"The Pretender Charles Edward resided here three years in a house which is still pointed out." So you may read in "Murray," under the head of "Bar-le-Duc." The information, which is apt to suggest inquiry to those who, like myself, are fond of picking up a little bit of neglected history on their travels, is, as it happens, not altogether accurate. For, in the first place, the "Pretender" who "resided" at Bar was not "Charles Edward" at all--_could_ not have been "Charles Edward," who was not born till five years after the Pretender who _did_ reside there had left. In the second, so little is "the house still pointed out" that, on my first visit to Bar, in August, 1890, I could actually not find a soul to give me even the vaguest information as to its whereabouts. Even mine hostess of the "Cygne," in whose stables, I afterwards discovered, some of the Pretender's horses had been put up, had never heard of our political exile. "_Cela doit être dans la Haute Ville_"--"_Cela doit être dans la Basse Ville_"--"_Eh bien, moi je n'en sais rien_." Why should they know about the Pretender? There were no thanks, surely, due to him. While in the town, he had given himself intolerable airs, had put the town to no end of expense and all manner of trouble, and in the end had slunk away without so much as a word of thanks or farewell, leaving a heavy score of debts to be paid--and, up in a cottage perched on the very brow of the picturesque hill--for which some one else had to pay the rent--one pretty little Barisienne disconsolate, betrayed, disgraced. There was, in fact, but one man belonging to the town who had taken the trouble to trace the house from the description given in the local archives--a description, indeed, exact enough--M. Vladimir Konarski, and he was away on his holiday. There was nothing, then, for me to do, but to go home with an empty note-book, _quoad_ Bar, and return in 1891 to resume my inquiry. Even to us Englishmen the first Pretender is not a particularly attractive personage. But he is a historical character. And about his doings at Bar thus far very little has been made known. With the help of M. Konarski's notes, of the local archives, freely placed at my disposal by the kindness of M. A. Jacob, of the manuscripts in the _Archives Nationales_, in the Archives of Nancy and in the Foreign Office at Paris, of the Stuart MSS. in London, and of other neglected sources of information, as well as some rather minute local research, I have managed to gather together sufficient historical crumbs to make up a fairly substantial loaf--all the information on the subject, I suppose, that is to be got. And, at any rate, as a secondary side-chapter to our national history at an important epoch, perhaps the account which within the limits of a magazine article I shall be able to give, may prove of passing interest to more besides those staunch surviving Jacobites who still from time to time "play at treason" in out-of-the-way places.