FRANCE: End of an Adventurer

Between the Louvre and the Place de la Republique lie the great grimy sheds of the Halles Centrales, the central markets of Paris. Tourists returning from the theatres pass long lines of high-wheeled wagons, piled high with cabbages. Few ever notice the long rows of stalls outside the market where weary camelots sell rubber dolls, postcards, hair oil, lace doilies, patent corkscrews.

In one of these booths until last week a plump, spectacled little Spanish woman, Senora Condeleria Brau-Soler, shrilly hawked beauty creams that she stirred up herself in a hotel room not far away. Snivelling loudly, Senora Brau-Soler led police to that room last week. There on the floor, sharp under the single drop light and the grimy, epileptic wallpaper, lay the body of her lover, a grey-haired man of 62, still handsome. Senora Brau-Soler had nearly severed his neck with a razor. Within an hour transatlantic cables were clicking, for Senora Brau-Soler’s dead lover always insisted that his name was Prince Edgar de Bourbon d’Este, an illegitimate son of gentle old Franz Josef of Austria and the Princess Alice de Bourbon-Parme.

So ended a career that might have been dictated by E. Phillips Oppenheim. New York first saw “Prince Edgar” nearly 40 years ago when he arrived flush with funds and cut a wide swathe through the leg o’ mutton-sleeved Society of the period. He married Clare de Cosse Conger, niece of Edwin T. Conger of Ohio, onetime Minister to China. That did not last long. In 1911 Prince Edgar turned up in Vienna, but he talked too much about his relationship to the old Kaiser and was quietly ousted. By this time U. S. newspapers had it quite fixed in their minds that Prince Edgar was really an Italian adventurer named Carlo Lorioli who came originally from Milan, married a Milanese and had himself naturalized a Hungarian in order to get a divorce in Fiume. This story did not prevent Prince Edgar from turning up in Turkey shortly after his departure from Vienna. He led an uprising of the Albanian Maltsori tribes and was elected their chief.

High mark in his career came in 1913 when in all seriousness he claimed the throne of Albania. Britain, Austria-Hungary and Italy later gave it to the ineffective German Prince Wilhelm of Wied. Then began the decline. In 1916 he was accused by British authorities of being a spy. He was handed over to Italy, arrested under the name of Carlo Lorioli, acquitted. A few years ago he gravitated to that rogues’ rookery, the French Riviera, and had a modest success as an elderly gigolo. In 1930 the French police ordered him deported as an undesirable alien. The order was mysteriously countermanded. Then came the lean days. Still handsome, still holding his head high above his frayed collar, he drifted from rooming house to rooming house to meet finally with Senora Brau-Soler, comfortably married in Barcelona. She left her husband to go with Prince Edgar to Paris. He ran rapidly through her small fortune, until at last she was reduced to mixing unguents in a mouldy little room. Cause of the quarrel that led her to slit his throat was his attempt to beg enough money out of her to try one more fling at the Riviera. In his pocket was a letter to his son. He did not have the 1 franc 50 centimes to post it. The son, Rudolph de Bourbon, 35, an unemployed auto salesman, was discovered last week in Cleveland. “I don’t know what my father was doing in Paris.” said he. “I have not heard from him for years.” Despite the story of Carlo Lorioli of Milan, there were many persons in Nice and Monte Carlo, not all of them gullible, who believe that “Prince Edgar” really was a Habsburg. They point to interestingfacts. When he was in serious trouble —when he was arrested as a War spy and when he was about to be deported from France—mysterious influence was suddenly brought to bear to get him off. Within the past few years he pawned various bits of recognized Habsburg jewelry in Nice. Nobody ever came forward to say he stole them.