Some forty candidates for his honours were forthcoming under the
Restoration. The most important of these pretenders were Karl Wilhelm
Naundorff and the comte de Richemont. Naundorff's story rested on a
series of complicated intrigues. According to him Barras determined to
save the dauphin in order to please Joséphine Beauharnais, the future
empress, having conceived the idea of using the dauphin's existence as a
means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration.
The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden
figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the
consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure by a deaf
mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death
certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not
the dead child, but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin,
whence he was extracted by his friends on the way to the cemetery.
Richemont's tale that the woman Simon, who was genuinely attached to
him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does
not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with
the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being
deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely. A
third pretender, Eleazar Williams, did not affect to know anything of
his escape. He possessed, he said, no consciousness of his early years,
only emerging from idiocy at the age of thirteen, when he was living
with an Indian family in New York State. He was a missionary to the
Indians when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis Philippe, met him,
and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his
rights in favour of Louis Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin
(alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which
was his. This Eleazar refused to do. The wildness of this tale refutes
itself.
Richemont (Henri Ethelbert Louis Victor Hébert) was in prison in Milan
for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In
1833 he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year
and was condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped after a few
months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleize on the
10th of August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed
on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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