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.