THE HISTORY OF A DELUSION. 737 



away, saying, " You shall die before you go away from Nuremberg ! " 

 Caspar recognized in this man the same person who had taken him 

 out of the cellar, and who doubtless wished to punish him for having 

 broken silence and told his story to the gossiping burgomaster. No- 

 body but Caspar had seen this black man, who seemed to have van- 

 ished in the air like smoke, after having struck the youth. Search was 

 instituted for him, and inquisitions were made to recover traces of 

 him ; but no news was had of him. From that day, however, due 

 pains were taken to protect the child of Europe against the assassins 

 who were watching for him ; and he never went out without an escort 

 of two guards. 



These precautions were relaxed little by little, and some time after 

 this Caspar left Nuremberg and went to reside at Anspach, under the 

 care and at the expense of Count Stanhope. He became a boarding- 

 pupil of schoolmaster Meyer, whom he caused much annoyance. On 

 the 14th of December, 1833, as he was walking alone in the Public 

 Garden, he was again accosted by a black man, who presented him 

 with a purse ; and he was at the same time struck on his left side with 

 a dagger. The purse contained a note written in a back hand, and 

 reading : " Hauser will be able to describe my appearance to you, and 

 tell you where I came from. To save him the trouble, I will tell you 

 myself : I came from the frontier of Bavaria. I will tell you my 

 name, too : M. L. O." The second assassin was as indiscoverable as 

 the other one. Unfortunately, the wound was graver than was thought 

 at first, and Caspar died on the 17th of December, having exclaimed, 

 " O God, God ! must I die thus in shame and disgrace?" 



There was at the time in Berlin a counselor of police named Mer- 

 ker, a very methodical, exact, logical man, whose sagacity it was hard 

 to outwit. Struck with the accumulation of improbabilities in the 

 stories of Caspar Hauser, he drew the conclusion from them that " either 

 we must believe in miracles, or Caspar is an impostor." " It will be 

 said some day, in some course of universal history," he wrote, " that 

 a young man appeared one evening in a German city as if he had fallen 

 from a star ; but the sky was not his country ; he had come out of an 

 underground dungeon, and saw daylight now for the first time. A 

 mysterious unknown had brought him out of his hole, and this un- 

 known was at the same time his jailer, his master, his tutor, his deliv- 

 erer, and the man commissioned to assassinate him. The police of the 

 city of Nuremberg found something queer in this story, and regarded 

 the miraculous child as a very ordinary vagabond. But the world soon 

 became occupied with him. They wrote books and a great many arti- 

 cles in the journals about him. The extraordinary being became the 

 object of profound scientific researches. His saliva, his urine, his 

 evacuations were learnedly analyzed ; his ways of acting, even his 

 sneezings, were studied and commented upon as if they were affairs of 

 state. If any one ventured to express a doubt, he was dishonored and 

 vol. xxx. — 47 



