No one was permitted to see the child who was put into that obscure grave; and many circumstances give rise to a suspicion that the boy, who might have been a source of political embarrassment in the rehabilitation of France, was disposed of in another way--dropped into an obscurity which would serve as well as death.
There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution.

We are far from saying that such a thing happened.

But ambitious royalists might have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the murdered king from the scene.

The claim of the American dauphin, Eleazer Williams, may have been fanciful, or even false; but what safer and more effectual plan could be devised than to drop the half-imbecile heir to a throne into the heart of a tribe of Indians in an American wilderness?
When Louis XVIII.

occupied his brother's throne, in 1814, and erected over the dishonored graves of his family that beautiful Chapelle Expiatoire, he also gave orders for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of his murdered kindred, whom he designated by name: Louis XVI., king; Marie Antoinette, queen, and the Princess Elizabeth, his sister.