“WHOSE CHILD AM I?”

Shannon News, 4 August 1925, Page 4

“WHOSE CHILD AM I?”

GIRI/S I’ATKRMTV puzzles COURT.

With tears streaming down her face, a pretty, fair-haired girl of sixteen stood in the witness-box at the Assize Court at Agen, in France, and sobbed: “I want to know whose child I am.” She was Micheline, one of the adopted daughters of Dinorah Galou (nee Coarer), who, with her husband, Dr. Galou, is charged with a series of kidnapping episodes which form* one of the most amazing paternity puzzles ever known.

What the Judge and jury are trying to discover is w r hy Dinorah Galou, the elegant adventuress who passed herself off alternately as daughter of an Indian Maharajah, and a French viscountess born in the United States, adopted fifteen children and passed them off as her own, and what is the real parentage of those children, most of whose parents have never been traced.

Micheline wept bitterly when the woman, who had always treated hei with great affection, denied that she was her daughter. ‘‘Who am I? Oh, what-a situation to be in!” the girl sobbed again (when M. Albert Germot, a wealthy Paris manufacturer, who years ago was the lover of the woman, denied that he was the girl’s father. M. Germot broke with his family because he believed at the time of Micheline’s birth that- he was her father, and had no idea then of tlio fraud alleged to have been carried ou. by the woman in adopting two newlyborn infants and announcing to him that he was the happy father of a twin boy and girl.

Mme. Galou stated that Micheline was the daughter of a woman named Cordler, from whom she adopted her.