The war has led to so many upheavals that not many people now remember the Hergemont scandal of seventeen years ago. Let us recall the details in a few lines.

One day in July 1902, M. Antoine d'Hergemont, the author of a series of well-known studies on the megalithic monuments of Brittany, was walking in the Bois with his daughter V ronique, when he was assaulted by four men, receiving a blow in the face with a walking-stick which felled him to the ground.

After a short struggle and in spite of his desperate efforts, V ronique, the beautiful V ronique, as she was called by her friends, was dragged away and bundled into a motor-car which the spectators of this very brief scene saw making off in the direction of Saint-Cloud.

It was a plain case of kidnapping. The truth became known next morning. Count Alexis Vorski, a young Polish nobleman of dubious reputation but of some social prominence and, by his own account, of royal blood, was in love with V ronique d'Hergemont and V ronique with him. Repelled and more than once insulted by the father, he had planned the incident entirely without V ronique's knowledge or complicity.

The Hidden Force is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer, L. Couperus. In the novel, the protagonist, Van Oudijck, a Dutch resident, faces his own demise as a result of his inability to see past his Western rationalism. The East Indian people and countryside have no effect on him, and the ambiance of Java, coupled with the adverse behavior of their Javanese subjects, prove more powerful than the might and power of the colonials.