FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxxv 



Its editor began his address to prospective readers with a 

 quotation from Renan. "I fear," said Renan, "that the work 

 of the twentieth century will but consist of retrieving from 

 the waste-basket a multitude of excellent ideas which the nine- 

 teenth century had heedlessly thrown away. The survival of 

 Louis XVII, after leaving the prison of the Temple, is one of 

 these ideas." This idea, which seemed so excellent to Renan, 

 when put to the test, has proved to be sterile of practical 

 results. This journal appears to have been intended to con- 

 tinue the work of an earlier publication, Bulletin de la Societe 

 d'Etudes sur la Question Louis XVII, which, according to 

 Wight, was discontinued, after some change in name, in May, 

 1894. 



There was a shrewd adventurer who suddenly appeared in 

 France in 1830, coming apparently from nowhere and passing 

 under the German name of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, in recent 

 times identified, though not with complete certainty, as Carl 

 Benjamin Werg. After a long and checkered career he was 

 thrown out of France and went to England, where he invented 

 a bomb which was operated by clockwork. Failing to interest 

 the English in his invention, he started for Holland in 1845 

 with a passport bearing the name of "Charles Louis de Bour- 

 bon." As he was detained at Rotterdam, the question of ad- 

 mitting him soon became one of international diplomacy 

 between France and Holland. The Dutch appear to have 

 wanted his bomb, but as they had little liking for Charles X, 

 the French King, the matter dragged over five months and 

 ended in compromise. The French were willing to have the 

 name "Charles Louis" appear in the document (the Dauphin's 

 name having been Louis Charles), and for all they cared the 

 bomb might be called the "Bourbon bomb," but they would not 

 go a step farther. This was held, but on insufficient grounds, 

 as a tacit admission that the Naundorff family was entitled 

 to use the Bourbon name. The agreement was signed on June 

 20, 1845, and Naundorff, who had gone to Delft, was dead of 

 typhoid fever less than two months later. 



