ANOTHER NAPOLEONIC ROMANCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2401, 8 March 1900, Page 59

ANOTHER NAPOLEONIC ROMANCE.

In the early spring of last year a young man arrived at the Villa Perigord on A visit to the Duchess of Talleyrand, better known by the Parisians as the Princess de Sagan. He was of middle height, and his eyes, which seemed veiled by very long lashes ; were sad, almost sympathetic. The Duchess was so very kind — not to say tender — to him that her friends, nho have been accustomed to her eccentric frivolity and caprices,- were almost inclined to feel scandalised ; but a little closer attention on their part would have shown them that a touching motherly love was the only feeling that the gay Princess had bestowed upon her young guest. She took hyn "n ith her to her Villa Persane, at Trouvilie, and it was there that a little family drama took place which betrayed to the other guests who Emmanuel de S. really was.

Among the ladies who graced with their presence the Villa Persane was a certain damsel of 30 summers or more, exceedingly pretty, winsome, a flirt, who at once fixed her mind upon the mysterious young man, about whom she resolved to know more. And she succeeded so well that Emmanuel de S. fell deeply in love with her, and announced one day to the Princess his intention of marrying the lovely Clemence.

" You know that a marriage with a mere nobody is not allowed to you, Emmanuel," said the Princess .sternly. " Your grandmother has entrusted you to me, and she will never forgive me if an unsuitable marriage -were to take i>lace under my roof. Clemence is not for you. She must go today."

The young man turned achy pale, and, in a voice which, was half a groan, half a de-

fiance, began to curse the people who could never leave him alone. On which Madame de Sagan quickly put her beautiful hand, covered with pearls and diamonds, over the dark moustache of the young rebel.

An hour later Mdlle. Clemence was en route for Paris, and Emmanuel de S. was casting sad looks round from under his heavy lids.

As a matter of fact, Emmanuel de S., or Willie Kelly, or, more accurately still, Willie Watkins, the guest of the Duchess of Talleyrand, is no less a personage than the son of Prince Louis Eugenic Napoleon, and grandson of the Empress Eugenic, who. rather late, begins to feel a grandmotherly love for the hitherto despised and forsaken boy. Almost suddenly she took it into her head to leave him the bulk of her enormous fortune, on condition that he married a wife worthy of his ill-fated father, and then took his chance, and posed as a Pretender to the throne of '"France.

Willie Watkins i?, as one knows, the son of a poor governess, who gave her love to the sad-looking young man whom she met one evening in a skating rink near London. Lottie Watkins Mas the daughter of a West-end tailor, and she remained the faithful mistress of her unknown lover till one day he had to tell her who he was, and why he had to leave her just as she was on the point of becoming a mother. Louis Napoleon was starting for Zululand. % After the death of her son, the Empress Eugenic, unmoved by the sad situation of the girl-mother, gave a small sum of money to a certain Walter Kelly, in order that he might marry the girl and adopt the child, to whom he gave his name. In 1879, Kelly died of consumption in the Brompton Hospital, and his widow, who .had to earn her own living and that of her child, accepted a situation in West Australia, leaving the boy to the care of a Miss Martin. Then, later on, he attended a Roman Catholic College, where he earned for himself the reputation of a dreamer. At last, he left England : a mysterious gentleman came one day to Biackheath, and took him to the College of St. Nicholas, near Paris, at Issy. It was there that, the Empress, having heard of the death of Lottie Kelly, came to see him and tell him the name of his real father, a piece of news which, it appears, had not the power of exciting the slumbering spirit of her grandson as much as she had hoped.

Now that his college education is quite finished, the Empress Eugenic has entrusted fche care of his worldly education to her former friend, the ex-ruler of elegance among the beauties of her Imperial court, the Princess de bagan, whose principal mission is to try and rouse the ambition of the future Pretender, and to get him married. In this hope she is looking for a Heaven-sent princess, poor if necessary, ugly if.it cannot be helped, German if it must be so, but, at all events, a real princess, who might render the young man fit for the exalted situation dreamed of by Lis tardily-loving grandmother.