Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/766

742 Schoolmaster Meyer represented him as a man of robust body, ready with his hands, and of a more pliant mind than was generally thought, divining quickly enough with whom he was dealing, and governing his face and language accordingly. He came to Nuremberg without any other intention than to become a light cavalry man. He found people disposed to believe that he was a hero of romance and the victim of a dark conspiracy. He entered into their idea, and invented the childish story of the dungeon. People regarded him as simple-minded, and spoke freely before him. He took advantage of all that he heard, and was what they wanted him to be. The relative facility with which he played his part may be explained still more easily if we suppose, with Merker, that he had escaped from a traveling circus, where he had gained some knowledge of the art of riding horseback, and had learned to compose his face for the diversion of the idlers in the interludes. It is said that in the last months of his life he had conceived a project of making the tour of Europe, going from city to city, and making a show of himself. Such a way of getting a living suited him much better than the employment which Count Stanhope proposed. The natural man appeared again, and prevailed over the studied part.

The honest people who allowed themselves to be taken in by the story of the dungeon were never willing to give it up. To them it was as the last word of the gospel. It is hard to recant, and acknowledge that one has been duped. "We have seen in Paris a mathematician of eminent merit holding as authentic letters in which Pascal taught attraction previous to Newton, and continuing to believe in those letters when no one else believed in them. We have seen in Prussia an illustrious Egyptologist recommending to the Academy of Sciences, as a work of incalculable value, a Greek manuscript fabricated by a forger, in which he found confirmation of some of his boldest conjectures; and it cost much trouble to make him acknowledge his error. The eminent criminalist, Anselm Feuerbach, who joined to a warm spirit and vivid imagination a taste for subtile ratiocinations and the art of deciphering the secrets of hearts, could not decipher Caspar Hauser. From the first day he regarded him as a miracle, and, having said it once, it was of no use to try to make him unsay it. "This dear foundling," he wrote to a friend in 1830, "has been for years the principal object of my studies, researches, and cares. An inhabitant of Saturn, falling during the night into the imperial city of Nuremberg, would not be enveloped in more mystery." He finally decided that Caspar Hauser was a Badenese prince, and till his death he was, with King Louis, the most zealous champion of the legend.

On the other side, physiologists and moralists, convinced that a young man who had passed sixteen years in the solitude of a dungeon might furnish valuable lessons respecting the primordial laws of human nature, studied him with devoted attention. Some thought that they could discover in him all the signs of the "animal man," and