Historical Mysteries

32

Narrative of Frances Shaftoe. Printed 1707.

33

Boyer, Reign of Queen Anne.

34

Article, 'Oglethorpe (Sir Theophilus).'

35

Carte MSS.

36

Macpherson, Hanoverian Papers.

37

Carte MSS. In the Bodleian.

38

Gualterio MSS. Add. MSS. British Museum.

39

Wolff, Odd Bits of History (1844), pp. 1-58.

40

The facts are taken from Ailesbury's, de Luynes', Dangeau's, and d'Argenson's Memoirs; from Boyer's History, and other printed books, and from the Newcastle, Hearne, Carte, and Gualterio MSS. in the Bodleian and the British Museum.

41

The most recent work on d'Éon, Le Chevalier d'Éon, par Octave Homberg and Fernand Jousselin (Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1904), is rather disappointing. The authors aver that at a recent sale they picked up many MSS. of d'Éon 'which had lain for more than a century in the back shop of an English bookseller.' No other reference as to authenticity is given, and some letters to d'Éon of supreme importance are casually cited, but are not printed. On the other hand, we have many new letters for the later period of the life of the hero. The best modern accounts are that by the Duc de Broglie, who used the French State archives and his own family papers in Le Secret du Roi (Paris, 1888), and The Strange Career of the Chevalier d'Éon (1885), by Captain J. Buchan Telfer, R.N. (Longmans, 1885), a book now out of print. The author was industrious, but not invariably happy in his translations of French originals. D'Éon himself drew up various accounts of his adventures, some of which he published. They are oddly careless in the essential matter of dates, but contain many astounding genuine documents, which lend a sort of 'doubtsome trust' to others, hardly more incredible, which cannot be verified, and are supposed by the Duc de Broglie to be 'interpolations.' Captain Buchan Telfer is less sceptical. The doubtfulness, to put it mildly, of some papers, and the pretty obvious interpolations in others, deepen the obscurity.

42

Le Chevalier d'Éon, p. 18.

43

Broglie, Secret du Roi, ii. 51, note.

44

Political Register, Sept. 1767; Buchan Telfer, p. 181.

45

One of these gives Madame de Vieux-Maison as the author of a roman à clef, Secret Memoirs of the Court of Persia, which contains an early reference to the Man in the Iron Mask (died 1703). The letter-writer avers that D'Argenson, the famous minister of Louis XV., said that the Man in the Iron Mask was really a person fort peu de chose, 'of very little account,' and that the Regent d'Orléans was of the same opinion. This corroborates my theory, that the Mask was merely the valet of a Huguenot conspirator, Roux de Marsilly, captured in England, and imprisoned because he was supposed to know some terrible secret – which he knew nothing about. See The Valet's Tragedy, Longmans, 1903.

46

Voyage en Angleterre, 1770.

47

The Duc de Broglie, I am privately informed, could find no clue to the mystery of Saint-Germain.

48

An Englishman in Paris, vol. i. pp. 130-133. London 1892.