• U.S.

AUSTRIA: New Lexicon

2 minute read
TIME

Vienna is a city of specialists. Its directories are filled with the names of psychoanalysts, gynecologists, ichthyologists, bacteriologists, geologists, botanists. But unique among Vienna’s specialists is Professor Dr. Heinrich Hoefflinger, historian. For years he has burrowed with prying pencil among the secret archives of European Royalty, in the monumental task of discovering and listing all the illegitimatechildren of all the royal houses of Europe, a work which has earned him among his Viennese students the entirely unofficial degree of B. N. (Baccalarius Nothorum, “Bachelor of Bastardy”).

Last week the Austrian Institute of Genealogy published the result of the labors of Dr. Hoefflinger, B. N.—a monumental tome grandiloquently entitled Lexicon Illegitimorum Europaeorum (Dictionary of Illegitimate Europeans).

Riffling through the B’s, correspondents discovered that a most interesting bastard’s daughter claimed to be a direct descendant of the late great Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French.* She lives in a small villa outside Paris. Called “Mme. Mesnard Leon,” she is a retired schoolteacher. On her own admission and by the authority of Dr. Hoefflinger, Mme. Leon is the daughter of Count de Leon who was the illegitimate son of Napoleon and one Elenore de la Plaigne, a complaisant lady of the Imperial Court.

“The news of my father’s birth was received by Napoleon at Pultusk, Poland, when he was preparing the campaign that culminated in the victory of Friedland,” said Mme. Leon last week. “Napoleon was already thinking of divorcing the childless Empress Josephine, so you can imagine what consequences the news of my father’s birth might have had. But what could Napoleon do? Nothing! Marriage with my grandmother was out of the question. . . . He could only give the child the last syllables of his own name, calling him Count Leon.”

* Manhattan’s Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte and other living Bonapartes are descended from Napoleon’s brothers.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com