RICH MAN’S ALTER EGO

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 614, 16 March 1929, Page 27

RICH MAN’S ALTER EGO

AUDACIOUS IMPOSTER POSED AS TWIN BROTHER A remarkable story of audacity is unfolded by the Budapest correspondent of the “Daily Mail.” M. Endre Palfi’s comfortable villa on the Gellert Hill in Buda is tenanted for only a few days every month, as the owner has a pleasant estate in Nogradveroce, where, being an ardent sportsman, he spends most of his time. A butler, a footman, a chambermaid and a chauffeur are maintained to provide for M. Palfi’s needs on the few occasions when he resides in Budapest. At the end of last July he gave the staff a holiday, intimating that he would not return to Budapest for at least a month. On August Bhe was, however, obliged to return unexpectedly on business. Believing his villa to be closed, he arranged to meet a business friend in a cafe in the Andrassy Street. There, as he sat at a table at a window, M. Palfi saw his own blue touring car driven by his own chauffeur, pulled up in a traffic block not ten yards away.

Three minutes later M. Palfi was stupefied to discover that the person sitting in the back of his car, was an almost exact replica of himself. Voice, hair, countenance, height, figure, were to all intents and purposes the same. When M. Palfi turned to his chauffeur for an explanation and this person replied that he was driving M. Palfi’s twin brother, the real M. Palfi feared for his sanity. He was glad, at the request of a policeman, to step into his car and instruct the chauffeur to drive him, his alter ego, and the policeman to the nearest police station. There and at the trial of the spurious M. Palfi which has just concluded in Budapest the mystery was unravelled. Natural Likeness Paul Kenessey, a Transylvanian refugee, had been down on his luck for many months. While sitting in a cafe studying the “situations vacant” advertisements in the newspapers, he noticed the extraordinary likeness between himself and M. Palfi, who happened to be sitting at a table near by. Having made inquiries concerning M. Palfi’s habits, he conceived the idea of living in luxury in M. Palfi’s villa while the owner was in Nogradveroce. Posing as M. Palfi, he went to the villa, informed the servants that he had changed his mind about going away, and that they must postpone their holiday. Every night for a week he ordered an excellent dinner, and in the daytime he drove about in M. Palfi’s car. Pie allayed the suspicions of the chauffeur by explaining that he was M. Palfi’s twin brother, and was occupying the villa till his brother returned to Budapest.

So that the other servants should not notice the difference between his own habits and those of their employer he stayed out all day. This plan also had the merit of keeping the chauffeur too busy to compare notes with the other servants. M. Palfi, who has a sense of humour, refrained from taking an action against Kenessey, who has been sentenced merely to a fine of 200 pengos (£7 4s) for the technical offence of “infringement of domiciliary peace.”