LITMIR.BIZ

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else would perceive them. When, for instance, the Duke of Berri, dying from the stroke of an assassin, had some final words to whisper to his brother, the Duke of Angoulême – “What,” asks M. Nauroy, “could this have been but the truth in regard to Louis XVII.?” When, again, one of the doctors who made the post-mortem examination of the supposed Louis XVII. offered to Louis XVIII. the heart which he had concealed and preserved, and the king declined the present – “Why,” asks M. Nauroy, “should he have accepted the heart which he knew was not that of Louis XVII., but that of the child by whom the young prince was replaced in his prison?”

      Meanwhile, that some of the great Royalist families believed Louis XVII. to have been replaced in the Temple by another child and himself carried to La Vendée is beyond doubt; and a letter on the subject, addressed, December 4, 1838, to the Times, shows that this view of the matter was held by at least a section (probably a very small one) of the Royalist party.

      On January 19th the cobbler Simon ceased to do duty as gaoler. At that time there were, as M. Nauroy sets forth, only four persons in the Temple – the Dauphin, Simon, his wife, and the Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Duchess of Angoulême. Simon died on the scaffold six months afterwards, on the 28th of July. The Princess Elizabeth, confined in a room apart from her brother, never saw him again, and consequently knew nothing of him except by hearsay. From January 19th to July 28th there was no warder at the Temple. The child was watched by Commissaries, who were relieved from day to day, and of whom not one could establish his identity. When regular gaolers were appointed, not one of them had ever seen the Dauphin. If, then, after the departure of Simon, another child could have been substituted for Louis XVII., there was no one to notice the change when it had once been accomplished. The Dauphin was in perfect health at the time when Simon and his wife left him. But the child in the Temple fell ill immediately afterwards; and on the 6th of May, 1795, Dr. Desault, summoned to attend the “Dauphin,” declared his little patient to be some other child. He had visited the Dauphin’s brother in 1789, and on that occasion had seen the Dauphin himself at the Tuileries. If, as M. Nauroy asserts, Dr. Desault drew up a report on the subject, that report has disappeared. Indirect evidence, however, as to Dr. Desault’s conviction that the child he attended in the Temple could not be the Dauphin, was given fifty years afterwards in a letter written and signed by the widow of P. A. Thouvenin, Dr. Desault’s nephew, who claimed to remember what his uncle had frequently said on the subject.

      Whether or not Louis XVII. escaped to La Vendée to be cherished by the Vendean chiefs even when, in the Royalist army which was invading France from Germany, Louis XVIII. had been proclaimed, he is now in any case no more. The eighteenth Louis was ten years old when the child of the Temple is supposed to have died in prison; and according to the most convinced, not to say credulous, of those writers who maintain that Louis XVII. escaped, to live for years afterwards, he breathed his last in 1872 at Saveney (Loire Inférieure), under the name of Laroche, at the age of eighty-seven. The numerous impostors who with more or less success personated the unhappy prince had died much earlier. But the descendants of Naundorff, his valet, the most famous of all these pretenders, claim still to be of the blood royal, and on the occasion of the Count de Chambord’s death they displayed a proud consciousness of their rights by publishing somewhere in Holland a manifesto asserting gravely the title of the chief of the family to the throne of France.

      Another prisoner in the Temple of whom mention must be made is Sir Sidney Smith, whose friends were making every effort for his liberation, when a Royalist officer in the French army, named Boisgerard (who under the Revolution had quitted military life to become ballet-master at the Opera), effected his escape. With this view he had obtained an impression of the seal of the Directorial Government, which he affixed to an order, forged by his own hand, for the delivery of Sir Sidney Smith into his care. Accompanied by a friend, disguised, like himself, in the uniform of an officer of the revolutionary army, he did not scruple personally to present the fictitious document to the keeper of the Temple, who, opening a small closet, took thence some original document, with the writing and seal of which he carefully compared the forged order. Desiring the adventurers to wait a few minutes, he then withdrew and locked the door after him. Giving themselves up for lost, the confederates determined to resist, sword in hand, any attempt made to secure them. Highly interesting is Boisgerard’s own description of the period of horrible suspense he now passed through. Under the dread that each successive moment might be attended by a discovery involving the safety of his life, the acuteness of his organs of sense was heightened to painfulness; the least noise thrilled through his brain, and the gloomy apartment in which he sat seemed filled with strange images. Both he and his companion, however, retained self-possession, and after the lapse of a few minutes their anxiety was terminated by the re-appearance of the gaoler, with his captive, who was delivered to Boisgerard. But here a new and unexpected difficulty occurred. Sir Sidney Smith, not knowing Boisgerard, refused for some time to quit the prison; and considerable address was required on the part of his deliverers to overcome his scruples. At last the precincts of the Temple were cleared. The fugitives rode a short distance in a fiacre, then walked, then entered another carriage, and in this way so successfully baffled pursuit that they ultimately got to Havre, where Sir Sidney was put on board an English vessel. Boisgerard, on his return to Paris, was a thousand times in dread of detection and had a succession of narrow escapes until his visit to England, which took place after the peace of Amiens. A pension had been granted to Sir Sidney Smith by the English Government for his meritorious services; and on Boisgerard’s arrival here a reward of a similar nature was bestowed on him through the influence of Sir Sidney, who took every opportunity of testifying his gratitude.

      If the prison of the unfortunate king and queen who were to suffer for the sins of their predecessors was at the eastern end of the line of boulevards, as marked by the Boulevard du Temple, their place of execution on the Place Louis XV., now known as Place de la Concorde, was at the western extremity, which in due time we shall explore.

      Meanwhile from one end of the boulevards to the other, from the tiny Théâtre Beaumarchais to the magnificent Opéra, there is a long series of playhouses. Close to the Beaumarchais Theatre stands the Cirque d’Hiver, opened in 1852 under the title of Cirque Napoléon, which seats 3,800 persons. It occupies the site of the first circus that was ever established in Paris. In 1785 the Astleys, father and son, came to Paris and there opened a circus exactly like the one they had just founded in London. Under their direction this theatre, situated at number twenty-four Rue du Faubourg du Temple, and measuring twenty metres in diameter, was lighted by 2,000 lamps and furnished with two rows of boxes. The price of the seats varied from twelve sous to three francs. Astley junior is said to have possessed a remarkably fine figure; and, in the words of a contemporary writer, “his beauty was sculptural.” Bachaumont, in his memoirs of the time, speaks of the numerous passions inspired by the young equestrian in too susceptible feminine hearts. The tricks of the circus, now so familiar, that in England, at least, no one cares to see them, were at that time new, and the sight of a man attitudinising on the back of a horse at full gallop excited the greatest wonder.

      Astley’s Circus in Paris possessed, as so many operatic theatres have done, a sort of international character. Engagements were made for it by diplomatists abroad. It can be shown, indeed, that diplomatists have long and almost from time immemorial been in the habit of doing agency work for artists and managers of good position. Operatic celebrities have been particularly favoured in this respect. A great Minister of State, Cardinal Mazarin, introduced, or aided powerfully in introducing, opera into France. The engagement of Cambert as director of music at the Court of Charles II. was effected by diplomatic means. Gluck, more than a century later, was induced to visit Paris through the representations of a secretary of the French Embassy at Vienna – that M. du Rollet who arranged for Gluck, on the basis of Racine’s Iphigénie, the libretto of Iphigénie en Aulide; and Piccini, at the instigation of Madame du Barry, was secured at Paris as opposition composer through the instrumentality of Baron de Breteuil, French Ambassador at Rome, working in co-operation with the Marquis Carraccioli, Neapolitan Ambassador at Paris.

      The great Montesquieu, moreover, when he was in England, had not thought it unbecoming to interest himself in the welfare of the French artists who occasionally arrived in England with recommendations addressed to him. Nor did the illustrious Locke occupy himself so exclusively with the “human understanding” as to have no time to bestow on

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