From the October 8, 1903 edition of The Chatham Record:
Humbug on a Large Scale.
In 1862 a man named Vrain-Lucas, living in the rue Jean Jacques Rousseau, Paris, managed to dispose of no fewer than 27,000 bogus manuscripts, gems, enamels and ivories.
He said he found them in an iron-bound chest in a ruined city in Central America: but it came out afterward that he had, with infinite pains and cunning made them all himself.
The pride of the collection was what purported to be an ancient silver casket of Syrian workmanship, and which contained, among other things, a love letter from Judas Iscariot to Mary Magdalen, twenty-five letters to St. Peter from Lazarus and two brief epistles from Gremius Julius to our Lord.
A quick google search returns many articles that contain both the name Vrain-Lucas and the word “forger”. One source says that Vrain-Lucas sometimes used contemporary French in his supposedly ancient epistles. Wow.
The man must have been very convincing.
