Dear White Knight

Foremost pretender to the French "throne" is the Duc de Guise, head of the house of Orleans, leader of the Royalist party. Like all pretenders, the Due de Guise is automatically and forever banished from the soil of the Republic. There is another pretender--"Louis XIX, head of the house of Bourbon"--whose claim has not seemed serious enough to warrant his exile but whose activities landed him last week in police court.

"Louis de Bourbon" is a portly old man of 65, blind, living outside Paris at Sannois. His sympathizers believe him to be a descendant of one Karl Wilhelm Naundorff who appeared in Berlin in 1810 announcing that he was the Dauphin. Herr Naundorff explained that he had not died in a Paris prison 15 years before as the world believed, but had escaped in the bottom of a laundry basket.

Herr Naundorff's descendant interested one old lady, a Mme Heitz, so deeply in his case that she advanced him sums aggregating $40,000, always addressed him as "My Liege Lord and Dear White Knight." In return "Louis de Bourbon" issued notes "payable in the near future" when he should have regained his rightful place as France's ruler. Last month Mme Heitz went to a medium who revealed that her King was misappropriating the funds she had lent him. Forthwith she demanded a reckoning.

At Versailles, where the case was tried, the magistrate found that "Louis de Bourbon" was sufficiently sincere, that he had not obtained the money on false pretenses, that "he had acted in perfect good faith in striving to obtain the succession to Louis XVI." Mme Heitz had to be satisfied with $400.

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