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THE MYSTERY OF THE LOST DAUPHIN

(Louis XVII)

by

EMILIA PARDO BAZAN

Translated from the Spanish by Annabel Hord Seeger

Frontispiece Illustration by Raphael Bode







Funk & Wagnalls Company
New York and London
1906




[Illustration: "When the world salutes me King, I will admit I am your
brother."]




EMILIA PARDO BAZAN


While Provencal literature blossomed in chivalric splendor along the
northern shore of the Mediterranean and rare pastoral music in madrigals
and roundelays rang through France and Italy, there sounded from the
sea-girt province of Galicia wonderful songs which rivalled the sweetest
strains of the troubadours, making kings to weep and warriors to smile,
thrilling, by their wit and pathos and lyrical beauty, the brilliant
courts of Castile and Leon.

It is an ethnographical phenomenon that, in Great Britain, France and
Spain, the Celt has been pushed to the northwest. Galicia corresponds in
position to Brittany and her people are characterized by the powerful
imagination, infinite delicacy, concentration of feeling and devotion to
nature which are the salient attributes of Gaelic and Cymric genius.

The Modern Literary Renaissance of Galicia, a superb outburst of
Gallegan exuberance, has a noble and eloquent exponent in Emilia Pardo
Bazan, gifted child of this poetic soil.

Senora Pardo Bazan has been called the creator and protagonist of
Spanish Realism. It has been claimed that she bears to Spain such a
relation as Turgenieff to Russia and Zola to France. She herself says
somewhere that she is skeptical regarding the existence of Realistic,
Idealistic and Romantic writers, averring, in her trenchant style, that
authors constitute but two classes, _good_ and _poor_. "Certain critics
would affirm," she remarks, "that, as simple as the cleaving in twain of
an orange is the operation of separating writers into Realistic and
Idealistic camps."

One biographer claims that our author sacrifices sex to art and that the
result warrants the sacrifice. I would insist that 'tis a lady's hand
wielding the mailed gauntlet and that reading Pardo Bazan helps one to
understand why Great Brahm is described as partaking of the feminine
principle.

Castelar has remarked that: "In Belles Lettres we have the illustrious
Celt, Emilia Pardo Bazan, whom, living, we count among the immortals,
and whose works, though of yesterday, are already denominated Spanish
classics." Garcia, in his History of Spanish Literature, calls her the
Spanish de Stael. Rollo Ogden writes: "No masculine pen promises more
than that of Pardo Bazan. Her equipment is admirable; it is based on
exhaustive historical and philosophical studies, from which she passed
on to the novel. In this transition does she resemble George Eliot,
whom, however, she surpasses in many respects."

G. Cunninghame Graham remarks: "We have not in England, no, nor in
Europe, so illustrious a woman in letters as Pardo Bazan." Goran
Bjorkman declares that "Among Spanish writers, Pardo Bazan most resemble
Turgenieff, excelling him, however, in the sane gayety of her
temperament."

Senora Pardo Bazan is descended from a noble and illustrious family, in
whose genealogy Victor Hugo sought the characters of his Ruy Blas. An
only daughter, her childhood was passed amid her father's extensive
library. When scarcely sixteen she was married to the scholarly
gentleman, Don Jose Quiroga. Several subsequent years were occupied in
European travels and study, at the conclusion of which she consecrated
herself to the literary labors which have yielded so rich a harvest. To
enumerate these masterpieces of contemporaneous Spanish letters would be
superfluous. They have been translated into every European tongue.

Dona Emilia, as she is affectionately called by the Spanish people,
passes her winters in Madrid, her salon being the rendezvous of the
literary, political and diplomatic world. The author smacks not of the
bas bleu; she is a simple woman in the truest sense of the word, and a
regal grande dame as well.

Annabel Hord Seeger.




A GREAT GRANDSON OF LOUIS XVI


Over one hundred and thirteen years ago, in Paris, at ten in the morning
of the twenty-first day of January, seventeen