FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxxvii 



the real Dauphin of France, and ten years later an article, 

 supposedly written or inspired by Williams himself, appeared 

 in the United States Democratic Review, in which his definite 

 claim to royalty was made public. Meanwhile Williams re- 

 peated his story to anyone who would listen, but the widespread 

 notoriety after which he had evidently been striving came with 

 the publication in Putnam's Monthly Magazine for February, 

 1853, of an article on "Have We a Bourbon among Us?" by 

 the Rev. John Halloway Hanson. Hanson corresponded with 

 Williams, visited him, and became such an enthusiastic sup- 

 porter of his cause that he wrote his biography, in a volume 

 of nearly five hundred pages which was published in 1855. Han- 

 son was an idealist, without a particle of critical judgment, 

 and, believing in the unimpeachable integrity of his hero, he 

 accepted without question all of his yarns however amazing or 

 impossible. I can relate but one of these stories, which came 

 out in a conversation with Hanson, who said in effect : "Before 

 you left the Temple, at the age of ten, you must have stored 

 up in your mind many memory pictures of extraordinary events, 

 some of which you will be able to recall. Now, I wish you 

 would describe some of them." "A most remarkable fact," 

 replied the self-styled Dauphin, "is that up to the age of 

 thirteen or fourteen my mind was like a blank page: nothing 

 was written on it. Consciousness seemed to be imperfect or 

 entirely lacking, and at that early period I was practically an 

 idiot. Then, this strange thing happened : one summer's day, 

 when I was bathing with a number of Indian boys, my friends, 

 in the waters of Lake George, in my foolish way I climbed a 

 high rock over the water and dived. The shock rendered me 

 unconscious, but my boy friends dragged me out, and when I 

 was gradually restored to consciousness I was a changed per- 

 son. My mind was restored to me, and the events, which had 

 happened in my earlier years in Paris, came back. Pictures 

 of soldiers and great personages were there, and there was a 

 hard, cruel face, which I seemed to recognize with a start, when 

 I suddenly came upon it in a steamboat or upon entering a 



