A false letter from Vercingetorix to Pompeu
Denis Vrain-Lucas used his talent for forgery to scam university professor Michel Chasles out of more than 140,000 francs.
One of most audacious literary frauds of the 19th century was perpetrated not by a scholar or aristocrat, but by a modest French civil servant who managed to deceive one of the leading mathematicians of his time.
Denis Vrain-Lucasa self-taught civil servant from rural France, falsified tens of thousands of historical documents and sold them to a renowned academic, creating a scandal that rocked the French scientific community.
Born in 1816 in the village of Lanneray, in the Loire Valley, Vrain-Lucas had humble origins. Although he received some formal education, never got a degree university and spent much of his youth working as a clerk in administrative offices, explains .
His luck changed when he began producing genealogies and forged documents for rich clients who sought to prove noble ancestry, a practice that allowed him to develop extraordinary skills in imitating calligraphy and aging paper to resemble centuries-old manuscripts.
When visiting the Imperial Library in Paris to study authentic documents, Vrain-Lucas learned to replicate historical writing styles and even treating the paper with candle smoke and dirty water to give it an antique appearance. Armed with these techniques, he launched a much more ambitious plan in 1861.
Its main target was Michael Chaslesa celebrated mathematician and professor at the Sorbonne, who was also an avid collector of manuscripts and antiquities. Vrain-Lucas claimed to represent the heir of a deceased aristocrat, whose valuable collection of historical documents had to be sold discreetly. Intrigued, Chasles began purchasing the documents.
Over the next five years, the mathematician accumulated a remarkable collection of supposedly authentic letters written by famous historical figures. Among them, there were correspondences attributed to literary icons such as Molière and Shakespeare, as well as figures from Antiquity, including Plato, Archimedes and Charlemagne. Some of the most extraordinary documents included letters from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus, Cleopatra to Julius Caesar, and even biblical characters like Judas Iscariot.
Many of the letters contained praise for France or ancient Gaul, an element that strongly appealed to Chasles’s patriotism. The forgeries became even more sensational in 1867, when Vrain-Lucas produced a letter suggesting that the French philosopher Blaise Pascal had discovered the law of gravity decades before Isaac Newton.
Chasles enthusiastically presented the document to the French Academy of Sciences, sparking debate among scholars. While some supported its authenticity, others quickly identified inconsistenciesincluding references to scientific ideas discovered long after Pascal’s death. As suspicions grew, Vrain-Lucas attempted to cover up the flaws with other forged letters from Galileo and Newton.
When the scheme collapsed in 1870, Vrain-Lucas had already sold Chasles more than 27,000 forged letters attributed to 660 historical figures, raising around 140,000 francs. Strangely enough, Chasles initially sued the forger not for fraud, but for failing to turn over additional documents for which he had already paid.
Vrain-Lucas turned out to be convicted and sentenced to prison. Although most of the false documents were later destroyed, around 180 copies survive today in the National Library of France — ironically, the same institution that once rejected Vrain-Lucas when he applied for a job.
