Читать книгу The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833-1918 онлайн

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Stone was prominent politically. In 1825 he and Thurlow Weed accompanied Lafayette in his tour of the United States. In 1841 President William Henry Harrison appointed him minister to The Hague, but when Harrison died he was recalled by President Tyler. He was also the first superintendent of the New York public schools—an office which he held at the time of his death, in 1844.

Stone went to Montreal, visited the Hôtel Dieu, and minutely compared the details set down by the Monk woman in regard to the inmates of the nunnery and the plan of the building. The result of his investigation was to establish the fact that the “Awful Disclosures” were fiction, and he exposed the impostor not only in his newspaper, but in his book, “Maria Monk and the Nunnery of the Hôtel Dieu.” The adherents of the woman abused Stone roundly for this, and the general belief in her fake was not entirely dissipated for years; not even after her own evil history was told, and after the Protestant residents of Montreal had held a mass-meeting to denounce her. Maria Monk died in the city prison in New York fourteen years after she had created the most unpleasant scandal of the time.