Note 21 — V.—CHARMS, SPELLS, AMULETS AND DIVINATIONS.
Reading edition
While these pages are passing through the press I come across the following paragraph in the Paris correspondence of a leading London Journal. The rumour it gives may be entirely untrue, but I quote it as a specimen of ordinary newspaper gossip in 1875 on the subject under notice:—“It is now known that the Napoleonic talisman is safe; and, so long as that talisman remains in the Bonapartist family, the tradition is that, however much the eagle’s wings may be clipped, the imperial bird will soar at last. On the afternoon of September 4, 1870, as the Empress Eugenie was flying from her apartments to the dentist’s cab which was to take her out of Paris, she pointed to several large boxes containing important papers, and to a small but extremely heavy metal casket, and said to M. Thelen, one of the few faithful servants that remained with her to the last—‘Save those papers, but above all save that casket, and preserve it as you would your own soul.’ In that mysterious casket, doubly and trebly locked, the Napoleonic talisman lay. M. Thelen had the boxes and casket thus confided to him transferred with all possible speed to the house of his sister in one of the quietest suburbs of Paris. But the September 4 Government soon got wind of the affair, and their emissaries were not long before making a descent at the house of M. Thelen’s sister. They found and carried off the papers, but the casket containing the talisman escaped them. It had been concealed in a hole in the wall behind a small map representing the seat of war. In due time the talisman was conveyed to Chiselhurst, where it now is; and so long as it remains in the keeping of the Imperial family, it will be safe to bet on the restoration of Napoleon IV. As the curious reader would, perhaps, like to know in what the talisman consists, I may inform him that it is a large sapphire which Napoleon I. cribbed from the crown of Charlemagne when he took the indecent liberty of having that monarch’s coffin opened up at Aix-la-Chapelle.” ↑