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 DONVILLE'S FICTITIOUS TRAVELS IN AFRICA. 



THE two last numbers of the Revue des deux Mondes, a semi-monthly 

 Parisian publication, contain some farther disclosures on the subject of 

 M. Donville's pretended voyage to Congo, one of the grossest literary 

 frauds which has ever been practised on the world. Among his own 

 countrymen M. Donville has met with the greatest success : to the first 

 edition of his travels the Geographical Society of Paris appended a 

 highly flattering report, after electing the author to be their honorary 

 secretary ; and the Institute itself received and placed in its museum a 

 collection of specimens of natural history, professedly obtained in the 

 interior of Africa, but which are now proved to be the productions of the 

 South American continent. The articles in the Revue des deux Mondes 

 are, we find, by another traveller, M. Theodore Lacordaire, who, unfor- 

 tunately for M. Donville, had found him keeping a miscellaneous shop, 

 or store, for the sale of all sorts of commodities, first at Buenos Ayres, 

 and afterwards at Rio de Janeiro, at the very period when, according 

 to his published travels, he was pursuing his scientific researches in the 

 interior of Africa. The fraud was first detected in a late number of the 

 Foreign Quarterly Review (No. 19, pp. 163 206) ; but M. Lacordaire 

 applies himself to the task, con amore, and relentlessly strips his victim 

 of the last of his borrowed plumes. 



" I was at Buenos Ayres," he says, " in 1826 and 1827, when the 

 roadstead was blockaded by a Brazilian squadron, which prevented all 

 communication with the town by sea. Towards the middle of the 

 month of December, 1826, one of the enemy's ship's of war was ob- 

 served one morning proceeding towards the town with a flag of truce. 

 The rumour instantly spread that this vessel was the bearer of proposals 

 of peace ; but it was announced next morning in the newspapers that 

 she had only come to land M. Donville, a naturalist sent by the French 

 government to explore the interior of the South American continent. 

 M. Donville was received by his countrymen with all the consideration 

 which was due to the mission with which they believed him to be 

 charged ; and a few days after his arrival, M. Ramen Larrea, one of the 

 principal merchants at Buenos Ayres, for whom he had brought a letter 

 of introduction, gave in his honour a grand dinner of twenty covers, to 

 which I was invited. I was placed next to Donville. During the 

 whole of the entertainment he remained modestly silent, a rare merit for 

 a traveller, and made only polite but evasive answers to the questions 

 addressed to him by the guests. 



" Several Frenchmen sought the acquaintance of M. Donville, and 

 received from him some vague particulars of his previous travels. It 

 was quite marvellous the number and the extent of the countries 

 through which the traveller had passed ; almost the whole of Europe, 

 the Cape of Good Hope, India, Persia, and South America, had been 

 successively explored by him. He had even penetrated by land from 

 the Amazons to the south of the Pampas of Buenos Ayres, where he had 

 lived among the savage Indians who inhabit those regions ; but singu- 

 larly enough, he had never visited Buenos Ayres itself in the course of 

 this great journey, although the distance is so inconsiderable. Nobody 



