ex-countess ■was a daughter of a tailor of Offenbach, and, thanks to her ravishing beauty and her dare-devil nature, she acquired money and jewels and luxury with astonishing rapidity. Towards the end of the last century she took the city of Frankfort-on-the-Main by storm and also the hearts of the sons of its rich bankers and merchants, to say nothing of the hearts of their susceptible elders. z

She was the soul of every frolic and gay supper-party of the city. The solid wealth of Frankfort finally bored her, and, rich in experience of the are of capturing men with desirable bank accounts, she appeared at BadenBaden at a period when rhe city was at the height of its fame and crowded by rich and distinguished persons from every part of Europe. She provided a sensation when she drove her own four-in-hand exquisitely decorated with flowers, at the most brilliant coiso of tho season, and the gossips said she would undoubtedly have boon awarded the first prize for her turn-out had not. a royal personage, from whom she had extorted a large sum of money, intimated that, the committee would incur his displeasure if Pussic, as everybody called her, was given the prize. Pussie left Baden-Baden to try her luck at Monte Carlo, where, in point of fact, she held her owm with rivals of a dozen nationality., She was quickly the friend of g’and dukes and princes, whom she amused as much as she had amused the bankers of Frankfort-on-the-Main. Germans were and arc proud of her.

“Our one and only successful adventuress,” said one Gorman when talking of the murder attempt. She was over 30 when she came to Berlin, where she showed herself in fashionable restaurants and sipped

champagne in bars frequented by officers of the Guards. All the money which she wanted she got, ami she resolved to have a new triumph. She decided to be a countess. So Pussie and a Count Fischler von Treiiberg went to London and got married, but the marriage was subseqpently annulled by a. German court.

As her beauty began Io fade, Pussie who spent all she got, had Io find new means of raising the wind. In combination with a famous swindler, who passed under the name of Baron George de Focke, she began to interest people in an alleged will of the Archduke Eugene, under which she was to inherit an immense fortune, and she persuaded one of the best lawyers in Berlin to guarantee that the document which she produced was a correct translation of a non-existing Hungarian original. In business of this sort, she found the melting eyes of her daughter, who had inherited her mother’s beauty, worked wonders.The swindle was exposed in one of the Berlin papers.

Tho countess, as she was then, made the acquaintance of innumerable young men of the Prussian nobility and always had a plan to help them to get the absolutely indispensable thousand or so. She was actually in partnership with moneylenders, including the famous Heinrich Pariser, about whom one of the young men of the day said, “At least one gets money from Pariser and is not forced to take books and pictures and babies’ coflins.” When ."ome young fool was at his wits’ end Io raise a. thousand, perhaps to pay debls at cards, the countess would load him to the usurer. A year before tho war Pussio and one of her business friends overstepped the boundary between legal and illegal. Public attention was fixed on the gang when a young officer of the Guards, caught in their net, put a bullet through his brain. There was a trial, which lasted for days, and at which the affairs of all sorts of great people were revealed. Them was Princess Louise of Coburg, who had been swindled, and there was Prince Miguel of Braganza, neither of whom actually appeared, and there were revelations of the extraordinary connection between Princess Alexan-

(Ira. of Ysenburg-Budingen and the countess, who had acted together in arranging marriages. Pussie was sent to prison for three years and a-half. During her imprisonment the marriage of Pussie with her count was annulled. When she appeared again she became associated with companies for running gaming-tables in fashionable watering-places. Latterly she has been able to maintain an agreeable flat in the west end of Berlin. What were her relations with the false

Count von Arnim, who nearly killed her, nobody knows.

The so-called count appeared at tho flat of the ex-countess, and made such a frightful scene that the neighbours, alarmed by the noise, sent for the pel !<•(;. When they arrived Frau Uhl, Io give Pussio her present name, de-<-]:ired llml nolhing was amiss, and Hwy had Io go.

Yet she was terribly frightened, for she had got a sailor, a lad of 25, who is an excellent boxer to come to her flat at the time at which she knew

the mysterious friend would arrive. There was another violent scene, and the visitor was quicker with his revolver than the sailor with his fists. The sailor was wounded and Pussie Uhl, as she rushed down the stairs, received three bullets and collapsed in Ihe street in a pool of blood, yet in hospital she categorically refused to give any information which would help the police to establish the identity of her assailant.

She is now 57 With no hope and nothing but misery before her.