Note 9 — Chapter XXIX

The account of Kolli’s examination had in one part been palpably falsified. He was represented as saying that it was the Duke of Kent’s wish to send Ferdinand to Gibraltar; but that he would not have assisted in this plan, because it would have been in fact sending him to prison! The whole of these documents are printed in Louis Goldsmith’s Recueil de Decrets, Ordonnances, &c. t. iv. pp. 302–14; and by Llorente, in his Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de la Revolution d’Espagne, t. ii. pp. 306–342. This unworthy Spaniard expresses there a decided opinion that Kolli himself was the person who went to Valençay, as the official report stated. The Baron, however, has published his own story, and it is confirmed by the declarations of Richard and Fouché, authentically made after the restoration of the Bourbons.

One curious fact appears in the Baron de Kolli’s Memoirs. Diamonds to the amount of 200,000 francs were taken from him by the police when he was seized. After the restoration he reclaimed them. The result of his application was a royal ordonnance, in which the King decided, that the other effects belonging to the claimant should be restored to him, but that the diamonds seized at Paris are, and remain, confiscated, as having been given to the Sieur de Kolli by a government then at war with France. And his renewed applications were answered by a repetition of this ordonnance!