Florida Exile

A PRINCE IN THEIR MIDST (275 pp.)--A. J. Hanna--University of Oklahoma ($3).

One of the sights of Florida in 1824, in the days when Florida's sights were pretty well confined to flora & fauna, was the new owner of a 1,2OO-acre plantation known as Parthenope, near St. Augustine. The bachelor proprietor was 23, and had a nervous, knowing, extraordinary manner.

He spoke Italian, Spanish, German and French as well as English. When he was not reading Blackstone or walking in his orange grove, he was likely to be sitting, in a specially constructed chair, neck-deep in the waters of the Matanzas River, considering the landscape and the past. "I get up at sunrise. I give the orders of the day to my overseer and make the rounds of my lands. . . . Late in the afternoon I take another horseback ride. . . . Once in a fortnight I go to town to buy what I need," he wrote. "From time to time my friends come to spend two or three days with me in philosophic leisure. ... It is impossible to be more happy than I am. ... I have all that is necessary for contentment."

The stranger was Achille Murat, son of King Joachim of Naples, and nephew of Napoleon. His father had already died before a firing squad, his uncle had been banished to St. Helena, when Murat applied for U.S. citizenship, and settled in the Territory of Florida. He drank steadily until his death at 46, speculated heavily, sired a number of mulatto Murats, married a great-grandniece of George Washington. Usually embarrassed for funds, he was once arrested on a charge of cattle stealing. But he was also sober citizen enough to be admitted to the Florida bar and to dabble in Florida politics.

Moreover, he wrote about U.S. life as sympathetically as Alexis de Tocqueville, and despite his foreign habits and ideas, made a profound impression on young Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson met him by chance in a St. Augustine boarding house one winter, described him as "an ardent lover of truth," a "scholar," a "noble" soul.

Biographer A. J. Hanna, professor of history at Rollins College, is handicapped by generally skimpy sources, but gives tantalizing glimpses of an ex-Crown Prince wearing homespun, of tea served in a log house with Napoleonic gold spoons and damask napkins bearing the royal Neapolitan crest.

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