Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/510

 his persecutors, who had compromising letters and so on, as their weapons of extortion. The victim at length decided to face the scandal. The blackmailers were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying between six years and three months. One of them was acquitted for want of proof. In the same month, in Milan, a very well-known, man in society, the Marchese di S—, a naval lieutenant, was walking along the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele at high noon, when a young man of dubious aspect, (whom the Marchese S— declared to be absolutely unknown to him) slipped up to his side and asked for money; at the same time alluding to homosexual satisfactions. The Marchese S— turned away angrily, but his interlocutor at once became explicit and declared that if the Marchese S— would not then and there give him fifty lire he would "tell all Milan" of the intimate relations between himself and the Marchese. The Marchese S—, as his answer, caught hold of the rascal, and called tire police. The blackmailer pulled himself loose and ran away, but was arrested. He declared that he "had taken the Marchese S— for another gentleman"; but he was condignly punished.

Quite aside from chevaliers d'industrie, of low degree, or audacious rogues with no social platform to be considered, numerous blackmailing scandals have occurred where the blackmailer has belonged to families and stations of high grade. To such schemes to pay their bills, or rather to add to incomes of precarious source, have descended ruined barons, counts in difficulties, adventurous princes, decadent elder or younger sons and professional men of rapacious and unscrupulous types. The history of the "submerged social tenth" is abundant in such affairs. A few years ago, came before the international public a case in which a rich industrial was the victim of two individuals of distinguished social grade—titled—who had squeezed a