Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/762

738 despised; and a miraculous event was learnedly explained by other events still more miraculous."

A circumstance that confirmed Merker's suspicions and skepticism was the fact that everybody who had anything to do with Caspar Hauser surprised him, at some time or another, in some flagrant lie. Madame Biberbach wrote, on the 19th of February, 1832: "How many bitter hours has this child made us pass! How many griefs and vexations has he caused us by his absolute want of truthfulness! When we catch him in the act, he pretends to repent, and promises to amend, and we begin to love him again; but the demon of falsehood has so fully taken possession of him that he is always falling back into his sin, and going deeper and deeper into his vice. From the time when he saw himself detected his heart was estranged from us." Count Stanhope, who had loved him as a father, began to grow cool toward him and to mistrust him. After having dreamed of the most brilliant career for him, his illusions dispelled, he had no better thought for him than to find him employment with some large stable. Merker inferred from these facts that the miraculous child, seeing his high hopes failing and uneasy about his future, had felt the necessity of bringing back his benefactors, and of fortifying their wavering faith by a new comedy; that he had invoked the phantom of the black man, in which Count Stanhope did not more than half believe, for the second time; that the assassin of Caspar Hauser was Caspar himself; that he had struck himself with the dagger, but had struck too hard; that he was the victim of his own maladroitness, and that his death was an involuntary suicide.

The idle populace reasoned very differently from the suspicious and sagacious police counselor. They believed more than ever in the black man, and in the noble origin of Caspar Hauser. They had made him by turns the son of a village curate, or of a canon, or bishop, or baron, or count, or Hungarian magnate. They now held it for certain that he was born in a palace, that his mother had reigned somewhere, and that faithless collaterals had seized the heritage of the child of Europe. Suspicion shortly fastened upon the house of Baden, and the bell was so well fixed to it that it tinkles even yet at the slightest breath of gossip that blows over Carlsruhe.

The Margrave Charles Frederick, who became grand-duke in 1806, was married twice. After the death of the Princess Caroline, of Hesse-Darmstadt, he concluded a morganatic union with Madame Hochberg, countess of the empire, who was born Geyer von Geyerberg. His successor was his grandson Charles, who married Stephanie Louise Adrienne de Beauharnais, a lady who had been brought up by the Emperor Napoleon, with the rank of a princess of France. She had five children, of whom two sons died, one a few days, the other a few months, after birth. The former, born on the 29th of September, 1812, died on the 16th of October of the same year; the second lived from