Can no documentary proof of this statement be produced? It is at least certain that a portion of the royalists, who worked zealously for the restoration of the Bourbons after the de facto overthrow of the French Republic on 9 Thermidor, 1794, did not believe in the Dauphin's death. A very credible proof of this was produced in 1851, upon the trial which Naundorff's family brought before the French courts. This evidence came from M. Brémond, formerly the private secretary of Louis XVI., and was to the effect that he, Brémond, heard in 1795, from Bailiff Steiger, of Berne, that the latter knew, on the best authority, that the Dauphin had not died in prison, but had been rescued. Steiger, it must be remarked, was on the most intimate terms with the leaders of the royalistic emigration, and also with the generals of La Vendée.

The current story about the prince's rescue from the Temple is, that it was effected, on the intercession of Josephine Beauharnois, by her then lover, Barras. These two persons, in addition to Hoche, Pichegru, Frotté, and the creole Laurent, play the same part in the story of watchmaker Naundorff, who, be it remembered, was formally recognised as the true son of Louis XVI. by Madame de Rambaud, nurse to the Dauphin up to his confinement in the Temple. Yet, the whole story of the rescue of the Dauphin, as Naundorff described it, is such a tissue of absurdities, improbabilities, and impossibilities, that one might fancy it sprang from the fertile imagination of Victor Hugo. But there are also other versions of the same story. One of them, believed and spread by those who recognised and honoured the rescued Dauphin in the person of Richemont, is to the following effect: "On January 19, 1794, the prince, with the privity and assistance of his bribed keeper Simon, was removed from the Temple by MM. Frotté and Ojardias, emissaries of the Prince de Condé, after a dumb boy of the same age had been introduced in his stead. The rescued Dauphin was conveyed to La Vendée, after his supposed death in the Temple was officially announced, joined the army of the Prince de Condé, by whom he was placed in the care of General Kleber, who passed him off as the son of a relative, and appointed him his aide-de-camp." We need not pursue this myth any further. On the other hand, it may be asked why the rescued prince did not at once receive an enthusiastic recognition from all the adherents of the Bourbons. A tolerably plausible reason has been alleged.

It is notorious that violent disputes went on in the Bourbon family before the outbreak of the Revolution, and the crafty and ambitious Count de Provence, afterwards Louis XVIII., was accused, not without reason, of having formed a settled plan to destroy the children of his elder brother, through his hatred of Marie Antoinette. When, after the assumed death of the Dauphin, the Count de Provence was recognised by a portion of the royalists as legitimate king, he naturally did everything in his power to nip in the bud any claim urged by his rescued nephew. For this purpose, Louis XVIII. and all his adherents made it an article of faith that the Dauphin really died in the Temple. In order to induce the prince's sister, Marie Thérèse Charlotte, who was glorified by enthusiastic royalists as "the orphan of the Temple," to accept this article of faith, her interests were separated from those of her brother, as

The princess was given over to the Austrians, in exchange for a certain number of republican prisoners of war.

she was married to the eldest son of the Count d'Artois, and thus, since Louis XVIII. was childless, a prospect was offered her of becoming some day Queen of France, and a real queen too, as her husband was a cypher. In this way we can explain the circumstance that the Duchess d'Angoulême protested with all the harshness and sharpness of her character against every attempt to convince her of the rescue of her brother from the Temple, and of his being still alive.

And yet it was this very princess, who, through a passage in the celebrated volume in which she described her life in the Temple (Récit des Evènements arrivés au Temple, par Madame Royale), offered a strong support for the assertion that the Dauphin was rescued from the Temple on the aforesaid January 19, 1794. The passage is as follows: "On January 19 my aunt Elizabeth and I heard a great noise in my brother's room, which led us to suppose that he was leaving the Temple, and we were convinced of this when, on peeping through the keyhole of our prison door, we saw trunks being carried away. On the following days we heard the door of the room, in which my brother had been, opened, and distinguished the footsteps of persons walking about it, which confirmed us in the belief that he had been removed."

We have not yet finished, however, with this January 19. For it is an established fact that, on this very day, the notorious cobbler Simon, who gave up the duty of guarding the unhappy Dauphin to assume that of a municipal official, left the Temple with his wife, and other baggage. It is also a fact, clearly proved at the trial of 1851, that Simon's widow, Marie Jeanne Aladame, who did not die till June 10, 1819, in the Female Hospital in the Rue de Sèvres, repeatedly and circumstantially explained to the Sisters of Mercy, who officiated as nurses, how the Dauphin did not die in the Temple, but was removed from it with the aid of herself and her husband, on the very day on which they removed, namely, January 19, 1794. The affair was managed in this way: Among other playthings, a large pasteboard horse was made for the prince. In the belly of this horse the (dumb) child, substituted for the imprisoned Dauphin, was conveyed into the Temple. The prince, however, was concealed in a large wicker basket with a double bottom, which was placed on the cart that removed Simon's furniture, and he was covered with a pile of linen. The Temple guard examined the cart, and displayed an intention of overhauling the linen; but Madame Simon cleverly averted this, by driving the men back with well-feigned indignation, and telling them it was her dirty linen. In this manner the contents of the wicker basket were smuggled out of the Temple without further obstacle.

It is true that all those persons, who had the slightest interest in supporting the view that the Dauphin really died in prison, declared that widow Simon was insane when she made this statement, but not a shadow of proof of it was adduced; while, on the other hand, the evidence of the Sisters of Mercy clearly showed that widow Simon was in perfect possession of her senses when she told the story. This objection to the woman's narrative would, therefore, be removed. But was the whole story, perchance, an invention by means of which Simon's widow wished to reduce the weight of the just execration which lay on herself and the memory of her husband? It is equally impossible to answer this question in the affirmative or the negative. Still, it must be remembered that the theory about the prince's escape from the Temple was most

offensive in the highest circles, and that Simon's widow would have specially to avoid drawing on herself the displeasure of the rulers of that day. It is, consequently, going too far to assume that the woman racked her fancy to invent something which could not possibly obtain her thanks, but, in all probability, only persecution.

The removal of the prince was evidently effected with the connivance and aid of influential men of the day. In this respect, hints have been thrown out about Cambacérès in various quarters. The well-informed author of the Histoire Secrète du Directoire," who was a good deal behind the scenes of the revolutionary stage-it is generally ascribed to Count Fabre de l'Aude-says: "It appears certain that the public was deceived as to the time and place, when and where, Louis XVII. died. Cambacérès admitted it; but he never would tell what he knew about this affair." In May, 1799, the Countess d'Adhémar, formerly lady in waiting on Marie Antoinette, recorded in her "Souvenirs," when alluding to the Dauphin: "Unhappy child, whose reign began and ended in a dungeon, but who yet did not die in that dungeon! Most certainly I do not wish to increase in any way the number of stories which could be employed by impostors; but, as I record this, I assert on my soul and conscience: I know for certain that H.M. Louis XVII. did not die in the prison of the Temple. I do not pretend to say where the prince was carried to, or what became of him, for I do not know. Cambacérès alone, the man of the Revolution, would be in a position to perfect my statement, for he knows much more on the subject than I do." Here we have formal and solemn evidence, but unfortunately it is assailable. A great portion of the "Souvenirs" of the Countess d'Adhémar was not written by herself, but by Baron Lamothe-Laugon, on whom the very well-founded suspicion lies, that he so frequently confused truth and fiction, that it is difficult to decide where the former leaves off and the latter begins. Still, as regards the passage quoted, it may be observed that Lamothe-Laugon was one of Cambacérès's most intimate friends, and probably knew something, if not everything, about his share in rescuing the prince from the Temple. The supposition that Cambacérès was really engaged in the affair gains in consistency through the fact that the Bourbons, on their first and second restoration, not only showed him remarkable mercy, but, as soon as he was dead, they had his papers immediately seized and sealed up. Was a revelation of the Temple secret apprehended from the lips of the living or the papers of the dead Cambacérès? For we must always bear in mind that it was of the highest importance for Louis XVIII., Charles X., and the July king, to leave the Temple enigma unsolved, and at once to suppress every rising doubt as to the death of the Dauphin in the Temple.

Assuming, however, that a substitution did really take place, and that the prince escaped from the Temple, what became of him? A Dauphin of France, whom the French royalists must regard as their legitimate king from January 21, 1793, cannot have disappeared without leaving a trace, just as if the earth had swallowed him up. The story that the boy sought shelter in the camp of the Prince de Condé, is a pure invention. Though Condé was notoriously a weak man, he was an honourable one in his way, who would not have consented to deny his legitimate king. We may, therefore, decidedly assume that he not only did not have

the prince with him, but sincerely believed the official announcement of his death published by the republican authorities, as he issued an order of the day on the occasion which ended with the words, "King Louis XVII. is dead, long live King Louis XVIII.!" Of course, each of the gentlemen who afterwards declared himself the Dauphin, drew up the story of his odyssey in a workmanlike way-that is to say, a rhapsody of adventures and wanderings which he pretended to have endured after his. escape from the Temple. But this is no stuff for the historian, but only for a novelist of the Dumas order. It is certainly often said, credo, quia absurdum est, and by that rule it would be quite right that the following absurd fable, concocted by a rampant royalist brain, should find favour with the public. The rescue of the Dauphin from the Temple took place before 9 Thermidor, or at a time when only one man could dare such a thing-Robespierre. He substituted for the real Dauphin a false one, who, in case of necessity, could be easily proved an impostor. The real one, however, he murdered, strangled, or got rid of somehow, because he was an obstacle in Robespierre's path to the throne of France, upon which he intended to raise himself by a marriage with the imprisoned sister of the assassinated Dauphin. This trait was wanting to complete the monstrosities of a man whom all the great and little children, learned and unlearned, regard as the gigantic scapegoat of the French Revolution, because they either do not know or do not understand the laws of the great historic process, and hence are utterly incompetent to comprehend the great convulsion of society in its entirety, or, in other words, to refer effects back to their causes.

But we have wandered long enough in the cloud-land of suppositions and assertions, of fables and myths. We were obliged to do so, if we wished to throw the right light on the enigma which awaits solution. We will now step on firmer ground.

After the sans-culotte cobbler Simon gave up his guardianship of the Dauphin, the latter remained for six months without any special oversight. The only assurance of his existence was provided by the daily visit of the commissaries of the commune. In any event, the poor boy-whether the prince or a substituted child-was in reality then treated much more brutally than he had been by Simon and his wife. Everything was evidently calculated, either to kill the real Dauphin slowly, or to reduce the false one to a condition which rendered it impossible for him to tell the truth about himself, and by this impossibility destroy all traces of the substitution which had been effected. The boy was locked up on the ground floor of the Temple tower, in a gloomy, artificially-darkened room, so that he could neither see nor be seen. His scanty food was given him by means of a turning table in the door, he was no longer allowed to take exercise in the Temple garden or on the platform of the tower, or to see his imprisoned sister. He was condemned to solitude in a room dark by day and unlit by night, the approaches to which were regularly barricaded.

Was all this merely an effect of the timid anxiety of the Committee of Safety, lest the precious pledge might be stolen by the Bourbons, or was it a consequence of the intention to keep the boy out of the sight of all those persons who had known the Dauphin?

It was not till 11 Thermidor (July 29, 1794) that a keeper was

again appointed for the poor lad, in the person of the already-mentioned creole Laurent, the choice of whom persons have ascribed to the influence which the creole Josephine Beauharnois exerted over the rulers of the hour, Barras and Tallien. The Thermidoriaus, who wished to give a tinge of truth to the huge lie that they rebelled against Robespierre and his gang "out of humanity," ordered an apparent amelioration in the treatment of the imprisoned child, which probably would not have been offered so late had it been anything more than pretence. On 13 Thermidor, or two days after Laurent's appointment as guardian, several members of the Committee of Safety visited the little prisoner in the Temple. If the removal of the prince was really effected by the aid of Laurent, it must have taken place on 12 Thermidor, for the new keeper, before he risked so daring an enterprise, must make himself a little acquainted with the locality. During the Naundorff trial in Paris in 1851, the advocate of the family, the celebrated Jules Favre, produced three letters written by Laurent to Barras, in which the substitution of a dumb orphan lad for the Dauphin was "proved." If this evidence had been unimpeachable, it would have been most important, indeed almost decisive. But the letters produced were mere copies of doubtful authenticity. The originals of the letters were said to have been entrusted to Justizrath Lecoq, in Berlin, in the year 1810. If that were the case, would it not be possible to come on the trail of the originals?

The members of the Committee of Safety found, on their visit paid to the Temple on 9 Thermidor, a lad "of about nine years of age, with a bent spine and arms and legs, whose unusual length was quite disproportioned to the rest of the body." This lad, the true or a false Dauphin, though he could hear, could not speak, and the visitors were unable to draw a word out of him. This fact would certainly contradict the report of a visit which Barras is said to have paid the little prisoner shortly after 9 Thermidor. On this occasion, we are told, the boy spoke to Barras ; but the whole story about Barras's visit may be rejected as utterly unproved. On November 9, 1794, Laurent was given an assistant, in the person of one Gomin, who had never seen the Dauphin-that is to say, true one-before. At a later date, it is true, after the Duchess d'Angoulême had appointed him seneschal of her château of Meudon, he declared that he recognised in the lad of the Temple the son of Louis XVI., whom he had repeatedly seen before. But as it is known that the duchess ever opposed the theory that her brother did not die in the Temple, Gomin's statement does not deserve any credence.

the

In exact proportion to the evident progress of the royalist reaction, or at least reactionary feeling in the autumn and winter of 1794, public attention was directed, more than had formerly been the case, to the little prisoner in the Temple. The Convention, too, busied itself about him. On December 28, Lequinis moved "to cleanse the soil of liberty from the last stain of royalty, by banishing the imprisoned prince." In the report which Cambacérès drew up on this motion, he demanded its rejection, which was agreed to. In the debate, Brisol uttered the brutal remark, "I am astonished that among all the useless crimes which were committed before 9 Thermidor, the relics of an impure race were spared." Bourdon replied, "There are no useful crimes. I demand that the last speaker be called to order." Great applause. "I call myself to order," said Brisol.