descriptions. He became incoherent, and died.
There was snow lying, when Kaspar was stabbed, but there were no
footmarks near the well, and elsewhere, only one man's track was in
the Hofgarten. Was that track Kaspar's? We are not told. No knife was
found. Kaspar was left-handed, and Dr. Horlacher declared that the
blow must have been dealt by a left-handed man. Lord Stanhope
suggested that Kaspar himself had inflicted the wound by pressure, and
that, after he had squeezed the point of the knife through his wadded
coat, it had penetrated much deeper than he had intended, a very
probable hypothesis.
As for the bag which the assassin gave him, it was found, and Dr.
Meyer said that it was very like a bag which he had seen in Kaspar's
possession. It contained a note, folded, said Madame Meyer, as Kaspar
folded his own notes. The writing was in pencil, in _Spiegelschrift_,
that is, it had to be read in a mirror. Kaspar, on his deathbed, kept
muttering incoherences about 'what is written with lead, no one can
read.' The note contained vague phrases about coming from the Bavarian
frontier.
After Kaspar's death, the question of 'murder or suicide?' agitated
Germany, and gave birth to a long succession of pamphlets. A wild
woman, Countess Albersdorf ('_nee_ Lady Graham,' says Miss Evans, who
later calls her 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf'), saw visions, dreamed
dreams, and published nonsense. Other pamphlets came out, directed
against the House of Baden. In 1870 an anonymous French pamphleteer
offered the Baden romance, as from the papers of a Major von
Hennenhofer, the villain in chief of the White Lady plot. Lord
Stanhope was named as the ringleader in the attacks on Kaspar, both at
Nuremberg and Anspach. In 1883 all the fables were revived in a
pamphlet produced at Ratisbon, a mere hash of the libels of 1834,
1839, 1840, and 1870. Dr. Meyer was especially attacked, his sons
defended his reputation by an action for libel on the dead, an action
which German law permits. There was no defence, and the publisher was
fined, and ordered to destroy all the copies. In 1892 the libels were
repeated, by 'Baron Alexander von Artin:' two documents of a palpably
fraudulent character were added, the rest was the old stuff. The
reader may find it in Miss Evans's _Kaspar Hauser_ (1892). For
example, Daumer knew a great deal. He even, in 1833, received an
anonymous letter from Anspach, containing the following statement:
'Lord Daniel Alban Durteal, advocate of the Royal Court in London,
said to me, "I am firmly convinced that Kaspar Hauser was murdered. It
was all done by bribery. Stanhope has no money, and lives by this
affair."' Daumer and Miss Evans appear to have seen nothing odd in
relying on an anonymous letter about Lord Daniel Alban Durteal!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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