Word: naundorff
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...Angry Rabbit. When at last he arrived in Paris, Naundorff was a down-at-heel beggar. But he found an important champion. The lost Dauphin's old governess had come to scoff at the beggar's claims, but when she saw his prominent front teeth, the triangular vaccination on his arm and the pigeon-shaped mole of Louis Bourbon on Naundorff's thigh, she became convinced that he was the Dauphin. Naundorff even had a scar on his upper lip like that which the imprisoned Dauphin had got from the bite of an angry rabbit; the Dauphin...
...real-life claims of another pretender to the same identity were still in dispute last week. When he first arrived in Paris on May 26, 1833, he was a balding watchmaker with a thick mustache and a fringe of chin whiskers. His passport identified him as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff of Weimar, but the passport, its bearer promptly explained in almost incomprehensible French, was merely a blind; Karl Naundorff was in reality Louis, son of the guillotined Louis XVI, and the rightful King of France...
...Naundorff's own early life was as clouded in obscurity as the Dauphin's, death. In 1812, he was run out of Berlin for claiming to be King of France. He moved to Spandau and wrote Louis XVI's daughter Maria Therese a letter saying, "I am alive, your real brother. Ask me to prove it." Maria, then the Duchess of Angouleme, paid no attention, but others were more sympathetic. The mayor of Spandau believed Naundorff and took him to Brandenburg. There Naundorff was arrested for arson and jailed for counterfeiting, but two years later...
With the governess' help, Naundorff enlisted Louis XVI's last Minister of Justice and a former Lord Chamberlain on his side. Then one night in a Paris street, Naundorff was attacked and left bleeding from six knife wounds...
...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...