Marshal Up?

In conventional histories the life of Michel Ney, cooper's son whose brilliance and bravery in the service of Napoleon raised him to be Duke of Elchingen, Prince of Moskowa and Marshal of France, ends before the guns of a firing squad in Luxembourg Gardens on Dec. 7, 1815. Called by Napoleon "the bravest of the brave," the hero of Elchingen, Friedland, Redinha, Borodino and the retreat from Moscow had sworn allegiance to Bourbon Louis XVIII on the Empire's fall, set out to bring Napoleon to Paris in an iron cage when he returned from Elba, joined him instead with his whole army. After Waterloo Marshal Ney was condemned to a traitor's death. Following the execution his corpse lay on the ground for a quarter-hour, was then delivered to his family who placed it in a lead casket, buried it without ceremony in an unmarked grave in Paris' Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.

In January 1816 there debarked at Charleston, S. C. a French fencing master who said his name was Peter Stuart Ney. From Georgetown he fled to Brownsville three years later when some French refugees insisted he was France's late, great Marshal. In the next few years he wandered from town to town in North Carolina and Virginia teaching school. Years later one of his pupils told how he had fainted on reading a newspaper report of Napoleon's death at St. Helena. Found next day with his throat ineffectively slashed, he explained: "With the death of Napoleon, my last hope is gone."

In 1830 Teacher Ney settled in Iredell County, N. C. In the library of nearby Davidson College, whose seal he designed, he read books on recent French history, drew sketches of Napoleon and Ney in the margins, scribbled comments on the authors' accuracy. On his deathbed in 1846 he declared: "I am Marshal Ney of France." He was buried in the cemetery of Third Creek Presbyterian Church near Statesville.

Mystery-loving folk throughout the world have woven legends around the afterlife of historic personages supposed to have survived their official deaths. A reputed mummy of John Wilkes Booth was long exhibited, with the tale that Lincoln's assassin escaped from the burning barn near Fredericksburg, Va., became a conscience-stricken wanderer, killed himself in Enid, Okla. in 1903 (TIME, Dec. 28, 1931). Some other legendary survivors: Louis Charles, Dauphin of France; Earl Kitchener; Tsar Nicholas II; Belgian Banker Alfred Lowenstein. As the years passed there grew up in the North Carolina countryside a firm belief that Peter Stuart Ney had actually been the Marshal of France. Amateur historians delved into the matter, wrote earnest monographs and pamphlets. Their explanation: Marshal Ney's firing squad was composed of his old comrades-in-arms. They put blank cartridges in their guns, smuggled him aboard a U. S.-bound ship at Bordeaux.

In 1887 curious North Carolinians dug up the grave of Peter Stuart Ney, found a skeleton about the size of Marshal Ney's, made a cast of the skull which has since disappeared. Last week in Charlotte, N. C. another group, including Charlotte's chief of detectives, announced that a battery of scientists was being assembled to make, probably next month, an exhaustive examination of Peter Ney's bones and dust. Present will be Dr. J. Edward Smoot, who as a boy saw Peter Ney exhumed in 1887, later gathered what he considered convincing proof of the Marshal's escape to the U. S., put it in a book called Marshal Ney Before and After Execution. The historical detectives centre their hopes on finding a silver plate, a bullet-nicked ankle bone. Marshal Ney had a silver trepan in his skull, a bullet wound in his ankle.

Over Michel Ney's once unmarked grave in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery now rises a three-tiered monument, blazoned with plaques of rose-colored marble bearing the names of the hero's descendants also buried there and the dates of his victories. Last week news of the North Carolina venture made Pere-Lachaise keepers scoff anew at a chestnut which had been popping fitfully for years. At No. 20 Rue Quentin-Bauchart, the Duchess of Elchingen, relict of a Michel Ney who died in 1931, vigorously denied that her husband's great ancestor was buried in the U. S. In Charlotte Davidson College librarians fingered the books in which North Carolina's mysterious exile had corrected accounts of the life of the Marshal of France a century ago.

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