Читать книгу The Uncrowned King - Baroness Emmuska Orczy - Страница 3

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I have often wondered if I should live to see the time when I could relate this story of an uncrowned King of France without wounding the susceptibilities of those whose families were involved in the various phases of the amazing drama. Details of the story came to me in a curious way and for years I was under a promise not to publish what had been revealed to me, and now that I am free to do it, I wonder if the story will be believed. There will be many, I know, who will doubt it, and I am ready to admit that some of the happenings are so strange and so fantastic that they seem to belong to the realm of fiction rather than that of history.

But let me tell you how those happenings came to be known to me. On our last visit to Hungary, some time before the war, my husband and I spent a few days in Vienna in the house of a relative, an old uncle whose age was anything between eighty and a hundred; he was a dignified, courtly old man, who in his day had been an important personage in the entourage of the Emperor Francis Joseph. He had reached his anecdotage without impairing his memory and his sense of humour, and many were the stories both grave and gay with which he entertained us, stories of the brilliant and tragic court of pre-war Vienna, of persons and events, of the beautiful Elisabeth, of Napoleon and Eugénie, of Bismarck and Palmerston, of young Disraeli as he was then, of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. He had known them all, not only officially, but intimately.

The subject, however, which engrossed him most and on which he could talk by the hour, was that of the Bourbon cause in France. Royalist to the soul, he had, even as a young student, been passionately interested in the mystery which, to this day, has surrounded the personality of the little Dauphin, son of the martyred King Louis XVI and the equally tragic Queen Marie Antoinette. My old uncle was one of those who were convinced that the child did not die in the Temple prison, as the revolutionary government had declared, but that he was rescued through an agency that has remained anonymous and conveyed to Austria, where he lived for years, and subsequently married and had a son. It was about this son that the old man loved to speak.

“The rightful King of France, my dear,” he would declare emphatically, “there’s no getting away from it. If he had been a different type of man, he would have been crowned at Rheims, and the whole destiny of Europe would have been mapped out differently.”

I liked to draw him out, for the subject was an engrossing one. “There is no more tragic figure in the history of the world,” the old man would say in his cultured well-modulated voice, “than that of the Dauphin, this child born and nurtured amidst the pageants and luxuries of Versailles, idolised and petted until the age of five, then torn from the embrace of his parents and his kindred, martyred and buffeted under the domination of rough and cruel warders, tools of the revolutionary government, who desired his death, connived at it, even though they did not actually murder him, asserted that the boy was dead, even though they knew perfectly well that he had been rescued from prison and taken to Austria. This last fact is too well known now to need emphasising: it has been admitted on almost every side. His own family knew it: his sister, the Duchesse d’Angoulême, confessed to her knowledge of it on her death-bed. The two Bourbon Kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X, were well aware of the fact that their nephew was alive—their nephew who was the only legitimate King of France; nevertheless, they usurped the throne which was rightfully his, and he was classed by his own kindred in the same category as the batch of adventurers who sprang up like mushrooms at the time, all claiming to be the Dauphin rescued from the Temple prison.”

He paused a moment, leaning back in his chair, his tired old eyes seeming to gaze into a dim and romantic past.

“My Emperor,” he said after a few moments’ silence, “had proof positive of the rescue. He knew, none better, that the only rightful King of France had lived for years the life of a recluse in the beautiful mountain district of Carinthia, that he subsequently married and had a son. To this son the Emperor Francis Joseph always referred as Louis XIX, King of France, until——”

“Until what?” I insisted, for the old man had paused once more, his thin, firm lips tightly closed as if to guard a secret that had very nearly escaped them. Aware of my eagerness, flattered perhaps by the earnestness with which I listened to him, he took my hand and patted it.

“It is all written down,” he said.

“By whom?” I queried at once.

“By Cardinal Beneventy. You remember him?”

I certainly did; as a child I had seen the cardinal, for he was a friend of all my family. He died in the middle ’eighties at a very advanced age.

“He kept a diary. Made notes,” the uncle went on; “when he died, he bequeathed all his papers to me. You shall read them some day.”

“Why not now?” I begged.

He shook his head.

“Not till after I’ve gone,” he said, “then you shall have them. But,” he added solemnly, “not unless you give me your word of honour that you will not publish their contents till twenty years after my death. I know what you fiction writers are—any game is good enough to fall to your gun. But there are men and women alive to-day, friends of mine, who were involved in the tragedy of King Louis XIX. They would resent it, if secrets were disclosed that were never meant for publicity. So you must give me your solemn promise, my dear, or His Eminence’s diary shall be buried with me in my coffin.”

I gave the required promise. This was in 1912. The following year I received a registered packet from a firm of solicitors in Vienna. With it came a letter telling me that the old uncle was dead. The packet contained a bundle of papers carefully held together by a purple ribbon and half a dozen seals. There was also a letter, a few affectionate lines written to me by the old man less than a week before he died. Below his signature there was a postscript: “If you break your promise, my ghost will haunt you, and ill-luck will dog your future career.”

Funny old man, wasn’t he? I kept my promise, of course, and kept it so rigidly that I never broke those seals until the twenty years had gone by. This was last year. The papers were as the old uncle had said, portions of a diary kept by His Eminence Cardinal Archbishop Beneventy, together with a few letters and some loose notes and memoranda set down by him at different times, but chiefly round about 1860. The first cursory glance revealed these to me as documents of extraordinary interest. A series of events had here been put on record by a man of unimpeachable integrity, and though I admit that the whole story sounds like romantic fiction, I don’t see how it is possible to doubt its truth. His Eminence was not the type of man who would, for a moment, give credence to hearsay. He was Cardinal Archbishop of Esztergom and was at one time Papal Legate in Berlin, in Vienna and in Paris. Thus he was mixed up in all the political intrigues of the day: he had, as it were, his delicate fingers on the pulse of every actor who took part in the drama which had its beginning in the rescue from the Temple prison of the Dauphin, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The letters and the notes were yellow with age, the writing difficult to decipher. It took me days of patient sorting, of reading and re-reading and piecing together the fragments of the diary, before I was able to bring order into chaos. In his notes His Eminence speaks at great length of the rescue of the Dauphin by the mysterious stranger who brought him to the Benedictine monastery of Gmünd in Carinthia where he lived and ended his days. His Eminence was only a child at the time, but the event made a very deep impression on his mind, an impression which he subsequently jotted down in his diary. It is from these fragments that I constructed the first part of my narrative. From the moment that he was old enough to understand what he had witnessed on that memorable occasion, the Cardinal Archbishop kept in close touch with Louis XVII, the son of the martyred King, and rightful King of France, and through his memoranda and certain letters I was able to trace various events in “His Majesty’s” life: his marriage to the Spanish lady and the birth of his son. Other events are historically unimportant.

It is what happened subsequently, after the death of Louis XVII, that is so amazingly interesting. I was able, through various entries in His Eminence’s diary, to follow the drama step by step and I have taken the liberty of forming from these fragments a coherent story—the life story not of the rescued Dauphin himself, for that was uneventful, but that of his son, known to a narrow but intensely loyal circle of royalists as Louis XIX.

I must here renew my profession of faith in the absolute truth of that story from beginning to end. The foundation of it rests on the testimony of a distinguished statesman, and of a cleric of the highest possible standing. All I have done was to alter some of the names and to add a few unimportant details. The diary and His Eminence’s letters are, of course, in Hungarian, but Hungarian is a very lissom language and I had no difficulty in translating some of the extracts verbatim. Others I have used as the basis for the development of the story, because in several instances they are too full of irrelevant matter to bear quoting in extenso. Both in the diary and in the letters I found vivid pen portraits of the uncrowned King of France, of his half-brother, and of their Spanish mother, Madame la Princesse de Bourbon; and I need not insist on the identity of the distinguished statesman and diplomatist, thinly veiled under the pseudonym of Count Friesen.

I wish I could also have retained some of the Cardinal’s mordant comments on the people with whom he came in contact, mostly people of high repute in the political and artistic world, and some of august rank. But as in many instances, near relatives of such personages are still alive to-day, I have omitted all passages which might give offence.