September 12, 2005
Mark Twain's Dauphin gets one wrong
Posted by
Mark Kleiman
One of the most charming characters in Huckleberry Finn is the con artist pretending to the the lost Dauphin. At one point, he remarks:
Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
I've always considered that remark a depressing but fundamentally accurate insight into practical politics. But it turns out that His Majesty Looey the Seventeen wasn't infallible, after all.
