They Locked Tartaria's Last Princess in a Convent — Her Diary Surfaced in 1928

1928 That's the number I want you to hold in your mind. Not a decade, not a period, a single year. The year a Belgian antiquarian, sorting the unsold residue of an estate auction conducted three months earlier in a town I will come to in a moment, lifted from a wooden tea chest a bound volume that the auction's printed catalogue had described, in a single line of eight-point type, as a devotional manuscript, undated, of no commercial value, and opened it, and read the first page, and closed it, and rewrapped it in the linen it had arrived in, and sent it the following morning, by registered post, to a Jesuit librarian in Louvain whose name appears, in the surviving correspondence, only as Father M. Father M. Carry that initial with you, because it is the only name in the chain of custody of the volume between 1928 and 1931 that the surviving correspondence preserves intact. Every other name in the chain is either initialed, redacted in pencil by a hand that is not the original correspondent's, or replaced, in the typed copies that were later prepared for institutional filing, with the designation party A, party B, party C. The volume itself, by the spring of 1931, is no longer in Louvain. Where it is between 1931 and the date a single citation in a 1956 ecclesiastical bibliography refers to it by a shelf mark that does not match any shelf mark in any catalogue I have been able to locate, is the matter this investigation concerns.