a king's ransom. The king died before it
was completed, and the story became current that Marie Antoinette, the
hated Austrian woman who was ruining France by her extravagance, was
negotiating for the purchase of this necklace while the people were
starving!

A network of villainy is woven about the whole incident, in which the
names of a cardinal and ladies high in rank are involved. The mystery
may never be uncovered, but every effort to connect the queen's name
with this historic scandal has failed.

Probably of all the cruelties inflicted upon this unhappy woman, none
caused her such anguish as the testimony of her son before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, that he had heard his mother say she "hated the
French people." Placed under the care of the brutal Simon after his
father's removal from the Temple, the child had become a physical and
mental wreck. The queen, in her last letter to her sister the Princess
Elizabeth, makes pitiful allusion to the incident, begging her to
remember what he must have suffered before he said this; also reminding
her how children may be taught to utter words they do not comprehend.
His lesson, no doubt, had been learned by cruel tortures; and, rendered
half imbecile, it was recited when the time came. None but his keeper
was ever permitted to see the boy. His condition, final illness, and
death are shrouded in mystery. In June, 1794, eight months after his
mother's execution, it was announced that he was dead. It would be
difficult to prove this event before a court of justice. There were no
witnesses whose testimony would have any weight. No one was permitted
to see the child who was put into that obscure grave; and many
circumstances give rise to a suspicion that the boy, who might have
been a source of political embarrassment in the rehabilitation of
France, was disposed of in another way--dropped into an obscurity which
would serve as well as death.

There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution. We are far
from saying that such a thing happened. But ambitious royalists might
have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the
murdered king from the scene. The claim of the American dauphin,
Eleazer Williams, may have been fanciful, or even false; but what safer
and more effectual plan could be devised than to drop the half-imbecile
heir to a throne into the heart of a tribe of Indians in an American
wilderness?

When Louis XVIII. occupied his