FRANCE: Lost or Found

“Yes, my friend, it is too true,” confided the mysterious, grey-bearded hitchhiker aboard Huckleberry Finn’s raft, “your eyes is lookin’ at the very moment on the pore disappeared Daughin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette . . . You see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.”

This grisly old con-man of Mark Twain’s imagining was soon proved a fraud and ended his brief reign riding out of a Mississippi River town on a rail. But the real-life claims of another pretender to the same identity were still in dispute last week. When he first arrived in Paris on May 26, 1833, he was a balding watchmaker with a thick mustache and a fringe of chin whiskers. His passport identified him as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff of Weimar, but the passport, its bearer promptly explained in almost incomprehensible French, was merely a blind; Karl Naundorff was in reality Louis, son of the guillotined Louis XVI, and the rightful King of France.

The Shoemaker’s Wife. Paris was used to such claims; the fate of the young Dauphin had long been shrouded in mystery and rumor. In 1795, the revolutionary government, which held him prisoner, had officially announced his death from scrofula at the age of ten, but the stories of witnesses who claimed to be present at the death varied widely. Some years later a shoemaker’s wife, who had been charged with the care of the royal prisoner, swore on her deathbed that young Louis had been spirited away and that another boy had been buried in his grave in the churchyard of Sainte Marguerite.

Naundorff’s own early life was as clouded in obscurity as the Dauphin’s, death. In 1812, he was run out of Berlin for claiming to be King of France. He moved to Spandau and wrote Louis XVI’s daughter Maria Therese a letter saying, “I am alive, your real brother. Ask me to prove it.” Maria, then the Duchess of Angouleme, paid no attention, but others were more sympathetic. The mayor of Spandau believed Naundorff and took him to Brandenburg. There Naundorff was arrested for arson and jailed for counterfeiting, but two years later, on his release, he persuaded the Minister of Justice in nearby Crossen that he was the Dauphin. Eventually Naundorff moved on to Switzerland.

An Angry Rabbit. When at last he arrived in Paris, Naundorff was a down-at-heel beggar. But he found an important champion. The lost Dauphin’s old governess had come to scoff at the beggar’s claims, but when she saw his prominent front teeth, the triangular vaccination on his arm and the pigeon-shaped mole of Louis Bourbon on Naundorff’s thigh, she became convinced that he was the Dauphin. Naundorff even had a scar on his upper lip like that which the imprisoned Dauphin had got from the bite of an angry rabbit; the Dauphin had screamed the era’s worst insult, “aristocrate,” at the bunny.

With the governess’ help, Naundorff enlisted Louis XVI’s last Minister of Justice and a former Lord Chamberlain on his side. Then one night in a Paris street, Naundorff was attacked and left bleeding from six knife wounds.

The Bourbon Bomb. The government confiscated 202 documents he was hoarding as evidence of his claim and banished him from France. Naundorff fled to England, sired a son who was registered on the books as Prince of France, and settled down to write his memoirs. While in London the pretender was shot at three times.

Three years later Naundorff was run out of England. He settled in The Netherlands and wangled huge sums of money from the Dutch War Ministry to finance a new explosive, “the Bourbon bomb,” on which he was working. In Delft in August 1845, Naundorff fell mysteriously ill. The Dutch King’s personal physician attended him, but to no avail. A few days later he died. The death certificate bore the name Charles Louis de Bourbon.

Last week a company of still loyal believers who call themselves the Survivantists gathered around an open grave in a Delft cemetery to exhume the old bones which may or may not be those of an heir to the throne of France. A new examination of Naundorff’s remains did nothing to dispel the mystery, but the Survivantists were not discouraged. Next year in the Vatican, on the 100th anniversary of her death, the secret will of Maria Therese, Duchess of Angouleme, is to be opened and read. Perhaps, hope the Survivantists, it will contain the final proof that the lost Dauphin of France had been found at last.

* Another pretender, who claimed identity as “the rightful ‘Duke of Bridgewater’ . . . torn from high estate and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft.”