[
    {
        "id": 206981,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1974",
        "page_number": 52,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "46 \n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE \n\nOn the island Mayréna lived alone in a shack with a French poodle. He did not collect birds' nests, a task he left to his fellow European, but the feathers of birds of paradise. It seems that he took another 'wife—the twelve-year-old daughter of a local village chief. But he soon began to suffer acutely from paranoia, barricading and fortifying his shack and interrogating at the point of a rifle all who approached. He also suffered from delusions; he walked around gesticulating and talking to himself. He was now more than a 'king in exile', he was a 'mad king'. \n\nFor Mayréna's last days we must rely on the testimony of J.F. Owen,46 the Collector of Kuala Rompin on the mainland, who visited Tioman and made friends with Mayréna. In November 1890 Mayréna visited Owen at Kuala Rompin. The morning after he drew up his will, and executed it formally in the presence of Owen, who was a magistrate. Then he called Auguste, his poodle, and set forth for a stroll along a jungle path. Soon he returned in great pain and claimed to have been bitten by a poisonous snake. He died soon afterwards in the presence of Owen. He was buried, Lineham states, at Kampong Jawa on the Rompin and his grave was marked by a plain block of chengal wood.47 There was no inscription. ‘But if you chance to visit Tioman', Sir Hugh Clifford writes, \"the natives of the place will point out to you a number of strange-looking quadrupeds, half-pariah, half-poodle, and with pride will inform you that these are \"ânjing pranchis\" (French dogs); and these uncouth descendants of the well-beloved and redoubtable Auguste are the only traces left upon this little fairy island marking it as the erstwhile refuge of Marie David de Mayréna, Comte de Ray (sic), and King of the Sedangs'.48 \n\nThe Marquis de Morès' nirvana was as strange as Mayréna's. Back in Paris he discovered that he could not go ahead with his scheme to construct a railroad in Tongking because of opposition from Ernest Constans, Minister of the Interior, who had just driven from France another ambitious soldier who, too, had left the French army. This was the sentimental General Boulanger, who was later to commit suicide over his mistress's grave at Brussels. Morès, as a result of what he felt was a personal conspiracy against him, became an implacable enemy not only of Constans but of the regime, the Third Republic, that Constans served. He had also become an anti-semite, principally because of his experiences with the Jews in",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206983,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1974",
        "page_number": 54,
        "title": "RAS-1974",
        "content_text": "48\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nOn 9 June, after the party had left Mechiguig and was passing through a grove of tamarisks, Bechaoui, who had now joined the caravan, suddenly seized Morès' carbine and unhorsed him. He was cut in the head by a blow from a sword but managed to get on his feet and back up against a tree, from which position the lion-hearted adventurer opened fire with his revolver on his assassins. Surrounded by over forty Touaregs, he fought bravely, killing and wounding a number of his assailants. Then he was felled finally by two shots, and a knife plunged into his heart. And so the Emperor of the Badlands died amidst his servants in the desert.\n\nIt is not necessary to detail what happened after the Marquis' death—the long search for and trial of his assassins, 52 his apotheosis as a great national hero, the creation of a nationalist legend—except to add that his body was recovered by a French patrol, shipped to Marseilles; then conveyed to Paris and to a magnificent ceremony at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The funeral oration was declaimed by Maurice Barrès, the novelist and perfervid nationalist; the distinguished mourners were joined by contingents of butchers from La Villette, though accounts do not tell us whether they came wearing their Stetsons. The London Times reported of the funeral;\n\nSpeeches were delivered today in which the murder of Morès was attributed to the Jews and the English and the listeners cried, \"A bas l'Angleterre! A bas les Juifs!”\n\nEven on his catafalque the stone-cold Morès was a centre of agitation.\n\nIt is not a coincidence, I feel, that many people continued to doubt the official versions of the deaths of both these adventurers. Although Owen, who signed Mayréna's death certificate, declared that death was due to snakebite, the symptoms exhibited by the dying man were not those usually associated with death from a venomous snake—there was only one puncture of the skin and death came too rapidly. It is possible, then, that Mayréna either killed himself by taking poison and pricking his own leg to simulate a snakebite; or that the libidinous Mayréna was killed by a poison arrow shot by a jealous Malay. Morès' death, on the other hand, has been blamed by French nationalists on the dastardly British Secret Service and even, according to another version, on a conspiracy hatched by Constans, his political allies and Jewish friends. In both cases we are not likely to resolve the puzzle at this date.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1974.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077",
        "rank": 0
    }
]