738 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



despised ; and a miraculous event was learnedly explained by other 

 events still more miraculous." 



A circumstance that confirmed Merker's suspicions and skepticism 

 was the fact that everybody who had anything to do with Caspar 

 Hauser surprised him, at some time or another, in some flagrant lie. 

 Madame Biberbach wrote, on the 19th of February, 1832 : " How 

 many bitter hours has this child made us pass ! How many griefs 

 and vexations has he caused us by his absolute want of truthfulness ! 

 When we catch him in the act, he pretends to repent, and promises to 

 amend, and we begin to love him again ; but the demon of falsehood 

 has so fully taken possession of him that he is always falling back 

 into his sin, and going deeper and deeper into his vice. From the 

 time when he saw himself detected his heart was estranged from us." 

 Count Stanhope, who had loved him as a father, began to grow cool 

 toward him and to mistrust him. After having dreamed of the most 

 brilliant career for him, his illusions dispelled, he had no better thought 

 for him than to find him employment with some large stable. Merker 

 inferred from these facts that the miraculous child, seeing his high 

 hopes failing and uneasy about his future, had felt the necessity of 

 bringing back his benefactors, and of fortifying their wavering faith 

 by a new comedy ; that he had invoked the phantom of the black 

 man, in which Count Stanhope did not more than half believe, for the 

 second time ; that the assassin of Caspar Hauser was Caspar himself ; 

 that he had struck himself with the dagger, but had struck too hard ; 

 that he was the victim of his own maladroitness, and that his death 

 was an involuntary suicide. 



The idle populace reasoned very differently from the suspicious and 

 sagacious police counselor. They believed more than ever in the black 

 man, and in the noble origin of Caspar Hauser. They had made him 

 by turns the son of a village curate, or of a canon, or bishop, or baron, 

 or count, or Hungarian magnate. They now held it for certain that 

 he was born in a palace, that his mother had reigned somewhere, and 

 that faithless collaterals had seized the heritage of the child of Europe. 

 Suspicion shortly fastened upon the house of Baden, and the bell was 

 so well fixed to it that it tinkles even yet at the slightest breath of 

 gossip that blows over Carlsruhe. 



The Margrave Charles Frederick, who became grand-duke in 1806, 

 was married twice. After the death of the Princess Caroline, of Hesse- 

 Darmstadt, he concluded a morganatic union with Madame Ilochberg, 

 countess of the empire, who was born Geyer von Geyerbcrg. His 

 successor was his grandson Charles, who married Stephanie Louise 

 Adiienne de Beaubarnais, a lady who had been brought up by the 

 Emperor Napoleon, with the rank of a princess of France. She had 

 five children, of whom two sons died, one a few days, the other a few 

 months, after birth. The former, born on the 29th of September, 1812, 

 died on the lGth of October of the same year ; the second lived from 



