FOREWORD AND POSTSCRIPT lxxxiii 



but very few, if any, outside the royal household, since the 

 boy Dauphin, as seen in life and in his portraits, had always 

 appeared with long locks, banged and hanging down over his 

 ears, which they completely concealed. No doubt his fond par- 

 ents were quite willing that his tresses should hide such a defect. 

 It was a bodily mark which tripped many a brazen pretender 

 in the eyes of the knowing. 



Did anyone ever notice or know that John James Audubon's 

 right ear was deformed? Not so far as is now known, and his 

 numerous portraits give no suggestion of it. If Audubon's 

 right ear was normal, as he and other artists represented it to 

 be, he could not have been Louis Charles, the prince. Had he 

 possessed such a deformity and been bound, under oath, as he 

 said, not to reveal his identity, would he have consented to 

 be shorn of his "ambrosial locks" in Edinburgh on March 19, 

 1827? 



vin 



There is probably no parallel in history to the Dauphin 

 racket, which began in France shortly after the reputed death 

 of Louis Charles and lasted for the better part of a century, 

 with reverberations still felt to this day. The causes that led 

 to such an extraordinary succession of events do not seem to 

 have been duplicated in either ancient or modern times. 



Within five years after the death of the Dauphin, as re- 

 corded in the Temple's archives, seven boys all claiming to be 

 Louis XVII had already come to the attention of the French 

 police. Soon they kept bobbing up overnight, as Vogt says, 

 like as many prairie dogs, here, there, and everywhere, and 

 sometimes two were circulating in the country at the same 

 time. Three who made such false claims lived at one time or 

 another in the United States or Canada. Of one of these, 

 Eleazar Williams, I shall speak later. The Dauphin's sister 

 once remarked, when the impersonators of her lost brother had 

 reached twenty-seven in number, that she believed every one 

 of them to be spurious. Fifty years after the reputed death 



