Multiple Wife

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 726, 27 July 1929, Page 20

Multiple Wife

2 Husbands Homes and Families STRANGE BELGIAN STORY

HAT a woman should for 20 years pass as the wife of two different men, run well two separate homes and endear

herself to two separate families, sounds almost incredible, but it has been accomplished by Madame Hearnaerts, the wife of a Flemish Russian living in Antwerp.

It was only the death of the other “husband,” an Englishman named John Bradley, that brought to light this well-kept secret. To her legal husband, by whom she has had four children, she was married just over 20 years ago, and met Bradley, who was then a young commercial traveller, in Brussels, shortly before the birth of her first baby. She renewed her friendship with Bradley when he was a soldier in the British Army and she and her husband were refugees iu Ypres in 1914, after the fall of Antwerp. Unknown to her husband she went through, in Paris, a marriage ceremony with Bradley, with whom she had remained on the most intimate terms since their first meeting 20 years ago. When Bradley was discharged from the Army he settled in Brussels, aud made a home for the lady he believed to be his wife. She joined him there, but on the pretext that she preferred to follow her business' as j traveller for a well-known Brussels j lace lingerie house, she was absent j enough from the roof of Bradley to make it possible for her to put in half her time under the roof of Hearnaerts, to whom she offered the same explanation of her absences when it was her turn to be in her Brussels home. Double Life

Apart from these absences she had the reputation of being an ideal housewife and mother, and when at home certainly did her best to make everything pleasant for husband and children. Regularly she had summer holidays with both families in turn, and tlie double life she was living was never suspected. Certain formalities connected with the estate of Bradley led to the truth being made public. Before his death she had told Bradley about her deception and secured his forgiveness, and she 'decided afterward to tell the facts to her husband and her two families.

AU have forgiven her because they recognise that she was otherwise all that could be desired as wife and mother. The two families will now live under the same roof, and if the authorities insist on punishing the mother they will stand by her. Her excuse for her extraordinary masquerade is that she is a woman with an infinite capacity for affection and tenderness, and that she felt that one home was not enough for her, beside which she loved both men and could not bear the .thought of losing one or the other.