process, still in existence, demonstrate the guilt of the La Mottes
and their accomplices at every step, and prove the stainless character
of the Queen.

La Motte could not be caught. He had fled to Edinburgh, where he lived
with an aged Italian teacher of languages. This worthy man offered to
sell him for 10,000_l._, and a pretty plot was arranged by the French
ambassador to drug La Motte, put him on board a collier at South
Shields and carry him to France. But the old Italian lost heart, and,
after getting 1,000_l._ out of the French Government in advance,
deemed it more prudent to share the money with the Count. Perhaps the
Count invented the whole stratagem; it was worthy of the husband and
pupil of Jeanne de Valois. That poor lady's cause was lost when
Villette and Gay d'Oliva were brought back across the frontier,
confessed, and corroborated each other's stories. Yet she made a
wonderfully good fight, changing her whole defence into another as
plausible and futile, before the very eyes of the Court, and doing her
best to ruin Rohan as a thief, and Cagliostro as the forger of the
Queen's guarantee. The bold Neapolitan was acquitted, but compelled to
leave the country, and attempt England, where the phlegmatic islanders
trusted him no more than they trusted Madame Humbert. We expended our
main capital of credulity on Titus Oates and Bedloe, and the
warming-pan lie--our imaginative innocence being most accessible in
the region of religion. The French are more open to the appeal of
romance, and to dissolute honesty in the person of Miss Gay d'Oliva,
to injured innocence as represented by Jeanne de Valois. That class of
rogues suits a gay people, while we are well mated with such a
seductive divine as Dr. Oates.

VI

_THE MYSTERY OF KASPAR HAUSER: THE CHILD OF EUROPE_

The story of Kaspar Hauser, a boy, apparently idiotic, who appeared,
as if from the clouds, in Nuremberg (1828), divided Germany into
hostile parties, and caused legal proceedings as late as 1883. Whence
this lad came, and what his previous adventures had been, has never
been ascertained. His death by a dagger-wound, in 1833--whether
inflicted by his own hand or that of another--deepened the mystery.
According to one view, the boy was only a waif and an impostor, who
had strayed from some peasant home, where nobody desired his return.
According to the other theory, he was the Crown Prince of Baden,
stolen as an infant in the interests of a