The Greatest Aphrodisiac

Chocolate?  Oysters?  Spanish fly?  No.  Historical manuscripts.

That's right, folks.  The Globe and Mail reports on John Mark Tillmann's theft of some seven thousand artefacts and documents from museums, libraries, archives and shops.  His Russian girlfriend served as accomplice.  Among their most cherished moments:

The pair also stole a letter written in 1758 by General James Wolfe, the victor at the Plains of Abraham, from the Dalhousie University archives. Mr. Tillmann explains that he was able to copy a set of keys that opened a vault in the university’s library. He and Katya hid in the women’s bathroom until the night security guard left and used the keys to get into the vault, which was jammed with documents. After two hours of searching, around 3 a.m., they hit “pay dirt.”

“I said, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, if this is real’ – and it looked all real, [it] was the George Washington letter, worth probably half a million to a million dollars in itself. … And I thought, ‘Oh wow.’”

Rooting around further, they found the Wolfe letter.

“We became so exuberant over this – because it was pretty euphoric being in there and knowing at that point that you have millions of dollars worth of documents on the black market – that we ended up having sex right in the middle of all these papers and stuff strewn around,” he recalls. He still had the Washington and Wolfe letters, which he stole in 1998, when he was arrested last year.

I have to wonder.  Are the good folks at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library ready for the euphoric hanky-panky that their recent acquisition will elicit?  If a single Wolfe letter can have this effect, I dare not imagine what 233 of them will do.

P.-F.-X.

Relic Theft

Readers may recall the post from back in September which reported that Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, had been named one of the top ten "cool" village destination in the United States owing to its French colonial heritage.  Today's piece of Ste. Genevieve-related news is less joyful. 

The Roman Catholic parish church there, the oldest in the archdiocese, is home to a number of relics --pieces of bone, scraps of a garment, locks of hair -- of saints.  It is said to hold the largest collection of Ste. Genevieve's relics outside of France.  Hold, or rather... have held.  Over the Christmas holiday, a thief walked off with nine of them, leaving the reliquaries, their containers, behind.  Last week, the empty reliquaries were noticed by a cleaning crew.  For a fuller story, see here.

I should point out that, though the parish was founded in 1759, the construction of the current building dates only to 1876, and that the relics in question arrived from Rome not during the colonial period, but in the 1930s and 1940s.

It brings back to mind another theft, which occured at the Maison Hamel-Bruneau, in Quebec City, back in 2008.  Among the objects stolen from a temporary exhibition at this small museum were two which had been borrowed from the Musée huron-wendat at Wendake : a silver reliquary shaped like the Virgin Mary's shirt, given to the Huron-Wendat community in 1676, and an ornate silver ciborium dating to 1675-1676.  Two masterpieces, and irreparable losses.  Here's to hoping that they haven't been melted and will one day surface.


P.-F.-X.