In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin Read Free Book Online Page B

his royal title on a French passport; a letter from the Consul of El Salvador in Houston recognizing him as a head of state in exile; and his correspondence with Presidents Perón and Eisenhower (whom he had decorated) and with Prince Montezuma, the pretender to the Aztec throne.
    In parting he gave me copies of the Cahiers des Hautes-Etudes Araucaniennes, among them Comte Léon M. de Moulin-Peuillet’s study, The Royal Succession of Araucania and the Order of Memphis and Misrāim ( Egyptian Rite ).
    â€˜Every time I try something,’ the Prince said, ’I gain a little.’

8
    I N THE spring of 1859 the lawyer Orélie-Antoine de Tounens closed his grey-shuttered office in the Rue Hiéras in Périgueux, looked back at the byzantine profile of the cathedral, and left for England, clutching the valise that held the 25,000 francs he had withdrawn from his family’s joint account, thus accelerating their ruin.
    He was the eighth son of peasant farmers who lived in a collapsing gentilhommière at the hamlet of La Chèze near the hamlet of Las Fount. He was thirty-three (the age when geniuses die), a bachelor and a freemason, who, with a bit of cheating, had traced his descent from a Gallo-Roman senator and added a de to his name. He had moonstruck eyes and flowing black hair and beard. He dressed as a dandy, held himself excessively erect and acted with the unreasoning courage of the visionary.
    Through Voltaire he had come on Ercilla’s epic of wooden stanzas and learned of the untamed tribes of the Chilean South:
    Robust and beardless,
Bodies rippling and muscular,
Hard limbs, nerves of steel,
Agile, brazen, cheerful,
Spirited, valiant, daring,
Toughened by work, patient
Of mortal cold, hunger and heat.
    Murat was a stable boy and he was King of Naples. Bernadotte was a lawyer’s clerk from Pau and he was King of Sweden. And Orélie-Antoine got it into his head that the Araucanians would elect him king of a young and vigorous nation.
    He boarded an English merchantman, rounded the Horn in mid-winter, and landed at Coquimbo, on the desert shore of Chile, where he lodged with a fellow mason. He soon learned that the Araucanians were heading for their last stand against the Republic, began an encouraging correspondence with their Cacique, Mañil, and in October crossed the River Bio-Bio, the frontier of his designated kingdom.
    An interpreter and two Frenchmen went along—MM. Lachaise and Desfontaines, his Minister for Foreign Affairs and Secretary of State for Justice, phantom functionaries, named after La Chèze and Las Fount and contained within the person of His Majesty.
    Orélie-Antoine and his two invisible ministers battled through an underscrub of scarlet flowers and fell in with a young horseman. The boy told him Mañil was dead and led the way to his successor, Quilapán. The Frenchman was delighted to hear that the word ‘Republic’ was as odious to the Indian as to himself. But there was one new fact he did not know: before dying the Cacique Mañil prophesied that eternal delusion of the Amerindian: the end of war and slavery would coincide with the coming of a bearded white stranger.
    The Araucanians’ welcome encouraged Orélie-Antoine to proclaim a constitutional monarchy with a succession to be established within his own family. He signed the document with his spidery royal signature, endorsed it with the bolder hand of M. Desfontaines, and sent copies to the Chilean President and the Santiago newspapers. Three days later, a horseman, exhausted by two crossings of the Cordillera, brought fresh news: the Patagonians also accepted the kingdom. Orélie-Antoine signed another paper, annexing the whole of South America from Latitude 42° to the Horn.
    Staggered by the magnitude of his act, the king retired to a boarding house in Valparaiso and busied himself with the Constitution, the Armed Forces, the steamship line to Bordeaux and the