In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

National Anthem (composed by a Sr Guillermo Frick of Valdivia). He wrote an open letter to his home newspaper Le Périgord advertising ‘La Nouvelle France’ as a fertile land bursting with minerals, which would compensate for the loss of Louisiana, and Canada, but didn’t mention it was full of warrior Indians. Another newspaper, Le Temps , jibed that ‘La Nouvelle France’ inspired about as much confidence as M. de Tounens his former clients.
    Nine months later, penniless and stung by indifference, he returned to Araucania with a horse, a mule and a servant called Rosales. (When hiring this individual he made the common tourist’s mistake of confusing fifteen for fifty pesos.) At the first village his subjects were drunk, but they revived and passed word for the tribes to muster. The king spoke of Natural and International Law; the Indians replied with vivas. He stood within a circle of naked horsemen, in a brown poncho, with a white fillet round his head, saluting with stiff Napoleonic gestures. He unfurled the Tricolour, crying, ‘Long live the Unity of the Tribes! Under a single chief! Under a single flag!’
    The king was now dreaming of an army of thirty thousand warriors and of imposing his frontier by force. War cries echoed through the forest and the itinerant hooch-sellers scuttled for civilization. Across the river, the white colonists saw smoke signals and signalled their own fears to the military. Meanwhile Rosales scribbled a note to his wife (which she alone could decipher) telling of his plan to kidnap the French adventurer.
    Orélie-Antoine moved through the settlements without escort. Stopping one day for lunch, he sat by a riverbank, lost in reverie, ignoring a party of armed men he saw talking to Rosales in the trees. A weight pressed on his shoulders. Hands clamped round his arms. More hands stripped him of his possessions.
    The Chilean carabineers forced the king to ride to the provincial capital of Los Angeles and hauled him before the Governor, a patrician landowner, Don Cornelio Saavedra.
    â€˜Do you speak French?’ the prisoner demanded. He began by asserting his royal rights and ended by offering to return to the bosom of his family.
    Saavedra appreciated that Orélie-Antoine could want nothing better. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I am having you tried as a common criminal to discourage others who may imitate your example.’
    The jail in Los Angeles was dark and damp. His warders waved lanterns in his face as he slept. He caught dysentery. He writhed on a sodden straw mattress and saw the spectre of the garrotte. In one lucid interval he composed the order of succession: ‘We, Orélie-Antoine Ier, bachelor, by the Grace of God and the National Will, Sovereign etc. etc.... ’ The throne would pass to his old father, at that season gathering in his walnuts—then to his brothers and their issue.
    And then his hair fell out and with it went the will to rule.
    Orélie-Antoine renounced the throne (under duress) and M. Cazotte, the French Consul, managed to get him out of prison and shipped him home aboard a French warship. He was put on short rations but the cadets asked him over to dine at their table.
    Exiled in Paris, his hair grew back longer and blacker than before, and his appetite for rule swelled to megalomaniac proportions. ‘Louis XI after Péronne,’ he concluded his memoirs, ‘François Ier after Pavia were no less Kings of France than before.’ And yet his career followed that of other dislocated monarchs; the picaresque attempts to return; the solemn ceremonial in shabby hotels; the bestowal of titles as the price of a meal ticket (at one point his Court Chamberlain was Antoine Jimenez de la Rosa, Duc de Saint-Valentin, Member of the University of Smyrna and other scientific institutions etc.); a certain success in attracting parvenu financiers and anciens combattants de guerre ; and an unwavering