CHAPTER XJOTTINGS FROM THE JOURNAL

April 12, 1914. Well, we've found out all about that dauphin, and an exhausting piece of work it was. I never waded through so much history before in all my life. If the Imp hadn't given us that hint, though, it would have been far worse, for we wouldn't have had the least idea where to begin.

We went to the library this morning and spent till lunch-time there, and then went back again this afternoon. As it was the Easter holidays, we fortunately had all the time to spend on it that we wanted. But I must tell all about what we've discovered. Some of it is very, very confusing. We can't understand what it can possibly have to do with Louis, and yet there are things about it that make us sure that it somehow has _something_ to do with him.

To begin with, there isn't a shadow of doubt that this portrait is of the dauphin who was the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, king and queen of France around the time of the French Revolution. They seemed to be having a pretty mixed up and bloody time in France just about that period, and everybody had it in for the royal family and all the nobility. The common people somehow got control of things, and first they put the king and queen and dauphin and his sister in prison, and then they killed the king and queen. The dauphin was a little boy of six or seven at the time, and they didn't kill him, but kept him a prisoner for three years in a place called the Temple Tower, till finally he died of neglect. I think it said that he died in 1795.

It just made us wild to read about how shamefully they treated that poor little fellow. They gave him in charge of a horrible, cruel cobbler, named Simon, who beat and ill-used him abominably,--just because he happened to be the child of a king,--and then afterward they shut him up in a room by himself, where he never saw a single soul for six months, and handed him his food as they would to a dog in a kennel. At the end of that time they appeared to be a bit sorry for the way they'd acted, and let him come out into a decent room and tried to take a little better care of him. But it was too late, for he died soon afterward,--as I should think he would after standing that kind of treatment for three years.

Carol and I got so worked up over the thing that we almost cried. We felt awfully to think that a poor, innocent, little chap should be treated that way by people who were fighting for liberty and justice, as the French were. It didn't make any difference if he _was_ a king's son. He had just as much right 

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