The young woman and the old man quitted the Masons’ Arms. That same evening Pansy Culver arrived unexpectedly at Willowmere.
FALSE DAUPHINS.
Whether the boy who died in the arms of M. Lasne, and whose body was wrapped in a sheet, put into a deal coffin, and buried in the cemetery of St-Marguerite, was a poor waif of Paris, or the lad who cleaned the shoes of his jailer’s wife and should have been Louis XVII. of France, is, judicial judgments notwithstanding, a question never likely to be satisfactorily settled. Those who have taken the most pains to elucidate the mystery agree to differ in their conclusions; M. de Beauchesne being certain that the Dauphin[1] was done to death in the Temple; M. Louis Blanc as strongly inclining to the opinion that he was rescued from durance. The wish being father to the thought, many royalists believed that the Prince had escaped his enemies, and would some day claim his own; and pretenders, as a natural consequence, have never been wanting.
The first of the sham Dauphins appeared in the days of the Consulate, in the person of Jean Marie Hervagault, a tailor by trade, who contrived to make some at least among the adherents of the ancient monarchy believe in himself and his pretensions. Notable for her enthusiastic espousal of his cause was Madame de Recambour. She lodged the impostor right royally at her mansion at Vitry-la-Française, and gloried in seeing her husband do a lackey’s duties for her protégé. Balls, concerts, and fêtes followed hard upon each other in honour of ‘Mon Prince,’ until Fouché intervened, and the ambitious tailor was condemned to four years’ imprisonment; finding his way, eventually, not to the throne of his supposititious sire, but to the Hospital for Incurables at Bicêtre, to die there in 1812.
In 1817, the Gentleman’s Magazine informed its readers that on the 17th of September, a young man who called himself Louis XVII. had been apprehended at Rouen. Some twenty years before, he had presented himself to a lady of La Vendée as the orphan child of a noble family of the name of Desin. She took him in; but five months later, sent him about his business for some flagrant misconduct; and never saw him again until confronted with him at Rouen. This was Mathurin Brunneau, the son of a shoemaker of Vezins, Maine-et-Loire; who, having learned all that Madame Simon knew of the lost Louis, went about the country proclaiming himself the only lawful king of France, until his profitable peregrinations were stopped by his arrest and that of four or five of his deluded friends. In the following February, Brunneau was arraigned at Rouen, and behaved in a most unprincely fashion; challenging the president of the court to fight, and calling that dignitary a beast; his many insolent exclamations and observations being ‘couched in ungrammatical language and most vulgar terms.’ He was pronounced guilty of vagabondage; of publicly assuming royal titles; of fraudulently obtaining deeds, clothes, and considerable sums of money from divers persons; and finally, of insulting the members of a public tribunal in the exercise of their functions. For these offences, Brunneau was sentenced to pay a fine of three thousand francs and three-fourths of the costs of the inquiry, and condemned besides to suffer seven years’ imprisonment—two of the seven being given him expressly for outraging the court—his person to be at the disposal of the government when the sentence had expired. ‘I am none the less what I am,’ was the only comment of the cobbler-prince. Of his accomplices, one only was punished, by being mulcted in a fourth of the costs of the trial and sent to durance for a couple of months. Brunneau served his term, and was then set at liberty, only to die soon afterwards.
While Brunneau’s trial was yet in progress, a well-dressed man, of tall stature and goodly mien, walked into the Tuileries, followed the servants who were carrying in the king’s dinner, and reached the dining-hall before his uninvited presence was discovered. He said he was Charles de Navarre, and insisted upon seeing the king. His desire was not gratified. He was handed over to the police, recognised as the mad nephew of an exchange broker, and relegated to Charenton for the remainder of his days.
Fifteen years later, one Richemont, a baron of his own creation, was found guilty of having, by a resolution concerted and decided between two or more persons unknown, formed a plan for destroying the government and fomenting civil war. For this he was sentenced to a term of imprisonment; but his real offence lay in putting himself forward as a claimant of the throne, as the legitimate representative of the elder branch of the Bourbon family. Richemont managed to get out of prison and out of France too. He soon, however, returned to his native land, and lived there unmolested long enough to see the second Empire established. In 1853, he died at the house of the Countess d’Apchier, wife of a whilom page at the court of Louis XVI. All the papers he left behind him were seized by the authorities and sealed up. Determined his claims should not be abrogated by death, the pseudo-Dauphin’s friends inscribed on his tombstone: ‘Here lies Louis Charles de France, born at Versailles, March 27, 1785. Died at Gleizé, August 10, 1853’—an inscription erased five years afterwards, by order of M. de Persigny, only to be replaced by the equally assertive one:
1785.
No one will say over my tomb:
‘Poor Louis,
How sad was thy fate!
Pray for him!’
A gentleman bearing the name of Eleazar Williams died at Hogansburg, in the United States, in August 1858, after spending the best portion of his life in converting the Indians to Wesleyanism; the fact that he was the long-lost son of Louis XVI. being apparently unknown to any but his most intimate friends, until one of them published a book to enlighten the world on the matter. From this we learn as follows: That in the year 1795, a French family of the name of De Jourdin came to live in Albany, in the state of New York; Madame giving out that she had been a lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette, a statement not belied by her appearance; while Monsieur looked and acted more like a servant than the husband of Madame, and the father of Mademoiselle Louise and Monsieur Louis, as the children of the establishment were designated. That, some little while afterwards, two Frenchmen appeared at Ticonderoga with a sickly and seemingly idiotic boy, who with his belongings—two large boxes, one of which contained a gold, a silver, and a copper coronation medal of Louis XVI.—was confided to the charge of an Indian chief known as Thomas Williams, to be brought up as one of the family. That, tumbling from a high rock into St George’s Lake, made Eleazar—as he had been named—as sensible as his red-skinned brothers by adoption. That, one day a French gentleman called him pauvre garçon, and gave him a gold-piece. That, going to Long Meadow with one of Thomas Williams’s sons, to be educated by a Congregational minister, somebody told him he must be of a higher grade of birth than the son of an Iroquois chief. That, after he became a missionary, one Colonel de Ferriere, before leaving Oneida, with several Indians, to visit Paris, obtained Eleazar’s signature, thrice over, to a legal document; and that the said colonel returned to America a rich man, and was known to be in correspondence with the royal family of France. Each and every one of the foregoing statements may be true, and yet Eleazar Williams no true prince.
Much more to the point was Eleazar’s extraordinary story of making the acquaintance of the Prince de Joinville on board a steamer, and afterwards, at his request, calling upon him at his hotel; when the Prince laid a document in French and English on the table, which the missionary found to be a deed whereby Charles Louis, son of Louis XVI., solemnly abdicated the throne of France in favour of Louis-Philippe. If he would sign this, the Prince promised to stand godfather to his daughter, take his son to Paris to be educated, provide him with a princely establishment in France or America, at his choice, and transfer to him all the private property belonging to the supposed defunct Dauphin. Mr Williams was not to be tempted, and his tempter returned to France unsatisfied. Unfortunately, the Prince de Joinville emphatically declared the story to be a pure invention; and it remains as unsupported as Williams’s other statement, that a gentleman in Baton Rouge wrote to him in 1848 to inform him that an aged Frenchman had upon his deathbed declared that he had assisted in the escape of the Dauphin from the Temple, and carried him off to North America, where he had been adopted by the Indians, concluding with avowing that Eleazar Williams was the man.