At the same time, the little prisoner grew worse and worse; and on the report of the keepers to that effect, the commune sent a deputation into the Temple, which drew up an official report, to the effect that "the little Capet had swellings at his wrists and ankles, but more especially at his knees; that it was impossible to obtain a word in reply from him; that he spent his whole time either in bed or on a chair, and could not be induced to take the slightest exercise." Alarmed by this report, as it appears, the Committee of Safety sent on February 27, 1795, the three members of the Convention, Harmand, Mathieu, and Reverchon, to examine into the state of the little prisoner.

The three gentlemen found the boy sitting at a table and playing with a pack of cards. He did not leave off playing on the entrance of the deputies. Harmand explained to him the object of the visit, but he made no reply. Harmand said, "I do myself the honour of asking you, monsieur, whether you would like a horse, a dog, birds, or other playthings, or perhaps some playmates of your own age? Would you like to walk in the garden, and go on the platform of the Temple? Would you like some bon-bons and cake?" No answer. Harmand then pretended to change his conciliatory tone for a commanding one. All the same, no reply. Harmand tried to induce the lad to speak, by representing to him that his silence would render it impossible for the commissaries to make a report to government about him. In vain; the boy remained dumb, but he was not deaf. At Harmand's request he at once gave him his hand. Nor could his silence be referred to malice and defiance, for with the exception of speaking, he did instantly what was asked of him. In great surprise, Harmand asked, before he quitted the Temple with his colleagues, the two keepers to what cause this extraordinary silence should be ascribed. Laurent and Gomin declared, as Harmand remarked in his report, that the prince had never again opened his mouth to speak since the evening of October 6, 1793, when he was forced, by the infamous Hébert, to charge his mother with a nameless crime.

But Laurent and Gomin were not in the Temple in October, 1793, and their statement only so far possesses value, as it proves that the prisoner had been dumb ever since they had taken charge of him. The explanation of the prince's silence is perfectly absurd. The Dauphin could not possibly feel such desperate repentance for letting Hébert extort the foul charge from him, because he could not have understood the meaning of the accusation put in his mouth by Hébert. And what man of common sense would believe that a child of nine years would suddenly form the resolution, and adhere to it with iron energy to his dying breath, of never speaking again? Nonsense! From all this we arrive at this fact: Harmand and his colleagues found on February 27, 1795, a dumb boy in the Temple, while it is a well-known fact that the Dauphin's organs of speech were in perfect order. In the beginning of April a new keeper, one Lasne, took the place of Laurent. This man afterwards was highly valued by those persons who believed, or at least wished to make others believe, that the true Dauphin died in the Temple. Lasne declared that the little prisoner was not dumb. But his evidence is in the highest degree suspicious: in the first place, because, when judicially examined, he utterly contradicted himself, as he stated in 1834 that the prince talked with him daily, but, in 1837, that he had only heard the prince speak once, and then but a few words. Secondly, because the remarks

which Lasne, according to his evidence in 1834, heard from the prince's lips, could not possibly have been uttered by him. Had Pascal or Montesquieu been placed in the position of the little prisoner, they could not have expressed themselves more wisely or thoughtfully. A boy of nine years of age, sickly, and deprived of all intercourse and society for years, could not speak so philosophically; it is absolutely impossible.

But we must go back a little way, so as to be able to advance afterwards with logical precision. The report which Citizen Harmand sent in to the Committee of Safety-i.e. to the highest police authority of the republic was kept secret, and had no result for the young prisoner. It almost appears as if Harmand had hinted that he had not recognised in the stunted, scrofulous, and dumb boy the Dauphin, who was notoriously a well-built, healthy, and sharp lad, and that he was so incautiously honest as to tell the Thermidorian despots who then ruled France that there was a mystery which must be cleared up. It is certainly a remarkable fact that Citizen Harmand was got rid of with great rapidity; a few days after his visit to the Temple he was sent off as commissary to East India. So then the mystery must not be cleared up?

At the beginning of May, the young prisoner's health became so bad that it was absolutely necessary to give him medical assistance, unless the government wished to stultify their assertion about humanity having returned with Thermidor 9. Assuming that the patient was not the Dauphin, the persons who must know he was not so committed a great act of negligence by allowing a physician, who had formerly known the prince, to be called in to the patient. This doctor was the celebrated Desault, of the Hôtel-Dieu, but the Committee of Safety decreed that he should only see and examine his patient in the presence of the keepers. At the same time they refused a request of M. Huc, ex-valet of Louis XVI., to be allowed to nurse the sick prince. Were the humane gentry of the Thermidor afraid to admit a man like Huc, who of course knew the Dauphin intimately, to the prisoner in the Temple?

On May 6, Desault visited the sick lad for the first time. He could not get him to speak. Some royalist authors, who were ordered to prove at all hazards that the Dauphin died in the Temple, assert that Desault by his kindness at last induced the boy to speak; but they pretend to have heard this from Lasne, whose evidence, as we have shown, is quite untrustworthy. On the night of May 29, Desault, after dining with the members of the government, was suddenly taken ill unto death. On June 1 he died. Had a "useful" crime been committed in this case? People whispered in Paris that Desault had been poisoned because he would not consent to poison the little prisoner-a perfectly groundless and absurd story. The affair looks different, it is true, when we assume, as was also asserted, that Desault was got rid of by the persons who held the key of the Temple secret, because he noticed and repeated that the scrofulous dumb lad in the Temple was not the true Dauphin, whom he knew well, but must be a substituted boy. This explanation of the matter is not at all conjectural, but well proved. M. Abeillé, a pupil of Desault, steadfastly declared all his life long that his master was poisoned in consequence of his report to the Committee of Safety, that he had not recognised the Dauphin in the young prisoner of the Temple. Jules Favre, in his pleading of 1851, quoted the evidence of another pupil and

friend of Desault, who confirmed Abeille's statements to him (Favre) at Perigueux. Even more important is the following official statement made by Desault's family:

"I, the undersigned, Agathe Calmet, widow of Pierre Alexis Thouvenin, resident in Paris, No. 34, Place de l'Estrapade, testify that during the lifetime of my husband Thouvenin, a nephew of Dr. Desault, I repeatedly heard my aunt, Madame Desault, state that her husband, the chief surgeon at the Hôtel-Dieu, was ordered to visit the boy Capet, who was at that time a prisoner in the Temple. In the prison he was shown a child, who was not the Dauphin, for Dr. Desault had seen the latter many times before the imprisonment of the royal family. After the doctor had made some inquiries for the purpose of learning what had become of the son of Louis, in whose place he was shown another lad, he sent in his report, and on the same day received and accepted an invitation to dine with some of the members of the Convention. On returning home, he was attacked by violent sickness. He died of it, and it led to the belief that he had been poisoned. AGATHE CALMET. Paris, May 5, 1845."

Why was not the poisoning of Desault proved by the physicians ? But it appears there was no investigation of this sudden and remarkable death. The affair, however, created a sensation, and Madame Desault declared quite loudly that her husband had been poisoned. Was it for the sake of stopping her mouth that the Convention granted her a pension of two thousand livres ? It is also strange that, quite contrary to the prevailing custom, Desault's report was not published. The contents of No. 263 of the Moniteur for 1795 mention the physician's report as contained in the body of the paper; but this statement is false, for the report is missing, and was never published. Six days after Desault, also died his intimate friend, Apothecary Choppart, quite suddenly. He had supplied the medicine for the young patient in the Temple.

On June 5, the Committee of Safety appointed a fresh doctor, Pelletan, who requested to be aided by his colleague, Dr. Dumangin, and afterwards by Doctors Lassus and Jeanroy. We might fancy that M. Pelletan did not wish to incur alone a danger in which his friend Desault had perished. However, not one of these four physicians had ever seen the Dauphin-that is, the true one. Pelletan and Dumangin were informed by the keepers that the patient would not speak, and as they received no answers to their questions they gave up troubling him. It is true that the persons who have a marked interest in attaching weight to Lasne's evidence, declare the contrary; but the words they put in the lad's mouth on this occasion bear the stamp of improbability-indeed, of impossibility -so plainly, that they at once convict themselves.

On June 8, the poor child died in the Temple tower.

Might it not have been expected that, if the dead boy was the true Dauphin, the authorities would employ the most minute care to settle every fact connected with the event in an incontrovertible manner? But the exact opposite was done; everything was performed lazily and carelessly. On June 9, Citizen Sévestre made a short and dry report to the Convention, in the name of the Committee of Safety, that the "son of Capet" had died in the Temple. On the same day, Dr. Pelletan and his three colleagues drew up a report as to the state of the corpse, in which

are these words: "On arriving, at eleven o'clock A.M., at the outer gate of the Temple, we were received by the commissaries, and conducted to the tower. On the second floor we found the dead body of a child lying on a bed, who appeared to us about ten years of age. This corpse, the commissaries told us, was that of the deceased Louis Capet, and two of us recognised the boy whom we had had under treatment for a few days." In truth, this is far from being any proof of the identity of the dead boy with the son of Louis XVI. A fact proved by the dissection of the corpse is also very remarkable. The brain of the dead boy was found to be in a perfectly normal and healthy condition. This, however, could not possibly have been the case if the dead lad had really been the Dauphin, for it is universally acknowledged that the shameful Simon and his wife had reduced him to a state of idiotcy by leading him into excesses doubly injurious at his age, and this must have produced a disorganisation of the brain. On the evening of June 10, the body of the young prisoner was buried, without the slightest ceremony, in the churchyard of Ste. Marguerite. Two days after the burial, or four after the decease of the child, the certificate of death was filled up, but in so negligent a manner, that the document has not the slightest legal value.

But Louis XVII. was regularly dead and buried for the Bourbons. They ever, his sister included, protested tooth and nail against every attempt to prove that a false Dauphin died in the Temple. When, in 1820, one Caron, who, after the imprisonment of the family of Louis XVI., obtained access to the Temple, offered to make important revelations about the abduction of the Dauphin, the man disappeared, after an official of high standing had visited him several times, and he never turned up again. Very remarkable, too, was the indifference which the royal family displayed after the Restoration about the remains and memory of Louis XVII. It is well known that in 1815 a grand state farce was played with the pretended recovery and exhumation of the bones of Louis XVI. and his consort. The thoroughly fantastic poet Chateaubriand on this occasion went so far in his romantic delirium as to write that the skull of Marie Antoinette had been recognised by the incomparably graceful smile peculiar to the queen, and this frightful nonsense met with great applause. This farce-for it was nothing more, as the real bones of the king and queen could not possibly have been found-induced Lemercier, the Curé of Ste. Marguerite, to propose a search for the bones of the Dauphin. He declared that, although the sextons buried the corpse of the prince in the common grave, they marked it with chalk, and a few nights later took it up and buried it near the door leading from the graveyard into the church. The curé laid his petition before the Duchess d'Angoulême, who, he naturally expected, would zealously and willingly assist him. But the worthy man made a mistake: the duchess bluntly refused to mix herself up in the matter.

This princess, who, according to Napoleon, was the only man in her family, was anything but sentimental, and we can easily understand that she could not be so. The burning agony which she suffered in her youth had calcined her heart. In truth, at the Restoration she displayed on several occasions a truly strong-hearted want of feeling, in proof of which I will mention a but little known circumstance. On August 11, 1792, the royal family, who had sought shelter in the hall of the National

Assembly, were in a state of utter impecuniosity. No sooner did Madame Auguié, one of Marie Antoinette's late waiting-women, hear of this, than she hastened to offer her suffering mistress twenty-five louis d'or out of her savings. This liberality of the servant was mentioned, fifteen months later, at the queen's trial. When asked who had given her the twentyfive louis, the queen mentioned the name of Madame Auguié. An order of arrest that is to say, a death-warrant-was at once most infamously issued against the faithful servant. At the moment when the myrmidons entered her apartments, the unhappy woman leapt out of window and was killed on the spot. One of her daughters afterwards became the wife of Marshal Ney. When the latter was tried and condemned—justly so, I · allow-after the second Restoration, the Duchess d'Angoulême could not so far overcome the bitterness of her hatred as to say a word for the husband of a woman whose mother had died for her mother's sake.

The princess, then, disposed of the Curé of Ste. Marguerite by pretending that "the position of the king was fearful, and they dared not and could not do everything they wished." At that very time, however, it is notorious that the Bourbons did everything they pleased, even the most absurd and irresponsible things, that a mad reactionary party could suggest to them. The truth is, the court wanted to hear nothing about the Dauphin or his remains, and persistently and successfully contrived to foil every attempt to investigate the enigmatical circumstances which accompanied the life and death of the prince in the Temple.

But, the reader may ask, what is the result of this long story?

An unsolved riddle! for I confess, without hesitation, that I am decidedly inclined to the view that the boy who died in the Temple on June 8, 1795, was not the Dauphin, but a substituted lad; but this conviction of course does not possess the slightest historic value, so long as it cannot be proved to demonstration what became of the prince in the event of his escape from the Temple. The attempts hitherto made to answer this question with certainty have proved insufficient or delusive. Of all the persons who came forward as Louis XVII., I may safely say, after careful investigation of their claims and pretensions, not one has proved his identity with the Dauphin even to a degree of probability. Watchmaker Naundorff appears to have been most convinced of his claim. The possibility of a satisfactory answer to the question, "What became of the Dauphin after his removal from the Temple?" could only be obtained by following up, laying bare and analysing all the countless intrigues which went on between the Bourbon émigrés and their adherents in and out of France. A tedious, difficult, and most unrefreshing task, which only an historian who had nothing better to do would undertake. For, even if he succeeded, what would be the result? The satisfaction of idle curiosity, and nothing more. Let the dead bury their dead!

June-VOL. CXXXIV. NO. DXXXIV.

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