TITLE-WORSHIPPERS.

Mataura Ensign, 29 September 1913, Page 2

TITLE-WORSHIPPERS.

In a drastic verdict satirising the "title - worshipping proclivities" of American women Judge Cohalan, of the Supreme Court, New York, granted r>robate of the will of Countess Gaston Darsdiot, nee Wilhelmina Detwold, a native of New York, who ignored the majority of her American relatives and divided her fortune of £BO.OOO between her husband's nephew, Count Darschot, and her own nephew and niece. Tho American relatives contested the will on the ground that Count Darschot of eßlgium had conspired with the nephew of the late countess, Mr Joseph Lentilhon- t for the purpose of fraudulently influencing the countess in making her will. They based their protest on same 2-00 letters addressed to his American aunt by Count Darsohot, in whioh he confessed Ins desire to marry only money and his inability to find an American heiress and observed, "In the United States there is nothing to lie 'done then? Let time.bring a golden balloon who is nice." Tho count eventually married, against the wishes of i his aunt, a daughter of Nubar Pasha, the Egyptian statesman, with a fortune : of some £1,600,000. i The judge in his verdict declared that the count's letters were "more like the fervid appeals of an infatuated lover than the letters of a young man to his nnde'w widow" Re added that they showed "manifest insincerity that would have filled an ordinary American woman with disgust." The letters showed the count to be "a typical European fortune-hunter desirous of bartering a title for money." Tho judge, however, decreed that the testatrix .belonged to that "class of American: women to whom a title of nobility is the great criterion of honor, virtue, and high social' position." If, therefore, sho was pleased by the grossest and most extravagant flattery and adulation from the possessor of a title the count could not be said to have exercised undue influence "even if he exhausted his ingenuity in ill ay ma upon tho affections of a title-worshipping] woman." !