innovate-issue-005

that it was the Habsburg recovery which had decided their fate, but I had argued also against that, onlysomewhat successfully it seemed. Doctor Hart who ran the classes had said that it was not the rights orwrongs of an essay that he would grade, but the arguments within, the breadth of study, and the use ofsource materials in a coherent and focused fashion. The worse mark on that paper had been a straightC given to a girl with pince-nez glasses and a severe dress sense. Eleanor I knew her name to be, butthat was about it - apparently she had used only those sources which had supported her argument andignored the many which did not, some of which were more famous than those she had referenced. AsDr Hart said, that was the way of a politician and not a historian.The History section of the library was by far the largest, but was easily navigable, being divided intocenturies. I walked swiftly, and rather blindly, past the 17th and 18th centuries, and came to the start ofthe 19th. Books were on the upper shelves, relevant journals and publications on the lower, and forthose which spanned the centuries, there were indices in each century referencing to the particularjournal in their separate shelving. I bent down to thumb through these, as I did so knocking my headon a large tome bound in black leather with embossed gold writing on the cover. "The Reign of LouisXX" it was called.Thumbing through the first of the indices, I began to feel a slight disorientation. There was a lot onHungary, but nothing on what I needed. Some of it was so obscure I didn't even recognise what itmeant, and surely 'Palatine Hungary in the 1850s" had to be wrong, they were under militaryoccupation then, but perhaps that was what it meant. I slid that index back, and opened the next,beginning to turn the pages over until a sudden title caught my eye and brought me up sharp. It wasunder Battles, a fairly long catalogue entry and whilst I knew that I did not know the names of all thebattles of the 19th century, and certainly not those fought in Africa or India or Afghanistan, I waspretty sure I knew most of those upon the European continent. "Battle of Moscow, 1864" wasdefinitely not one of these!I looked more closely under Battles, and soon began to see more anomalies. Maybe the Battle ofWarsaw 1863 referred to the Polish Uprising of that year, but what was the Battle of Kiev of the sameyear, or the Battle of Archangel 1865?I sat back on my haunches and cast the index aside. Maybe it was somebody's idea of a joke. I reachedforward for the next of the indices, and my arm brushed the book overhanging them. My mind nowfinally registered what it said...King Louis XX? I pulled it down and opened it at random, reading"Louis was only to be Dauphin for 8 years, before the death of his beloved father elevated him to theglory of kingship in the Spring of 1844, but those eight years were to his later memory the happiest ofhis life"I did some quick calculations, European genealogy, at least of the middle decades of the 19th century,having been something of a hobby of mine. Eight years before 1844 would have been 1836, and whilstI knew that Charles X had been overthrown in 1830, I was pretty sure he had lived another half dozenyears before dying in exile. He had two sons, one Louis, Duke of Angouleme who had not had anychildren, and the other the ill-fated Charles, Duke of Berry who had been assassinated in 1820 andwhose only son Henri was the Comte de Chambord who had after the Franco-Prussian War doomedthe hopes of royalists by refusing the crown if the flag was the Tricolor.Even though I knew that exiles counted their regnal numbers even when not upon the throne, I was atsomething of a loss here. The Duke of Angouleme had been considered Louis XIX by legitimists, evenwhilst the Duke of Orleans sat the throne as Louis Philippe I. It was true that Louis Philippe's heir hadbeen another Louis, his grandson, son of the lamented Ferdinand who had died in a carriage accident.But none of these facts tallied with the few I had read in the book. Maybe it was some sort of historicalromance, I thought?I leafed back to the flysheet, Printed in London and Paris in 1895, chronicling the reign of His Majesty