native kindness
underneath his coarse rough exterior, we do not know, but be this as it
may, Simon evidently gave only such measure of cruelty to his charge as
was insisted on by those who employed him, and it was doubtless, they
who forced Simon to do what he did to destroy the child's mental and
bodily faculties. Louis was made to share their political opinions, to
imitate their coarse manners and even to sing their revolutionary
songs, while in place of the mourning he had worn for his father, he
now wore the coarsest garments and the red cap of the Jacobins, and was
often made to drink and eat far more than was good for him, until at
last he was in a condition of body and mind such as his tormentors
desired, when he could be made a tool to suit their own ends, because
of his weakened and abnormal condition.

No page of history is written in so black an ink nor with so many blots
as that on which is recorded the imprisonment and torture of little
Louis Seventeenth, the King who never reigned, and no page of history
offers a more bewildering puzzle for solution, from the moment of his
being taken from his mother's care--a puzzle to which there have been
more answers, and about which as much mystery hangs, as about any other
incident on the pages of history, and no page has been oftener read and
re-read than this which offers for solution the problem of the ending
of this little King who never reigned.

We see him last as a prisoner; thin, haggard, sick unto death, with no
sparkle in his lustreless eyes, no motion in his swollen joints, no
pretty retort on his lips as of old, and with a sigh we turn from the
ghastly sight to the pages of French history where we again read in
detail the accounts of his life and death, and then it is for us to
decide upon our answer to this riddle which offers more than one
solution.

Louis Seventeenth of France, in his ninth year, was imprisoned by the
revolutionists and subjected to every kind of torture that a human
being could be made to suffer. As a result of that treatment, and of
loneliness and cruelty, did he pine and sicken and die a natural death
as some accounts say?

Did he, as some say, deliberately resist all the attempts made by his
persecutors to enter into conversation with him, by maintaining a
complete silence of fifteen months; or had a dumb child been put in his
place by friends who had secretly rescued the real little king from his
prison, and hidden him in a g