The Bourbon of Bhopal

Bal

thazar Napoleon de Bourbon may be the heir to the lapsed French throne. That sounds reasonable enough—except that the portly 48-year-old is also a decidedly un-Gallic lawyer from the central Indian city of Bhopal. Nevertheless, according to the book Le Rajah de Bourbon, published last week by European blueblood Prince Michael of Greece (a Bourbon scion himself), Balthazar is a direct descendant of Jean de Bourbon, a swashbuckling nephew of Henri IV who joined the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1560. While Jean's progeny faded into obscurity in the East, Henri IV's ruled France for centuries until the guillotine ended the Bourbon line at Louis XVI in 1793. Now, Prince Michael claims Balthazar is Louis XVI's closest living relative. Still, Balthazar, who has volunteered for a DNA test to determine his credentials, is hardly the first would-be French royal to appear from unexpected quarters.

Carl Wilhelm Naundorff
The German clockmaker and manufacturer of munitions (he dubbed them "Bourbon bombs") declared in 1833 that he was Charles Louis, son of Louis XVI, thought to have died in prison following the French Revolution. Undeterred by the fact that the dauphin's name had actually been Louis Charles, Naundorff attracted followers and even penned a royal memoir detailing his escape from captivity hidden in the coffin of a dead child.

John James Audubon
The famous American ornithologist, artist and woodsman never pressed his own claim to the throne. But a popular myth began circulating after his death in 1851 that Haiti-born Audubon, the illegitimate son of a French sailor and a maidservant, had actually been the lost dauphin in disguise. Hints of Audubon's royal identity supposedly appear in cryptic entries in his notebooks.

Eleazer Williams
In the early 19th century Williams, a Mohawk missionary who once tried to establish his own kingdom in Wisconsin, propagated the story that he was the Bourbon prince in exile, spirited to the Americas by French royalists after the Revolution. Williams' conceit—he went so far as to forge his own adoption papers—was later satirized by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Jenny Savalette de Lange
A ubiquitous figure of high Parisian society, de Lange resisted marriage, leaving behind a string of rebuffed suitors—and for good reason: upon her death in 1858, coroners discovered that she was in fact a he. Rampant speculation about de Lange's true identity prompted the publication of more than a few "histories" unmasking the transvestite socialite as the last Bourbon monarch, still in hiding.