Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur OrtonAnonymous
History
Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton
Anonymous
Impostors and imposture -- Biography
Meantime Madame Jacquieres had not been idle, and was ready to fulfil
her promise to send a messenger to the Duchess d'Angouleme. Her chosen
emissary was a Norman gentleman named Jacques Charles de Foulques, an
ardent Bourbonist and a lieutenant-colonel in the army. This officer
was both brave and suave, and seemed in every respect a fitting person
to act as an ambassador to the Tuileries. He was deeply religious,
very conscientious, and extremely simple. His mental capacity had been
accurately gauged by Bruneau and his associates, and care was taken to
excite his religious enthusiasm. The Abbe Matouillet plainly told him
that Heaven smiled upon the cause, and introduced him to the prince,
who administered the oath of allegiance, which the credulous Norman is
said to have signed with the seal of his lips on a volume that looked
like a book of _gaillard_ songs, but which the simple soldier mistook
for the Gospels. After several audiences, his mission was pointed out,
and Colonel de Foulques, without hesitation, agreed to proceed to
Paris, and there to place in the hands of the daughter of Louis XVI. a
copy of the "Memoirs of Charles of Navarre," and a letter from her
reputed brother.
The latter document was produced in the court at Rouen when Bruneau
was afterwards placed at the bar, and is a very curious production. In
it the maker of clogs thus addresses "Madame Royale:"--
"I am aware, my dear sister, a secret presentiment has long possessed
you that the finger of God was about to point out to you your brother,
that innocent partaker of your sorrows, the one alone worthy to repair
them, as he was fated to share them.
"I know, also, that you were surrounded by snares, and that they who
extend them for you are men of wicked ways. They believe they have
destroyed the germs of some virtues, as they succeeded in arresting
the progress of my education; but there remain to me uprightness of
principle, courage, a tendency to good, and the desire of preserving
the glory of my nation. Louis XIV. could boast of no more.
"I know that I have been pictured to you as one who has forgotten his
dignity, and who is the slave of a love for wine. Alas! that beverage
that was forced upon me in my tenderest youth, by the ferocious
Simon, has served to fortify my constitution in the course of a most
painful life, even as it did that of the great Henry IV.; and, if I
have been addicted to the use of it in this place, it was for my
health's sake, to preserve which a more refined method would not have
so well suited me.
"The use of tobacco was recommended to me in 1797, at Baltimore, also
on account of my health. I have profited by it. It has occasionally
served to dissipate my sense of weariness, and the thin vapour has
often caused me to forget that life might be breathed away from my
lips almost as readily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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