A note said to have been
found in the private collections of Durham University, where it was placed, if the
records are to be believed, by one who claimed to have found it on a beach near
Hartlepool in northern England in the early 19th century
I will begin by stating
that I was raised in far, far finer circumstances than this, the palace of
Versailles no less.
As a cub, not long weaned from my mother’s
hairy breast I was cruelly wrenched from her and the cage in the shabby commercial
menagerie we knew as our whole world: a dark backroom full of dirty wooden
boxes and filled with the groans and cries and squawks of whichever other
pitiful creatures their network of “Hunters” had managed to collect for pay.
Mewling, I was thrust into a rough sack and
carried out of the storeroom, through the front shop and into the street. A
terrifying contraption, that I now know to have been no more that a six wheeled
horse drawn carriage, stood before me as I pressed my eye to a small hole in
the opening of the sack. On the back of this conveyance there stood a shiny
wooden trunk and the oaf who bore me opened a lid on its upper side and threw
me in as though I were a bag of beans.
When next I saw light I was
on a vast and smooth expanse of grass and facing me were two small human children,
a girl of around six years and a boy of three: these were, apparently, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte,
the Madame
Royale, and Louis Joseph Xavier François, Dauphin of France. To me they were hairless playmates and
the twin stars by which, from now on, my world was to be lit.
Of my time at
Versailles I have spoken elsewhere and need not trouble my reader with further
details beyond a few salient points that have a bearing on the present
situation, wherein I am held on a foul and rain drenched English beach by a
gang of ruffians who surely intend to hang me until I am dead.
The first of these
points is that I can speak. I can speak and read and write and understand as
well as any educated Frenchman, and better than many for that matter. Why it
should be so I have no idea at all. Am I a freak? Are my entire race as capable
as I or would they at least prove so given similar circumstances? I cannot say,
but it is so, I speak.
Revealing my
abilities when I first made the error of speaking to anyone except the children
caused such commotion that I made a point of never doing so again without extremely
good cause. Such a contingency seldom arose and in the revolutionary chaos that
engulfed my adopted land in 1789 taciturnity seemed even wiser than it had
previously.
I ended up the
“property” of a drunken first mate on a ship of his emperor’s, navy tasked with
the patrolling of the north British coast. I had suffered from prolonged sea
sickness and the violent whims of my new “master” for a year before this
present tragedy befell me. On my third night aboard that wretched vessel, the first
mate, in his delirium decided it best to throw me over board, having somehow
convinced himself that I was a devil of some kind, his education in natural
history had not, I assume, been significant.
And so I spoke
once more, at the risk of confirming his worst fears as to my infernal origins,
but I spoke quickly and, fortunately, he was very stupid. And took me to the
Captain, Jacques de Gouges.
While no Voltaire himself, Monsieur Le Gouges
was a man with a capable mind, as far as any military man can be said to have a
mind.
Be that as it may,
he saw at once an opportunity for me to serve the glory of France, and set the
ship’s doctor to teaching me English. And English, though a vulgar, even
primitive tongue came to me with the same facility as had the glorious language
of Diderot and Racine. When we captured an English sailor I was set to
interrogating him and when Idle I took to perusing the scribbling of your
Shakespeare and Milton.
Little good it has
done me amongst these men of Hartlepool: if their language is English I cannot
recognise it as such. Theirs is a guttural speech with vowels that seem to have
been beaten with hammers.
Whether the
Captain intended to send me ashore here I know not: if there is significant
intelligence to be gained here I have not found it. But, either way a storm
rose and the winds of this bitter sea threw our craft onto the rocks, my cage
floated and I with it, our mission has failed.
My task was to go
ashore north of here and travel down the coast discerning what I could of coastal
defences and troop movements that might be of value to his Highness the Emperor
in his endeavour to invade this sorry island. Then I was to meet the ship once
more near some town which bears the singularly unattractive name of Hull.
The realisation that I will never have to set
eyes on this “Hull” is almost enough to make me welcome the noose I see these
fools fashioning on the mast of their primitive fishing craft. The same mast
they tied me to in order to interrogate me as a spy. One there was, by the name
of Kenneth, who saw the foolishness of interrogating a monkey as a spy and
cursed them for the oafs they are, but curse my luck, he is a Yorkshire man,
whatever that might be and they dismiss his every word as the blathering of a
bewildered child.
Ach, they are
done, their grisly work is prepared, I see them approach through the bars of
this lobster basket in which they flung me onto this dark and hopeless rain
swept beach, I hasten I must end this scribbling.
Vive le France Long live "Napoléon,
de la République, Empereur des Français".
Mon Dieu. They come…
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