Between the Louvre and the Place de la Republique lie the great grimy sheds of the Halles Centrales, the central markets of Paris. Tourists returning from the theatres pass long lines of high-wheeled wagons, piled high with cabbages. Few ever notice the long rows of stalls outside the market where weary camelots sell rubber dolls, postcards, hair oil, lace doilies, patent corkscrews.
In one of these booths until last week a plump, spectacled little Spanish woman, Senora Condeleria Brau-Soler, shrilly hawked beauty creams that she stirred up herself in a hotel room not far away. Snivelling loudly, Senora Brau-Soler led police to that room last week. There on the floor, sharp under the single drop light and the grimy, epileptic wallpaper, lay the body of her lover, a grey-haired man of 62, still handsome. Senora Brau-Soler had nearly severed his neck with a razor. Within an hour transatlantic cables were clicking, for Senora Brau-Soler's dead lover always insisted that his name was Prince Edgar de Bourbon d'Este, an illegitimate son of gentle old Franz Josef of Austria and the Princess Alice de Bourbon-Parme.
So ended a career that might have been dictated by E. Phillips Oppenheim. New York first saw "Prince Edgar" nearly 40 years ago when he arrived flush with funds and cut a wide swathe through the leg o' mutton-sleeved Society of the period. He married Clare de Cosse Conger, niece of Edwin T. Conger of Ohio, onetime Minister to China. That did not last long. In 1911 Prince Edgar turned up in Vienna, but he talked too much about his relationship to the old Kaiser and was quietly ousted. By this time U. S. newspapers had it quite fixed in their minds that Prince Edgar was really an Italian adventurer named Carlo Lorioli who came originally from Milan, married a Milanese and had himself naturalized a Hungarian in order to get a divorce in Fiume. This story did not prevent Prince Edgar from turning up in Turkey shortly after his departure from Vienna. He led an uprising of the Albanian Maltsori tribes and was elected their chief.