SPAIN’S CROWN JEWELS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XX, Issue XXIII, 4 June 1898, Page 716

SPAIN’S CROWN JEWELS.

‘ln 1817 Joseph Bonaparte’s secretary, Maillard, left Philadelphia armed with letters which represented him to be a travelling agent for Girard’s commercial house and visiting Girard’s correspondents in Holland and Switzerland.’ William Perrine writes in the April Ladies’ Home Journal. ‘His real destination was the Swiss chateau at Prangins, from which the King had fled two years before, and his real object to secure the treasure which had been buried in the ground of the estate on the eve of his flight. Maillard found the buried packets, and with them he would also have brought to Philadelphia Queen Julie if her physicians had not compelled her to renounce the project of joining her husband. ‘The jewels, which were valued at £ 200,000. were stuffed into a belt, which Maillard wore on his person when returning across the Atlantic, and with which he was gladly received by his master in the Lansdowne house, near Philadelphia. It was about this time that wild rumours began to circulate in Philadelphia concerning the ex-King’s riches and of the hoards of specie which he had deposited in the vault of Stephen Girard’s Philadelphia bank. Mysterious heavy boxes, sealed with wax, were believed by Girard’s clerks to contain the erown jewels of Spain and Naples. One or two old men in recent years, who were then among those clerks, have told how Joseph would sit In the bank talking with them affably while waiting for the great banker.’