The Mystery of the Dauphin
The story, according to which the Dauphin, son of King Louis XVI. and Queen Marie Antoinette, was done to death in the Temple prison by his brutal jailer Simon and the latter’s wife, has long since been exploded. It has been definitely established on the most incontrovertible evidence that the Dauphin did not die in the Temple at the hands of the Simons. The latter were not ignorant brutes, but well-to-do people, Simon being a member of the “Conseil Général” of the Seine, and, moreover, he resigned his guardianship of the Dauphin in January, 1794, eighteen months before the royal lad’s alleged death. There is abundant evidence to show that the Prince escaped, and that several members of the Royalist party were concerned in his flight.
The Dauphin eventually, after all sorts of adventures, when the star of Napoleon was on the wane, went to Berlin—he was about twenty-nine years old at the time—with a view of putting forward his claims for recognition as a member of the house of Bourbon. His uncles, the Comte de Provence (afterward King Louis XVIII.) and the Comte d’Artois (subsequently King Charles X.) were in receipt of handsome allowances from the Prussian, Russian, and English governments, and the Dauphin hoped that he, too, might be provided for in a similar way. The Prussian government, however, was committed to the Comte de Provence, and the chief of the Berlin police forced the Dauphin to surrender to him all the papers establishing his identity, and then furnished him with a passport describing him as a native of Weimar. These papers were never returned to him, in spite of all his efforts to recover them, and they remain at Berlin to this day. Eventually he made his way to Holland. The Dutch authorities, who are the most strict in the world in all matters relating to the assumption of unauthorized names and titles, not only permitted him to figure on the marriage and death registry at Delft as “Louis of Bourbon, son of King Louis XVI. and Queen Marie Antoinette,” but likewise allowed his sons and grandsons to serve under the royal name of Bourbon in the Dutch Army.
True, the Duke of Orleans, like his father before him, denounces the claims of these Dutch Bourbons, now established at Paris in the wine business, as ridiculous, and stigmatizes the alleged Dauphin as having been an impostor. Yet, in spite of all the efforts, and the large amount of money spent by Louis XVIII., Charles X., King Louis Philippe, and the Comte de Paris, no one has ever succeeded in finding out who the alleged Dauphin could possibly have been, if not the son of the ill-fated Queen Marie Antoinette.
It was natural that the brothers of Louis XVI. refused to recognize the alleged Dauphin as their nephew, since by their recognition he would have become an obstacle in the way of their accession to the throne of France on the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. Moreover, they had always been among the most bitter enemies of Marie Antoinette, insisting that her children were the offspring of another man instead of their eldest brother. There is, however, evidence to the effect that they provided for the lad’s maintenance after his escape from the Temple, on the understanding that he should be kept in the background, being unwilling that any personage should be appealed to in the matter. But when he grew up, they denounced him as a fraud.
It may be remembered that the Vatican, when asked in 1826 for a permit of consecration of the Chapelle Expiatoire at Paris, erected over what was understood to be the remains of King Louis XVI., of his queen, and of their son, only granted it on the condition that the name of the Dauphin was removed, taking the ground, set forth in an official dispatch, which is on record, that it could not lend itself to the comedy of consecrating a memorial chapel to a living person.
That the Prussian government or the Prussian crown have among their archives papers proving the usurpation of the French throne by Louis XVIII., the escape from prison of the Dauphin, and his identity with that Louis Bourbon who died at Delft, and to whom the president of the Berlin police had given a passport as “Naundorff,” a citizen of Weimar, where, by the by, no such person had ever been born or lived, has long been known. The Russian imperial archives and those of the Vatican are likewise known to possess equally conclusive documentary evidence upon the subject, and the attitude of the papacy toward the Dutch Bourbons has always been particularly considerate.
The Sistine Madonna and La Fornarina
People who are not content to accept the old-fashioned traditions concerning pictures and artists will be pleased with some recent discoveries about Raphael made by the art critics. These ingenious persons have practically exhausted Leonardo da Vinci, who for many years was their favorite quarry, having proved to their own satisfaction that nearly every picture ascribed to him was painted by some one else. They have now turned upon Raphael, and in the merciless but scientific dissection of his works and his life not only the authenticity but the fame of his Sistine Madonna has been placed in question. The chain of circumstantial evidence, it is true, seems incomplete in parts, but the missing links will be supplied by that faith which science often demands no less than legend.
Raphael has the unusual distinction of having had an excellent reputation among his contemporaries. He was a hard worker, and his private life was so uneventful as to excite no comment. This was hardly artistic, so, fifty years after his death, Vasari supplied him with a nameless mistress, a baker’s daughter, “La Fornarina,” whom the painter saw and loved in her father’s garden, near the Church of Santa Cecilia, in the Trastevere quarter at Rome. In another fifty years this story had grown into the well known tale of the painter’s passionate love bringing about his early death, and the beautiful, sensuous face of “La Fornarina” in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence made it credible. Sentimental persons looked on her portrait and then on Raphael’s own, and had no doubts.