lxxxiv AUDUBON THE NATURALIST 



of Louis Charles, the number of those claiming to be, or who 

 believed or imagined themselves to be, that prince had risen to 

 forty, and some have estimated that the roll of false claimants 

 by now has touched the seventy mark ! They were an assorted 

 collection of near-lunatics, unstable persons with delusions of 

 grandeur or plain monomaniacs, mendacious liars, clever 

 forgers, general swindlers or adventurers, and pious hypocrites. 

 What did they expect to gain by such fraudulent claims? 

 Probably not a diadem or kingly crown in most cases, but 

 money and gifts of various sorts from the credulous, a share, 

 perhaps, of the large private fortune of the sister of the 

 Dauphin, and, above all, public acclaim and notoriety. The 

 shrewdest forgers or the most consistent and accomplished 

 liars often did obtain some of these things, such as jewels, 

 coin of the realm, and a chance to live for a time at least in 

 luxury. Several wrote fictitious memoirs, and many figured in 

 the law courts, when they often drew fines and prison sentences. 

 Their claims were usually thrown out of court, but if they 

 were banished from France, they were almost certain to turn 

 up again in the same role somewhere else. 



Probably no boy in the world's history whose life, or that 

 part of it about which anything is definitely known, extended 

 to only ten years, two months, and two days, to follow the 

 Temple record again, has had so many biographers, so many 

 impersonators, or has been pronounced dead and buried so 

 many times and in so many different places. Under such cir- 

 cumstances it is not surprising that the bibliography of this 

 unfortunate prince has extended to extraordinary propor- 

 tions. 10 Over a hundred years after the reported death of the 

 Dauphin, a monthly publication, Revue historique de la Ques- 

 tion Louis XVII, was started in Paris in 1905, but seems to 

 have run out of material in the course of five or six years. 11 



10 See William W. Wight, who in his Louis XVII: A Bibliography 

 (Boston, 1915) lists with annotations 478 titles, and these limited solely to 

 material in his private library. 



"According to Wight this began as a "monthly" in 1905, with but 

 six issues, and these gradually diminished until there was but one issue 

 in 1910. 



