AN UNSOLVED FRENCH MYSTERY

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 181, 26 April 1919, Page 7

AN UNSOLVED FRENCH MYSTERY

A BOY KING WHO . NEVER REIGNED

STRANGE STORY REVIVED

(By RAY.)

In tho early days of thol'caco Congress llio Prime Milliliter of Britain and the I'rimo Minister of Franco wero presented, wjth .a. petition from i person , named Naundorff, in which, according to tho cablegram, ho asserted his claim '.'to tho i'rouch throne." Tho cablegram, however, misrepresented tho claim of the petitioner. Tiio French" nation', has very clearly settled tho question" of their mode of government, and even if tho claimant were a descendant of royalty, a petition which involved tho overthrow of republicanism and the sotting up of monarchy would be an act of madness, and would not merit notice of any kind. The cablegram, however, did not do justice to the claimant. ■ For eighty years the name of Naundorff has been before the people of Franco in connection with n claim to the private property of the King of France. Naundorff, in 1830, claimed to be the son of, Louis XVI, and tin present petitioner; a descendant of tlu former,' asks to bo' recognised as the legal ■ heir of ]>ouis XVI, that society should accept him as such, and that the private properly of Louis XVI be given to him. Tho Naundorff claim all through has been for property, aud not for kingly power. ■ I'roniineut republicans have pushed the claims of the Naundorffs in this matter. The late Jules Favre, who oil May 10, 1811, along with another, signed on behalf of France the Peaco of Frankfort, believed in tho Naundorff claim, and pleaded in the Lrw Courts that civil rights be given to the claimant' as ■ the heii N of Louis XVI. Favre, however, failed to convince the law. and the claim was rejected; but this rejection did' not end the matter,, for to this day a number of people believe in the claim made, and t-ho recent petition to. the two Prime Ministers is' probably the fruit of an agitation of sympathisers.Tho claim has its foundations in a mystery thathaß never been cleared up, but it may yet be cleared up by aji historian with the genius of a Sherlock'Holmes. .. This, mystory is part "of a traftic story that'is "worth being retold at a .time when Paris is the centre of the world's .interest to-day. This tragic 'story runs back to tie French Revolution of more than a hundred vears ago. Tho son and heir of tho ill-fated Marie Antoinette and Louis' •XVI in' the year of the Terror, was cast as a young child .into a Paris prison. The fate of both the royal' parents is clearly known—they . perished at the block—but. the fate of their little boy is shrouded'in mystery. The death of the young prince has never been fully proved, nor is his burial place known, and there is the possibility that he escaped from prison, fled to a foreign country, married, * and liad children J The elder Naundorff claimed that ho was tho prince that was put in prison, and that ne escaped, and after long years of eojouin oa foreign soil he returned to France to claim his civil rights as an heir of.'royalty; and his grandson to-day makes-the same demand. This mj;steriou? French' prince passed the first four and. a half years of liis'life in the royal palaces and parks' 'of Versailles. ' ' These palaces and parks cost .£50,000,000, and this money had been squeezed by unjust taxation from a mass of .people who were enduring grinding poverty and who were thus incited to revolution. In 1789 the political volcano burst: the Bastille fell, tho women of- Paris, demented with misery and hunger, went to Versailles to demand relief from, the incanablo Louis XVI and from his blinded Austrian'wife. The child prince, the hero of this tragic story. was . brought along with, his sister to one of the balconies : of. the palace to propitiate th 9 mob, but tho people yelled, "No children." .The mob swept tho royal family to Paris and to prison, and soon the heads of King and Queen rolled from the block. The sins of the fathers descend to the children. The historian has.p<iinted..out that Louis XIV butlfc Versailles as a. temple. for his own idolatry;* that Louis XV by his iouUife polluted the place, and that Louis XVI, , while lie could feast aud hunt and mend 'locks, could" neither rulo nor save his kingdom. Louis XV, tho sensualist, had a premonition of tho impending doonv of tho throne, for he said. "After me the deluge." .The delude having engulfed. King and Queen swept the child prince, Louis Charles by name, into s a foul and horrible prison, where lor a time ho was treated nioro like on animal than p. human being. With the death of his father tlio child was now Louis XVII in the eyes of tho monarchists, and during the Terror the revolutionaries looked upon the boy as a nicn;ico_ to the republic, and made him the Hctiin- of .their fear and 'hate. ■ lit-Marseilles-; and 1 in Bordeaux the child in the prison was proclaimed King as Louis X\ 11, and nearly every court. in. Europe endorsed these proclamations. I'he royalists were not idle in planning schemes of. escape, and the leaders in the (jovernment by Terror were incited to greater harshness'in their 'treatment of the illfated boy. His prison was like the cell of a wild beast.. Half of the door was cut away anil filled with baru, and the lower part of iron plates ,wasi strongly fastened; The guard was forbidden to speak- to the young prisoner, tood was thrust into the cell, and in dirt, darkness, and solitariness the prince existed for a time. General Barras was-cunous to see the. ; child, and .though history, describes him as inhuman: and immoral, yet tho sight':of-.thd: child—alivo wth vermin and : '.breathing-'an atmosphere so foul that ay visitor .could not go near tho cell in comfort-amoved him to order tho room to be washed and tho child reclothed and made clean'... After this the story of the child enters into the land of shadow, and darkness. The child in tho prison is now a cliild that lias neither intelligence nor power ,of speech, aud he "dies of a scrofulous disease of long standing," but tho child of Marie Antoinette had all his faculties, auu jibo had no such, long-standing tease. Iho doctors who attended tho child did not! know the prince, lyul no 0110 who knew him could certify that tho child ; .whose remains were laid in ;v grave> J 11 }" known was tho'eon of Louis XYL i.his case is. ono of tho unsolved myeteric* of French historjy and the claim of Naundorff lias revived this sado tale of tho entail of woo descended upon an iuolfcnsivo child, • Tho "official story" of"tho alleged death of tiie little "king that never, reigned is received with grave doubts by students of history; Several explanations havo been suggested. It may be. that about tho time Hams saw tho child tho royalists effected his escape, and substituted' a sickly deaf mute. Or it may be that the revolutionaries secretly murdered tho prince to end tho possibility of a rise of royalists, and established a deaf, dying boy. ffhe mystery, of tho death of this boy king led to no loss than forty people to assert that they wcro tho prince who had escaped from prison, but the only fruuily of pretenders (hat havo survived is that of Naundorff. This pretender, who emerged forty years after, the Alleged death of the boy prince, displayed a curious amount of knowledge of the early days of thfe prince, and of his alleged escapo from prison, but his story as a jvliola abounds in falsehoods aud contradictions. Tot in spite of these serious flaws in the case, Jules Favp and other distinguished Frenchmen believed that tho claimant was the heir of Louis XV. But French law courts never were wnyinced, and the I'rimo Ministers of Britain anil France' made no roply to tho petition presented to them tho other month. It is possiblo that tho boy liing who novor reigned did escapo from prison, and lived aud died in secret among his friends, and that Naundorff was- in the secret, perhaps, as a servant of Louis Charles, and used the.knowledge thus as tho basis of his deception. But this is speculation, and not l istory , so the mystery remains unsolved.