the family joined the ranks of the working bourgeoisie. The Bourbons of Bhopal are certain that their direct ancestor Jean Phillipe was the secret son of the Constable of France and his wife Duchess Suzanne, according to family oral traditions. Though there are no records of Jean Phillipe of Bourbon in official family genealogy of the House of Bourbon, Prince Michael of Greece, in his book Le Rajah Bourbon (Michel de Grece 2007) gives a very plausible explanation to this and he does believe this branch of the Bourbons to be the oldest branch of the family. There are other different accounts of Jean de Bourbon's possible lineage. One has the constable survive the sack of Rome and eventually marry a Mughal princess named Alaïque, Jean Philippe's mother. Another possible candidate is a member of the Bourbon-Busset branch, reported lost at sea in 1580, though the dates do not match. Balthazar Napoleon IV de Bourbon, the current head of the family of Bourbons in India, is the son of Salvadore de Bourbon (1917–1978), who claimed the lineage in his memoir Les Bourbons de l'Inde, which was edited by Lucien Jailloux and published posthumously with a preface written by historian of India and member of L'École Française d'Extrème-Orient Jean Deloche. Salvadore de Bourbon's work is based upon nineteenth-century articles by people such as Claude Sosthène Grasset d'Orcet writing in La Revue britannique , Gabriel Ferrand writing in La Revue de Paris , and Colonel William Kincaid's Historical sketch of the Indian Bourbon family . The story goes that Jean Phillippe (simply "Jean de Bourbon" in some accounts), the secret son of Charles de Bourbon, Duke of Bourbon, the so-called "Constable of Bourbon", arrived in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar in 1560, relating a tale of his journey there that included pirates, kidnapping, and an attempt to sell him in a slave market in Cairo. Prince Michael of Greece has incorporated this into a historical novel, Le Rajah Bourbon , whose publication spurred a renewed interest in this claim to the French throne. Claim to the Throne of France The current head of the Bourbon-Bhopal family is Balthazar Napoleon IV de Bourbon, a lawyer by profession. De Bourbon's claim of link to the Bourbons of France was endorsed by Prince Michael of Greece in his historical novel, Le Rajah Bourbon . The novel, described as "an amalgam of conjecture and research",