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Show me mmBmmmm Mi l'ii y jgy ' 'ft ;v - - 4 vA. . : attlsUj' - s n vitiKTE si l: ; EST DOLOR SfCUT JfCR HEUS 1 VVT7'' 7 By ELMO SCOTT WATSON r- ' rD '"' other day a group of TT French loyalists galh- erod in the Abbey of St. Denis, north of Paris, where lie the Kings of 1 France in their royal i tombs. The occasion was r the one hundred thirty- V -i fifth anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI which took place during the French revolution and Ihey had gathered there in memory of the Bourbon monarch and his Queen, Marie Antion-ette. Antion-ette. While they thus honored the.,e two victims of that historic tragedy, they were denied the privilege of paying pay-ing a similiar marl; of respect to a I bird, Louis XVII, the lost Dauphin of France, for the reason that no one knows where lie the remains of that vi.:tim of the Reign of Terror. In the cemetery of the church of St. Margaret Mar-garet in the Kue St. Barnard there is ti tomb which bears the words "L. XVII, lTSo-179."). Attendite et vioete si est dolor sicut dolor incus." Is this the tomb of the lost Dauphin, as that inscription would indicate and as many Parisians believe? Or would the Bourbonists who wished to honor the Memory of this King, who never held the throne which was rightfully his, he compelled to visit a cemetery In the town of Ilogansburg, New York, and Ii.y their wrealhs upon the gravestone grave-stone which bears the name of Flea.iv Williams with the assurance ' that they were thus honoring the little lost Dauphin? Although the fate of the lost Dauphin Dau-phin is one of the unsolved riddles of histii-y, certain definite facts In regard lo it have been established by the researches of a recent French historian. According to his account, in Angus-'. 1702. the Paris Commune after n flispute with the legislative assembly as to where their royal prisoners pris-oners were to be quartered, succeeded in getting its own wry and decreed that the place of captivity should he the Temple, the palace of the Grand Friar of the Knights Templars. Here were held King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antonette, Princess F.li.ahelh (si. iter of the King), Princess Marie Therese (daughter of the King and Queen and later the Duchesse d'-Angouleme), d'-Angouleme), and the Dauphin, Louis Charles. 0; January 21, lTD.'i, the king was beheaded; later the Queen and the Princess Elizabeth were also si'nt under the knife, leaving only the Dauphin and his sister prisoners in the Temple. Before tin Queen was executed, however, the Dauphin had been separated sep-arated from the rest of his family and held a prisoner by himself in another part of t h"j building where he was placed under the care of Autoine Simon, u'i ignorant shoemaker, and his wife. Simon was to be the young prince's tutor with the special object ob-ject of teaching him the democratic ideas of the revolution. All that he tai!L''.t the hoy, however, was to sing indveent songs and to talk the rough I .tiguage of the lower classes How-'.-ver he was not cruelly treated, as has so often been charged, and enjoyed en-joyed considerable liberty within the ' Vmplo grounds. " - On January 1!, 1704. Simon sudden ly ceased to be the Dauphin's guardian guar-dian and that night he and his wife left the Temple. It is from this eiomeiit that the mystery begins. 'eretofore many people had been allowed al-lowed to see the Dauphin, but from ti U. time on he v as kept in close on(inement and no one, except the person who attended to his needs, knew anything about the mode of his existence. Within six months the Commune had fallen, but the Temple still held its royal prisoner or, at least, a child who was supposed to be the Dauphin. The last guardian of the little prisoner, pris-oner, Etienne Alsne, reported that the boy was an imbecile or very much like one and finally on June 8, 1795, this boy died. An autopsy was performed per-formed and various persons were shown the corpse. Care was taken to prevent anyone from properly Identifying Identi-fying him. Although the boy had been buried as the son of Louis XVI, rumors persisted that the Dauphin was not really dead. It is a plausible theory that the real Prince was taken away from the Temple by Simon and that a substitute was placed there in his stead; that Royalist plotters abducted this substitute in the belief be-lief that he was Louis XVII, replacing replac-ing him with the boy who actually died in the Temple and was buried as the prince, a child who was apparently ap-parently diseased and an "imbecile. If this is true, then the mystery Is no nearer solution than ever before, for not long after Simon left the Temple, he was guillotined without revealing what disposition he had made of the real Louis XVII.- The Dauphin had simply disappeared and not even the careful researches of tliis French historian has accounted for his ultimate fate. lie is certain that the boy did not die in the Temple but is unable to find any trace of him afier his removal by those who hoped to profit thereby but who died before they had the chance to make use of their opportunity. In the years that followed the disappearance dis-appearance of the real Dauphin and the death of the supposed Prince in the Temple, there came a veritable deluge of claimants to the title of being the real Louis XVII. No less than twenty-five "Lest Dauphins" appeared before French courts from time to time to press their claims and to disturb the peace of mind of the government of France. . The most picturesque perhaps of all the claimants was Charles William Wil-liam Xaurendorf, who appeared in Paris in ISoll as the long missing lost Dauphin. He too, had a long list of documents in support of his assump tion that he was of royal blood but when the court heard the evidence this "lost Dauphin" was summa'ily banished from France. He eventually made his home in Delft. Holland, and died in IS-io. So strongly did he impress im-press his claims upon a large group of French royalists that he was hur ied with great ceremony and over his grave in the Delft cemetery was erected a monument bearing these words. "Here reposes Louis XVII, King of France and Navarre, Charles Louis. Duke of Xormandip, born in Versailles, March 27, 17S.". died in Delft August 10, 1SJ-V It is a far cry from the palace of Versailles and the Temple in Paris to the little town of Ilogansburg. N. V., and Green Bay. Wis., yet these . two American towns have also been concerned in the mystery of the lost Dauphin. Seventy-seven years ago both Europe and America were agog over the assertion of Rev. Eleazer Williams, an Episcopal missionary among the Indians, that he was the son of Louis XVI, and therefore the lost Dauphin of France. Eleazer Williams Wil-liams was the son of a halfbreed Mohawk Indian chief, Thomas Williams, Wil-liams, who was descended from Eunice Williams, the famous Deerfield captive, and was one of the family of thirteen halfbreeds by Thomas Williams' Wil-liams' Indian wife, Mary Ann Williams. Wil-liams. He grew up among the Mohawks Mo-hawks at Caughnawaga, Quebec, but was educated in New England and served brilliantly as the head of a corps of scouts and spies for the Americans in the War of 1S12. Later he became a missionary among his father's people, first as a Congrega-tionalist Congrega-tionalist and later as an Episcopalian. When they and other Iroquois tribesmen tribes-men in New York were being hard pressed by the advancing white settlers, set-tlers, he was instrumental in obtaining ob-taining lands for them in Wisconsin. At some time during his early career he heard the story of the lost Dauphin Dau-phin and having been told that he resembled the Bourbon Prince, he decided to advance his claims to the honor of being that person. Owing to a scrofulous taint in his family, the bruises and injuries, received while he was a child playing with his Indian In-dian playmates, left permanent scars which were later in life increased in size by artificial means. These he claimed to have been the result of the shackles and chains with which he was confined in the Temple. In 1S41 the Prince de Joinville, son of the then reigning King Louis Philippe of France, followed his father's fa-ther's example and paid a visit to America. During a trip on the Great Lakes the Prince found awaiting him at Mackinac a clerical-looking gentleman who asked permission to accompany the Prince's party to Green Bay, Wis. This cleric was Eleazer Williams and soon after the departure of the Prince from Green Bay, Williams gave out the astonishing astonish-ing statement that De Joinville had acknowledged that he (Williams) (Wil-liams) was Louis XVII, and th 1. 1 the Prince bad sought him out iu the western west-ern wilderness to ask him to renounce re-nounce his claim to the throne of France. A few years Inter Williams told his story to Rev. J. H. Hanson Han-son who wrote an article "Have We a Bourbon Among Us?", which appeared ap-peared in the February; 185;), number of Putnam's Monthly. When a copy of this magazine was received in England, where the Prince de Joinville Join-ville was then living as an eA'ile from France, he immediately repudiated the alleged 'interview and denounced Williams as an impostor. However, a hook by Hanson, "The Lost Prince." which gave a detailed account of Williams' Wil-liams' life, and which proved to the satisfaction of the author, at least, that the Mohawk halfbreed missionary mission-ary was indeed the lost Dauphin gained for him many adherents. Although Williams steadfastly riain tained that he was the lost LViu-pliin. LViu-pliin. not long ever came of his pretensions pre-tensions and he died August 2S, ISfi?. on the St. Regis' reservation nerY Ilogansburg. X. Y. Evidently bis adherents ad-herents were not as steadfast in t'.eir belief as were those of Naurendorf. for he was buried with Masonic rites simply as "Brother Eleazer Williams," and the plain monument over his grave at Ilogansburg bears not the royal crest of the house of Bourbon, Bour-bon, but the Masonic emblem, his name, dates of his birth and death. Perhaps he has had as much right to the title of the lost Dauphin as any other claimant but history has not yet been convinced that any of the claims are convincing. |