Avignon, and disappeared for many months from the ken of history.
For nearly eighteen years he preserved his incognito, vaguely heard
of here and there in England, France, Germany, Flanders, but always
involved in mystery. On that mystery, impenetrable to his father,
Pickle threw light enough for the purposes of the English Government,
but not during the darkest hours of Charles's incognito.

'Le Prince Edouard,' says Barbier in his journal for February 1750,
'fait l'admiration et la curiosite de l'Europe.' This work, alas! is
not likely to add to the admiration entertained for the unfortunate
adventurer, but any surviving curiosity as to the Prince's secret may
be assuaged. In the days of 1749-1750, before Pickle's revelations
begin, the drafts of the Prince's memoranda, notes, and angry love-
letters, preserved in Her Majesty's Library, enable us to follow his
movements. On much that is obscurely indicated in scarcely
decipherable scrawls, light is thrown by the French memoirs of that
age. The names of Madame de Talmond, Madame d'Aiguillon, and the
celebrated Montesquieu, are beacons in the general twilight. The
memoirs also explain, what was previously inexplicable, the motives
of Charles in choosing a life 'in a hole of a rock,' as he said after
the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). It is necessary, however, to
study the internal feuds of the Jacobites at this period, and these
are illuminated by the Stuart Papers, the letters of James and his
ministers.

The plan of our narrative, therefore, will be arranged in the
following manner. First, we sketch the character of Prince Charles
in boyhood, during his Scottish expedition, and as it developed in
cruelly thwarting circumstances between 1746 and 1749. In
illustrating his character the hostile parties within the Jacobite