A friend of Marie-Antoinette (Lady Atkyns)

by Frédéric Barbey

FOOTNOTES:

[75] His deposition at the Richemont trial.—Provins.

CHAPTER VI
THE FRIENDS OF LADY ATKYNS

What was the Chevalier de Frotté doing all this time? What steps was he taking towards the realization of what he had called so often the goal of his life, and towards the execution of the promises he had made with so much ardour and enthusiasm?

Transported with joy on hearing that the British Government at last contemplated listening to his projects and sending him to Normandy, Frotté, when leaving London, betook himself with four comrades-in-arms to Jersey—the great rendezvous at that time for the insurgents engaged in dangerous enterprises on the Continent, and seeking to find landing-places on the French coast.

It was the middle of winter—snow was falling heavily, and there were strong winds. Several weeks passed, during which the patience of our émigrés was severely taxed. Nothing was more difficult than to effect a landing in Normandy under such conditions. Apart from the difficulty of finding a vessel to make the crossing, it was necessary to choose some spot where they might succeed in escaping the vigilance of the troops stationed all along the cliffs, whose forts presented a formidable barrier. In short, Frotté and his friends found themselves confronted with serious obstacles.

On January 11, 1795, they were observed to leave Guernsey in a small sailing-vessel manned by English sailors, taking with them three émigrés who were to act as guides. What happened to them? No one knows exactly. Certain it is merely that the boat returned rudderless and disabled, with Frotté and his four companions. According to their own account, they took a wrong direction in the dark, and sailed along the coast in the midst of rocks. Their guides landed first, and disappeared from sight under a hail of bullets, and it was with great difficulty that they themselves had been able to get back to Guernsey.

At the beginning of February they made another effort, and succeeded in landing near Saint-Brieuc. Frotté at once made his way inland to join the insurgents, but ill fortune followed him. He had not been a fortnight in the country when he learned, to his surprise, that the Chouans under Cormatin had just concluded a truce to prepare the way for peace. His feelings may be imagined. To have waited so long for this! So much for his hopes and castles in the air! But there was no help for it. On February 17, 1795, the treaty of Tannaye was concluded, and a month later Frotté, who had kept moving about over La Vendée and Normandy unceasingly to survey the ground, established himself at Rennes, where he assisted at the conference of La Mabilais, which was to confirm the truce already agreed to.

Marie-Pierre-Louis, Count de Frotté, 1766-1800.

(After a portrait belonging to the Marquis de Frotté.)

If the turn taken by events had led him off temporarily in a different direction, his mind never abandoned the secret purpose which had brought him to France. Nevertheless, a change, at first imperceptible, but afterwards obvious enough, was coming over him.

The reader will not have forgotten the way in which a feeling of antagonism had grown up between Cormier and the Chevalier. The ill-will cherished by the latter for his quondam friend had not disappeared. On the contrary, the belief that Lady Atkyns was keeping him deliberately at arm’s length had intensified the jealousy. The result was inevitable. Chagrined at being thus left on one side, and at being supplanted, as he felt, in his fair lady’s affections, he soon began to devote himself entirely to his new rôle as a Chouan leader, and ceased to interest himself any longer in the drama of the Temple. In truth, he was not without pretexts for this semi-desertion of the cause.

On March 16, anxious to explain himself to Lady Atkyns, he writes to tell her just how he is feeling on the subject. He would have her realize that there is no longer any ground for hopes as to the Dauphin’s safety. When in touch with the representatives of the Convention who took part in the conference at La Mabilais, he had taken one of them aside, it seems, and questioned him frankly as to whether the Republican Government would consent to listen to any proposal regarding the young Prince, and whether he, Frotté, would be allowed to write to the Temple. The member of the Convention made reply, after taking a day to consider the matter and to consult his colleagues, that what Frotté suggested was out of the question.

“Your devotion,” he said, “would be fruitless, for under Robespierre the unhappy boy was so demoralized, mentally and physically, that he is now almost an imbecile, and can’t live much longer. Therefore you may as well dismiss any such idea from your head—you can form no notion of the hopeless condition the poor little creature has sunk into.”

These lines, reflecting the view then current among the official representatives of the Convention, stand out strikingly when we recall the situation at the Temple in this very month of March, 1795, and the absolute order given to Frotté not to allow the child to be seen. They tally at all points with what we know of the substitution that had been effected. To this substitution, indeed, Frotté himself proceeds to make an explicit allusion towards the end of the letter.

“Perhaps the Convention is anxious,” he writes, “to bring about the death of the child whom they have substituted for the young King, so that they may be able to make people believe that the latter is not really the King at all.”

As for himself, he has made up his mind. He will make no further efforts for the deliverance of the Dauphin.

On April 25, 1795, the La Mabilais Treaty was signed, and Frotté, who refused to subscribe to it, went off again to Normandy, confident of seeing the struggle recommence, and impatient to set going a new insurrection. Had he received any reply from Lady Atkyns to his outspoken missive? Assuredly not. If she gave any credence to his statements at the time, they must soon have passed out of her memory, for, thanks to Cormier, June found her quite confident again of the success of their plans. Not knowing, therefore, what to say to her old admirer—Cormier having forbidden her to tell him the names of their agents—she determined to keep silent.

Shortly afterwards, on the day after June 8, the report of the Dauphin’s death reached Normandy. The proclamation of the Comte de Provence—for how many weeks must he not have been waiting impatiently for it to be made—as successor to the throne of France in his nephew’s place was read to the insurgents. Frotté, who for some time already had been responding to the advances made to him by the pretendant, now formally placed his sword at the service of the new King.

What would have prevented him from taking this step? Would a personal interview with Lady Atkyns have had this effect? Perhaps; but devoted now to his new mission, passing from fight to fight, Frotté was no longer his own master.

Nevertheless, at the end of 1795, some feeling of remorse, or else the desire to renew his old place in the goodwill of Lady Atkyns, who had twice asked him to write and tell her about himself, moved Frotté to take pen in hand once again. He had been engaged in fighting for several months, concerting surprises and ambuscades, always on the qui vive. He had twice narrowly escaped capture by the enemy. In spite of this he managed to keep up an interesting correspondence with his companions operating more to the south and to the west, in La Vendée and in Le Bocage, and with the chiefs of his party in London, who supplied the sinews of war, as well as with Louis XVIII. himself, in whose cause he had sworn to shed the last drop of his blood. There is no reason to be astonished at finding our “Général des Chouans” expressing himself thus, or at the changed attitude adopted by him, dictated by circumstances and the new situation in which he has now found himself. Here is how he seeks to disabuse Lady Atkyns of the hope to which she is still clinging:—

“No, dear lady, I shall not forget my devotion to you before I forget my allegiance to the blood of my kings. I have broken faith in no way, but, unfortunately, I have none but untoward news to give you. I have been grieved to find that we have been deceived most completely. For nearly a month after landing I was in the dark, but at last I got to the bottom of the affair. I was not able to get to see the unfortunate child who was born to rule over us. He was not saved. The regicides—regicides twice over—having first, like the monsters they are, allowed him to languish in his prison, brought about his end there. He never left it. Just reflect how we have all been duped. I don’t know how it is that without having ever received my letters you are still labouring under this delusion. Nothing remains for you but to weep for our treasure and to punish the miscreants who are responsible for his death. Madame alone remains, and it is almost certain that she will be sent to the Emperor, if this has not been done already.”

These lines but confirmed what Frotté had written in the preceding March, after his talk with the representative of the Convention. The news of the Dauphin’s death having been proclaimed shortly after that, there had been no longer any difficulty in persuading the Chevalier to take up arms in the service of the Comte de Provence. He discloses himself the change that has come over his sentiments.

“How is it,” he writes to Lady Atkyns, “that you are still under the delusion, when all France has resounded with the story of the misfortunes of our young, unhappy King? The whole of Europe has now recognized His Royal Highness, his uncle, as King of France.... The rights of blood have given me another master, and I owe him equally my zeal and the service of my arm, happy in having got a number of gallant Royalists together. I have the honour of being in command of those fighting in Normandy. That is my position, madame. You will readily understand how I have suffered over the terrible destiny of my young King, and nothing intensifies my sorrow so much as the thought of the sadness you yourself will feel when you learn the truth. But moderate your grief, my friend. You owe yourself to the sister not less than to the brother.”

And to enforce this advice, Frotté recalls to her the memory of the Queen, which should serve, he thinks, to remove all scruples.

“Remember the commands of your august friend, and you will be able to bear up under your misfortunes. You will keep up your spirits for the sake of Madame. You will live for her and for your friends, to whom, moreover, you should do more justice. Adieu, my unhappy friend. Accept the homage of a true Royalist, who will never cease to be devoted to you, who will never cease either to deplore this deception of which we have been victims. Adieu.”

Was this farewell, taken in so nonchalant a fashion, to denote a final sundering of two hearts united by so many memories in common? It would appear so. Lady Atkyns was so strong in her convictions that the only effect of such words would be to make her feel that all was over between her and the Chevalier. Later, when he made an effort to renew relations with her and asked her to return the letters he had written to her, she would seem to have refused point blank, from what she wrote to a confidant.

He must, however, have got hold of some portion of their correspondence, for on his return to his château of Couterne, this indefatigable penman, in the scant leisure left him by his military duties, filled several note-books with reminiscences and political reflections tending to justify his conduct. In one of these note-books, which have been carefully preserved, he transcribed fragments of his letters to his friend—fragments carefully selected in such a way as not to implicate him in the affair of the Temple, once the death of the Dauphin had been announced. Had he lived, he would doubtless have learned what had really happened, as set forth in the documents we have been studying; but his days were numbered.

His end is well known: how, having fallen into an ambush, he and six of his companions were shot by Napoleon’s orders, in despite of a safe-conduct with which he was furnished, on February 18, 1800, at Verneuil. If in the course of these five years he did learn the full truth about the Dauphin, he doubtless abstained from any reference to it out of regard for the King. He carried his private convictions in silence to the grave.

The news of his death was received with emotion in London. Peltier, who had had good opportunities for forming an opinion of him, gave out a cry of horror. “This act,” he wrote in his gazette, “covers Bonaparte for ever with shame and infamy.”

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The small circle of Lady Atkyns’ London friends lost thus one of its members. Meanwhile, Lady Atkyns had been making the acquaintance of a French woman who had been living in England for some years, and whose feelings corresponded to a remarkable degree with her own. This lady had found a warm welcome at Richmond, near London, on her arrival as an émigré from France.

Pale, thin, anxious-looking, the victim of a sombre sorrow which almost disfigured her face, Louise de Chatillon, Princesse de Tarente, wife of the Duc de la Tremoïlle, had escaped death in a marvellous way. A follower of Marie-Antoinette, from whom she had been separated only by force, she had been arrested on the day after August 10 as having been the friend of the Princesse de Lamballe. Shut up in the sinister prison of l’Abbaye, she had felt that death was close at hand. From her dungeon she could see the men of September at their work and hear the cries of agony given forth by their victims. At last, after ten days of imprisonment, she was liberated, thanks to an unexpected intervention, and in the month of September, 1792, she succeeded in finding a ship to take her to England.

Hers was a strikingly original personality, and it is not without a feeling of surprise that one studies the portrait of her which accompanies the recent work, Souvenirs de la Princesse de Tarente. The drama in which she had taken part, and the bloody spectacle of which she had been a witness, seem to have left their mark on her countenance, with its aspect of embittered sadness. Her eyes give out a look of fierceness. Save for the thin hair partially covering her forehead, there is almost nothing feminine in her face. Seeing her for the first time, Lady Atkyns must have received an impression for which she was unprepared. They took to each other, however, very quickly, having a bond in common in their memories of the Queen. Both had come under the charm of Marie-Antoinette, their devotion to whom was ardent and sincere. The Queen was their one great topic of conversation. Few of their letters lack some allusion to her.

Knowledge of Lady Atkyns’ devotion to the Royal House of France, of the sacrifices she had made, was widespread in the world of English society, and the Princess, having heard of her, was anxious to meet the woman, who, more fortunate than herself, had been able to afford some balm to the sufferings, to prevent which she would so willingly have given her life. The Duke of Queensberry brought about a meeting between the two ladies. What passed between them on this occasion? What questions did they exchange in their eager anxiety to learn something new about the Queen? Doubtless the most eager inquiries came from the Princess, and bore upon the achievements of Lady Atkyns, her visit to the Conciergerie, her talks with the illustrious prisoner. For weeks afterwards there was an interchange of letters between the two, in which is clearly disclosed the state of affectionate anxiety of the Princess’s mind. They address each other already by their Christian names, Louise and Charlotte. Lady Atkyns shows Mme. de Tarente the few souvenirs of the Queen she still possessed, the last lines the Queen wrote to her. It is touching to note, in reading their correspondence, how every day is to them an anniversary of some event in the life of the Queen, full of sweet or anguishing memories.

“How sad I was yesterday!” writes the Princess. “It was the anniversary of a terrible day, when the Queen escaped assassination only by betaking herself to the King’s apartments in the middle of the night. Why did she escape? To know you—but for that the Almighty would surely have been kind enough to her to have let her fall a victim then.”

For all the affection which surrounds her, Mme. de Tarente constantly bemoans her solitude.

“I am in the midst of the world,” she writes, “yet all alone. Yesterday I longed so to talk of that which filled my poor heart, but there was none who would have understood me. So I kept my trouble to myself. I was like one of those figures you wind up which go for a time and then stop again. I kept falling to pieces and pulling myself together again. Ah, how sad life is!”

In the summer of 1797 the Princess came to a momentous decision. The Emperor and Empress of Russia, whom she had known formerly at the French Court, having heard of her trials and of the not very enviable condition in which she was living, pressed her to come to Russia, where she would be cordially greeted. After long hesitation she decided to accept, but it was not without genuine heartburnings that she separated from her English friends, from her Charlotte most of all. She left London at the end of July, and arrived at St. Petersburg a fortnight later. Very soon afterwards she wrote Lady Atkyns an account of the journey and of her first impressions of her new surroundings.

The Emperor and Empress received her in their Peterhof palace with the utmost consideration. Appointed at once a lady-in-waiting on the Empress, she found herself in enjoyment of many privileges attached to this post. The house in which she was to live had been prepared for her specially by the Emperor’s command. Finally, she was decorated with the Order of St. Catherine, and the Empress on her fête day presented her with her portrait. Different indeed is her position from what it had been at Richmond.

“I never drive out without four horses, and even this is my own doing, for I ought not, as a lady-in-waiting, to have less than six. They tell me I shall be obliged to get myself made the uniform of the Order of St. Catherine, and that would cost me 1200 roubles, that is, 150 louis.”

But the very marked favour met with by the Princess could not but disquiet some of the courtiers at the Palace. Within a week of her arrival, one of the ladies in attendance upon the Empress, Mme. de Nelidoff, at the instigation of Prince Alexandre Kourakine, hastened to represent Mme. de Tarente’s conduct and the unusual honour that had been shown her under the most unfavourable light to her Majesty the Empress; and her jealousy thus aroused (so one of Mme. de Tarente’s friends tells the tale), she had no difficulty in settling matters with her husband, and when the Princess next entered the imperial presence, the Emperor neither spoke to her nor looked at her.

The snub was patent, but the Princess seems to have taken it nonchalantly enough. The friendly welcome accorded to her by St. Petersburg society, the kindness and affection she met with from the Golowine family, in whose house she soon installed herself, there to remain until her death, enabled her speedily to forget the intrigue of her enemies at the Court. The incident is barely alluded to in her letters to Lady Atkyns, which continue to be taken up chiefly with reminiscences of their beloved Queen.

Towards the end of 1798 the two friends are sundered by Lady Atkyns’ decision to return to France, impelled by the desire to be near those who had played so important a rôle in her life, and to meet again those friends who had co-operated in her work—perhaps also to meet and question those who might be in a position to enlighten her regarding the fate of the Dauphin. This decision she communicates to the Princess, who opposes it strongly, warning her against the imprudence she is about to commit. Lady Atkyns persists, and the Princess at last loses patience. “I have so often combated your mad idea,” she writes nobly, “that I don’t wish to say anything more on the subject.”

In the spring of 1814 the news came to St. Petersburg of the defeat of the armies of Napoleon and the accession of Louis XVIII. Immediately large numbers of exiles, who were but waiting for this, made haste back to France. Mme. de Tarente contemplated being of their number, but before she could even make arrangements for the journey, death came to her on January 22, 1814.

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Hamburg, where our friends Mme. Cormier and the “little Baron” took refuge in 1795, was already a powerful city, rich by reason of its commerce, and its governing body, conscious of its strength, were not the less jealous of its independence. Its unique position, in the midst of the other German states, the neutrality to which it clung and which it was determined should be respected, sufficed to prevent it hitherto from looking askance at the ever-growing triumphs of the armies of the French Republic, and the Convention, too much taken up with its own frontiers, had done nothing to threaten the independence of the Hanseatic town.

This fact did not escape the émigrés, who were finding it more and more difficult to evade the rigorous look-out of the Revolutionary Government, and soon Hamburg was filled with nobles, ecclesiastics, Chouans, conspirators, Royalist agents, just as London had been some years earlier. Safe from surprises, and in constant communication with England, Germany, and Italy, this world of wanderers had discovered an ideal haven in which to hatch all their divers plots. Clubs were started by them, called after celebrated men. Rivarol was the centre of one set, noted for its intellectual stamp and its verve and wit. The publications also that saw the light in Hamburg enjoyed a wide liberty, and this it was that opened the eyes of the Republican Government to the state of things.

On September 28, 1795, there arrived at Hamburg, Citoyen Charles-Frédéric Reinhard, official representative of the Convention, formerly head of a department in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Paris. There could be no mistake about the nature of the instructions with which this personage was provided. If the condition of the commercial relations between the two states was the official pretext for his embassy, an investigation into the affairs of the émigrés was its real object. The Senate of the town were quick to realize this. However, Reinhard’s conciliatory bearing and his expressed dislike for the police duties imposed upon him by the Directoire prevented his mission from having too uncompromising an aspect. He could not shut his eyes, of course, to what was going on, and, in spite of his repugnance to such methods, he was forced to employ some of the tale-bearers and spies always numerous among the émigrés. In a short period a complete system of espionage was organized. It did not attain to the state of perfection secured by Bourienne later under the direction of Fouché, but its existence was enough to enhance the uneasiness of the Hamburg Senate. Their refusal to acquiesce in certain steps taken by the Directoire forced Reinhard to quit the town previously, in the month of February, and to take up his abode at Bremen, afterwards at Altona. This suburb of Hamburg, separated from it only by an arm of the river, was yet outside the limits of the little republic, and suited his purpose excellently as a place from which to conduct his observations. Everything that went on in Hamburg was known there within a few hours.

It was at this period that Reinhard received a visit from a somewhat sinister individual, named Colleville, who came to offer his services to the Directoire. He volunteered to keep Reinhard informed as to the doings of the émigrés, to whom he had easy access. On March 5, 1796, he turned up with a lengthy document containing a wealth of particulars regarding one of the principal agents of the princes—no other than our friend d’Auerweck, for the moment a long way from Hamburg, but soon expected back. “He is one of the best-informed men to be met anywhere,” Colleville reports. “He has travelled a great deal, and is au courant with the feeling of the various courts and ministers.”

It must be admitted that the spy was well informed as to the character and record of the “little Baron.” D’Auerweck would seem in intimate relations with a certain Pictet, “Windham’s man.” Through him he was in correspondence with Verona. He was known to be the “friend of the Baron de Wimpfen and of a M. de Saint-Croix, formerly Lieutenant-General in the Bayeux district. In his report upon d’Auerweck, Colleville had occasion inevitably to mention his friend Cormier. He stated, in fact, that at the moment d’Auerweck was located at Mme. Cormier’s house in Paris in the Rue Basse-du-Rempart.

Colleville could not have begun his work better. D’Auerweck was not unknown to Reinhard, who, five months before, in a letter to Delacroix, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, had mentioned the fact of his presence in London, “where he was in frequent touch with du Moustier and the former minister Montciel.”

By a curious coincidence, on the same day that Reinhard got his information, the Minister of Police in Paris, the Citoyen Cochon, had been made aware that a congress of émigrés was shortly to be held at Hamburg. The agent who sent him this announcement drew his attention at the same time to the presence at Hamburg of a person named Cormier.

“It should be possible to find out through him the names of those who will be taking part in the Congress. He is a magistrate of Rennes who has been continually mixed up in intrigue. His wife has remained in Paris.... The correspondence of this Cormier ought to be amusing, for he is daring and has esprit.”

Reference is made in the same communication to “the baron Varweck, a Hungarian, passing himself off as an American, living in Paris for the past five months.”

This was enough to arouse the attention of the Directoire. The persistence with which the two names reappeared proved that their efforts had not slackened. By force of what circumstances had they been drawn into the great intrigue against the Revolutionary Party? It is difficult to say. For some months past Cormier’s letters to Lady Atkyns had been gradually becoming fewer, at last to cease altogether. Having lost all hope in regard to the affair of the Temple, the ex-magistrate, placing trust in the general belief as to what had happened, came to the conclusion that it was vain to attempt to penetrate further into the mystery, and he decided to place his services at the disposal of the Princes.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs lost no time about sending instructions to Reinhard, charging him to keep a sharp watch on the meeting of the émigrés and to learn the outcome of their infamous manœuvres. He should get Colleville, moreover, to establish relations with Cormier, “that very adroit and clever individual.” In the course of a few days Reinhard felt in a position to pull the strings of his system of espionage.

Two very different parties were formed among the émigrés at Hamburg. That of the “Old Royalists,” or of the “ancien régime,” would hear of nothing but the restoration of the ancient monarchy; that of the “new régime” felt that it was necessary, in order to reinstate the monarchy, to make concessions to Republican ideas. Cormier would seem to have belonged to the former, of which he was the only enterprising member. His brother-in-law, Butler, kept on the move between Paris and Boulogne, and Calais and Dunkirk, with letters and supplies of money from England. D’Auerweck had left Paris now and was in England, eager to join Cormier at Hamburg, but prevented by illness.

Cormier was now in open correspondence with the King, to whom he had proposed the publication of a gazette in the Royalist interest. He was in frequent communication, too, with the Baron de Roll, the Marquis de Nesle, Rivarol, and the Abbé Louis, and all the “monarchical fanatics.” Despite his age, in short, he was becoming more active and enterprising than ever. Too clever not to perceive that he was being specially watched, he was not long in getting the spy into his own service by means of bribes, and making him collaborate in the hoodwinking of the Minister. The report that had got about concerning his actions, however, disquieted the Princes, and at the end of June Cormier is said to have received a letter from the Comte d’Artois forbidding him “to have anything more to say to his affairs,” and reproaching him in very sharp terms. At the same period, Butler, to whose ears the same report had found its way, wrote to rebuke him severely for his indiscretion, and broke off all communication with him. Meanwhile, he was in pecuniary difficulties, and borrowing money from any one who would lend, so altogether his position was becoming critical. Soon he would have to find a refuge elsewhere.

When, in the autumn, Baron d’Auerweck managed to get to Hamburg, he found his old friend in a state of great discouragement, and with but one idea in his head—that of getting back somehow to Paris and living the rest of his days there in obscurity.

The arrival of the “18th Brumaire” and the establishment of the Consulate facilitated, probably, the realization of this desire. There is no record of how he brought his sojourn at Hamburg to an end. D’Auerweck we find offering his services to Reinhard, who formed a high estimate of his talents. His offer, however, was not entertained. At this point the “little Baron” also disappears for a time from our sight.

It is about this period that Cormier and d’Auerweck fall definitively apart, never again to cross each other’s path.

Reassured by the calm that began to reign now in Paris, and by the fact that other émigrés who had returned to the capital were being left unmolested, Cormier made his way back furtively one day to the Rue Basse-du-Rempart, where the Citoyenne Butler still resided. The former president of the Massiac Club returned to his ancient haunts a broken-down old man. Like so many others, he found it difficult to recognize the Paris he now saw, transformed as it was, and turned inside out by the Revolution. Wherever he turned, his ears were met with the sound of one name—Bonaparte, the First Consul. What did it all matter to him? His return had but one object, that of re-establishing his health and letting his prolonged absence sink into oblivion. The continual travelling and his ups and downs in foreign countries had brought him new maladies in addition to his old enemy the gout. He had lost half his fortune, through the pillaging of his estates in San Domingo. Thus, such of his acquaintances as had known him in the old days, seeing him now on his return, sympathized with him in his misfortunes and infirmities.

He seemed warranted, therefore, in counting upon security in Paris. The one thing that threatened him was that unfortunate entry in the list of émigrés, in which his name figured with that of his son. In the hope of getting the names erased, he set out one day early in November, 1800, for the offices of the Prefecture of the Seine. There he took the oath of fidelity to the Constitution. It was a step towards getting the names definitely erased. His long stay in Hamburg was a serious obstacle in the way, but both he and his son looked forward confidently now to the success of their efforts.

Suddenly, on August 21, 1801, a number of police officials made their appearance at Cormier’s abode to arrest him by order of the Minister of Police. His first feeling was one of stupefaction. With what was he charged? Had they got wind of his doings in England? Had some indiscretion betrayed him? He recovered himself, however, and led his visitors into all the various apartments, they taking possession of all the papers discovered, and sealing up the glass door leading into Achille’s bedroom, he being absent at the time. This investigation over, Cormier and the officials proceeded to the Temple, and a few hours later he found himself imprisoned in the Tower.

What thoughts must have passed through his mind as he traversed successively those courts and alleys, and then mounted the steps of the narrow stairway leading to the upper storeys of the dungeon!

In the anguish of his position had he room in his mind for thoughts of those days in London when the name of the grim edifice was so often on his lips?

Three days passed before he could learn any clue as to the cause of his arrest. At last, on August 24, he was ordered to appear before a police magistrate to undergo his trial. An account of this trial, or interrogatoire, is in existence, and most curious it is to note the way in which it was conducted. The warrant for his arrest recorded that he was accused “of conspiracy, and of being in the pay of the foreigner.” These terms suggested that Cormier’s residence in England, or at least in Hamburg, was known to his accusers. Had not the Minister of Police in one of his portfolios a dossier of some importance, full of all kinds of particulars calculated to “do” for him? Strange to relate, there is to be found no allusion to this doubtful past of his in the examination.

After the usual inquiries as to name, age, and dwelling-place, the magistrate proceeds—

“What is your occupation?”

“I have none except trying to get rid of gout and gravel.”

“Have you not been away from France during the Revolution?”

“I have served in the war in La Vendée against the Republic from the beginning down to the capitulation. You will find my deed of amnesty among my papers.”

“What was your grade?”

“I was entrusted with correspondence.”

“With whom did you correspond abroad?”

“With the different agents of the Prince—the Bishop of Arras, the Duc d’Harcourt, Gombrieul, etc.”

“Did you not keep up this correspondence after you were amnested?”

“I gave up all the correspondence eight months before peace was declared.”

“Do you recognize this sealed cardboard box?”

“Yes, citoyen.”

And that was all! Cormier’s replies, however, so innocent on the surface, seem to have evoked suspicion, for on August 30 (12 Fructidor) he was brought up again for a second examination.

“With whom did you correspond especially in the West?” he was asked.

“With Scépeaux, d’Antichamp, Boigny, and Brulefort.”

“And now what correspondence have you kept in this country?”

“None whatever.”

“What are your relations with the Citoyen Butler?”

“I have had no communication these last two years, though he is my brother-in-law.”

“Where is he now?”

“I have no idea. I know he passed through Philadelphia on his way to San Domingo. I don’t know whether he ever got there or whether he returned.”

“When was he at Philadelphia?”

“He must have been there or somewhere in the United States not more than two years ago.”

Thus no effort was made in the second inquiry any more than in the first to search into his past. It should be mentioned that immediately on his return Cormier had made haste to destroy all documents that could compromise him in any way.

After a detention of three weeks he was set free, his age and infirmities doubtless having won him some sympathy. He and his son—for Achille had been arrested at the same time—were, however, not accorded complete liberty, being placed en surveillance, and obliged to live outside Paris. On September 20 they were provided with a passport taking them to Etampes, whence they were not to move away without permission from the police.

At this period Fouché had immense powers, and was organizing and regulating the enormous administrative machine which developed under his rule into the Ministry of Police. The prisons overflowed with men under arrest who had never appeared before the ordinary tribunal, “on account of the danger there was of their being acquitted in the absence of legal evidence against them.” He was reduced to keeping the rest under what was styled “une demi-surveillance.” His army of spies and secret agents enabled him to keep au courant with their every step.

The reports furnished as to Cormier’s behaviour seem to have satisfied the authorities, for at the end of a certain time he was enabled to return to Paris. Having learnt by experience how unsatisfactory it was to be continually at the mercy of informers, he now set himself energetically to trying to secure a regular and complete amnesty. His petition was addressed to the First Consul on June 18, 1803, and in it he described himself as “crippled with infirmities,” and it was covered with marginal notes strongly recommending him to the mercy of the chief of the state.

At last, on October 10, the Minister of Police acceded to his request, and Cormier received a certificate of amnesty, freeing him henceforth from all prosecution “on the score of emigration.” With what a sense of relief must not this document have been welcomed in the Rue Basse-du-Rempart! Bent under the weight of his sufferings, Cormier enjoyed the most devoted care at the hands of his family. His younger son, Patrice, had returned to Paris after an existence not less adventurous than his father’s. He had thrown himself into the insurrection in La Vendée, and for three years had served in the Royalist army of the Maine. Benefiting, like his father, by the general amnesty, he found his way back to the paternal roof in Paris, and went into business, so as to throw a veil over his past, until the day should come when he might appear in uniform again.

Achille, the elder, devoted himself entirely to his father, but the old man was not to enjoy much longer the peace he had at length secured for himself. The loss of almost all his income forced him, moreover, to quit his residence in the Rue Basse-du-Rempart, and to betake himself to a modest pension in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, in which he occupied a single room, in which he kept only a few items from the furniture of his old home—some rose-wood chairs, a writing-table, a desk with a marble top, a prie-dieu, and a small wooden desk, “dit à la Tronchin.” The rest of his furniture he sold. It was in this humble lodging that he died on April 16, 1805, aged sixty-five. Some months later Mme. Cormier died at the house in Rue Basse-du-Rempart.

It is strange to reflect that Lady Atkyns, in the course of her many visits to Paris, should not have ever sought to meet again her old friend. The Emperor’s rule was gaining in strength from day to day. Of those who had played notable parts in the Revolution, some, won over to the new Government, were doing their utmost to merit by their zeal the confidence reposed in them; the others, irreconcilable, but crushed by the remorseless watchfulness of a police force unparalleled in its powers, lived on forgotten, and afraid to take any step that might attract attention to them. This, perhaps, is the explanation of the silence of the various actors in the drama of the Temple, once the Empire had been established.

CHAPTER VII
THE “LITTLE BARON”

Cormier’s departure did not for a single moment interrupt the fiery activity of Baron d’Auerweck, nor his co-operation in the most audacious enterprises of the agents of Princes and of the Princes themselves. He lost, it is true, a mentor whose advice was always worthy of attention, and who had guided him up to the present time with a certain amount of success; but the ingenious fellow was by no means at the end of his resources. The life which he had led for the past five years was one which exactly suited him. A practically never-ending list might be drawn up of acquaintances made in the course of his continual comings and goings, of encounters in this army of emissaries serving the counter-Revolution, and of particularly prosperous seasons. Besides the d’Antraigues, the Fauche-Borels, and the Dutheils, there was a regular army of subordinates, bustling about Europe as though it were a vast anthill.

Amongst them d’Auerweck could not fail to be prominent, and he was soon marked as a clever and resourceful agent. His sojourn in Hamburg also continued to arouse curiosity and observation on the part of the representatives of the Directoire. They recognized now that he was employed and paid by England. “He serves her with an activity worthy of the Republican Government,” Reinhard wrote to Talleyrand; and it was well known that Peltier’s former collaborator, always an energetic journalist, assisted in editing the Spectateur du Nord.

An unlooked-for opportunity to exploit his talent soon offered itself to d’Auerweck.

The Deputies of the ten states, which at that time formed the Empire, had been brought together by the congress which opened at Rastadt on December 9, 1797, and for eighteen months there was an extraordinary amount of visits to and departures from the little town in Baden. The presence of Bonaparte, who had arrived some days before the commencement of the conference in an eight-horse coach, with a magnificent escort, and welcomed throughout his journey as the victor of Arcole, increased the solemnity and scope of the negotiations. All the diplomatists, with their advisers, their secretaries, and their clerks, crowded anxiously round him. Agents from all the European Powers came to pick up greedily any scraps of information, and to try to worm out any secrets that might exist. Rastadt was full to overflowing of spies and plotters, and the name of this quiet, peaceful city, hitherto so undisturbed, was in every one’s mouth.

From Hamburg the “little Baron” followed attentively the first proceedings of the Congress through the medium of the newspapers, but the sedentary life which he was leading began to worry him. In vain he wrote out all day long never-ending political treatises, crammed with learned notes on the European situation, wove the most fantastic systems, and drew up “a plan for the partition of France, which he proposed to a certain M. du Nicolay;” all this was not sufficient for him. D’Auerweck was on friendly terms with the Secretary of the French Legation, Lemaître by name (who, by the way, had no scruples about spying on him some years later, and informed against him without a blush), and, giving full play “to his romantic imagination and to his taste for sensational enterprises,” he one day submitted to his confidant a scheme to “kidnap the Minister, Reinhard, and carry him off to London; his attendants were to be made intoxicated, his coachman to be bribed, ten English sailors to be hidden on the banks of the Elbe!” At the back of these schemes of mystery there figured a certain “Swiss and Genevan Agency,” which at the proper time would, he declared, generously reimburse them for all their expenditure. But, for all these foolish imaginings, d’Auerweck displayed a knowledge of the world and a sound judgment which struck all those who came in contact with him, and it was certain that with strong and firm guidance he was capable of doing much good and useful work. In the winter of 1798 we are told that “he left Hamburg secretly” for an unknown destination. Lemaître believed that he had buried himself “in the depths of Silesia,” but he had no real knowledge of his man. For, as a matter of course, d’Auerweck was bound to be attracted to such a centre of affairs as Rastadt then was, in order to make the most profitable use of his ingenuity, seeing that, according to report, the British Government, which was making use of his services, in fear of being kept in the dark as to what was going on, had begged him “to go and exercise his wits in another place.”

He made Baden his headquarters, for the proximity of Rastadt, and his intimacy with the de Gelb family, which has already been mentioned, led him to prefer Baden to the actual field of battle, at which place he must have come under suspicion as an old English agent. One of the Austrian envoys at the Congress was Count Lehrbach; and d’Auerweck managed to get into relations with him, and even to be allowed to do secretarial work for him, on the strength of the connection which he declared he had possessed with Minister Thugut during the early days of the Revolution and the confidence which had lately been reposed in him. He had reason to hope that with the help of his ability and his gift of languages he would soon be able to secure active employment. And, indeed, it was in this way that d’Auerweck succeeded in re-establishing himself at once, to his great satisfaction, as an active agent, with a footing in the highest places, ferreting out the secrets of the Ambassadors, and carrying on an underhand correspondence openly. His intention was, doubtless, to return to Austria as soon as the Congress was over, by the help of Count Lehrbach, and there to regain the goodwill of his former patron, the Minister Thugut.

But the sanguinary drama which brought the Conference to such an abrupt conclusion completely spoiled his plans and undid his most brilliant combinations. We can realize the universal feeling of consternation throughout the whole of Europe which was caused by the news that on the evening of April 28, 1799, the French Ministers, Bonnier, Roberjot, and Debry, who had just made up their minds to betake themselves to Strasburg, along with their families, their servants, and their records—a party filling eight carriages—had been openly attacked as they were leaving Rastadt by Barbaczy’s Hussars; that the two first-mentioned gentlemen had been dragged from their carriages and treacherously murdered, and that the third, Debry, had alone escaped by a miracle. Even if the outrage of Rastadt was “neither the cause nor the pretext of the war of 1799,” its consequences were, nevertheless, very serious.

One of these consequences, and not the least important, was that Bonaparte’s police, magnificently reorganized by Fouché, redoubled its shepherding of émigrés and agents of the Princes, who swarmed in the country-side between Basle, the general headquarters of the spies, and Mayence. Once an arrest took place, the accused was certain to be suspected of having had a hand in the assassination of the plenipotentiaries, and if by any bad luck he was unable to deny having been present in the district, he found it a very difficult task to escape from the serious results of this accusation.

A few months after this stirring event, Baron d’Auerweck, tired of such a stormy existence, and seeing, perhaps, a shadow of the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, determined himself to break away from this life of agitation, and to settle down with a wife. During the last days of the year 1799 he was married at Baden to Mademoiselle Fanny de Gelb, a native of Strasburg, whose father had lately served under Condé; she also had a brother who was an officer in the army of the Princes. But, in spite of a pension which the mother, Madame de Gelb, was paid by England on account of her dead husband’s services, the available resources of the future establishment were very meagre indeed, for the “little Baron” had not learned to practise economy while rushing about Europe; so, as soon as the marriage had been celebrated, the turn of the wheel of fortune forced the young wife to leave the Grand Duchy of Baden and to wander from town to town in Germany and Austria.

They travelled first to Munich and then to Nuremburg, but d’Auerweck’s plans were to establish himself in Austria close to all his belongings. He had the fond hope of obtaining employment from Minister Thugut, to whom he reintroduced himself. But he experienced a bitter disappointment, for on his first attempt to submit to his Excellency the greater part of his last work (in which he had embodied, as the result of desperate toil, his views on the present political situation, the outcome of his conversations with the representatives of the different European states, his reflections and his forecast of events) d’Auerweck found himself unceremoniously dismissed. Thugut flatly refused, if the story is to be believed, to have anything further to do with a man who was still suspected of being an English emissary. Consequently he was obliged to abandon his idea of establishing himself in Austria, and to hunt for other means of existence, more particularly as Madame d’Auerweck had just presented him with his first child at Nuremburg. He turned his steps once again in the direction of the Grand Duchy, and after successive visits to Friburg, Basle, and Baden, he decided to make his home in Schutterwald, a village on the outskirts of the town of Offenburg. There he determined to lead the life of a simple, honest citizen, and renting a very humble peasant’s cottage, he installed his wife and his mother-in-law therein. He himself set to work on the cultivation of his garden, devoting his spare moments to writing, so as not to lose the knack, the sequel to his Philosophical and Historical Reflections.

He soon got to know his neighbours and all the inhabitants of the country very well. He was considered to be a quiet, unenterprising man, “with a positive dislike for politics, although loquacious and vain.” It was impossible to find out anything about his past life, for the prudent Baron considered it inadvisable to talk of this subject, but he was always looked upon “as an argumentative man, who wanted to know all that was going on, whether in reference to agriculture, to thrift, or to politics.” In spite of the apparent tranquillity in which he was allowed to remain, d’Auerweck followed with a certain amount of anxiety all the events which were happening not far from him, on the frontier of the Rhine. Troops were continually passing to and fro in this district; the French were close at hand, and their arrival at Offenburg inspired a feeling of vague unrest in him, although he never recognized, to tell the truth, the danger which threatened him. He had taken the precaution to destroy, before coming to Switzerland, his vast collection of papers: all that mass of correspondence which had been accumulating for the last few years, those reports and instructions, all of which constituted a very compromising record. At last, after a residence of some months, to make matters safe, he contrived, thanks to his marriage, to be enrolled as a freeman of the Grand Duchy; for it seemed to him that as a subject of Baden he would be relieved of all further cause of alarm.

But all d’Auerweck’s fears were reawakened by the much-talked-of news of the Duc d’Enghien’s arrest on March 15, 1804, and by the details of how the Prince had been captured openly in the jurisdiction of Baden, at Ettenheim, that is to say, only a short distance from Offenburg. He absented himself for some days from Schutterwald, so the story goes, and took himself to the mountains.

Just at the same time there arrived at the offices of the Ministry of Police in Paris a succession of memoranda, mostly anonymous, referring to Baron d’Auerweck, and to his presence in the neighbourhood of the Rhine.

Some of them came from Lemaître, Reinhard’s former secretary at Hamburg. Many of them, inexact and inaccurate as they were with regard to the details of the alleged facts, agreed on this point, viz. that the individual “was one of those men, who are so powerful for good or bad, that the security of every Government requires complete information as to their resting-places and their doings.” Then followed a medley of gossiping insinuations, the precise import of which it was difficult to discover.

“I shall never forget,” said one, “that, when d’Auerweck left Hamburg two months before the assassination of the French Ministers in order to take up his quarters only three leagues away from Rastadt, he said: ‘I am about to undertake an operation which will make a great sensation, and which will render great service to the cause of the Coalition.’”

“Now supervenes a whole year, during which his doings and his whereabouts are most carefully concealed,” wrote another; “however, I am certain that he is acting and working pertinaciously against the interests of France. I have heard him make this remark: ‘We shall take some time doing it, but at last we shall conquer you.’” A third added: “His tranquillity and his silence are but masks for his activity, and I, for one, could never be persuaded that he has all of a sudden ceased to correspond with Lord Grenville in London, with the Count de Romanzof, with a certain Nicolai in St. Petersburg, with Prince Belmonte, with the Chevalier de Saint-Andre, with Roger de Damas in Italy, with Dumoustier, who is, I believe, a Hohenlohe Prince in Berlin, and directly with the Count de Lille.” Finally, d’Auerweck, according to the same report, “complaisantly displayed a spot in the shape of the fleur-de-lys, inside his fist, declaring that ‘this is a sign of descent; it is a mark of predestination; I of all men am bound to devote myself and assist in the return of the Bourbons!’”

It would be a fatal mistake to believe that these fairy tales, all vague and absurd as they often were, remained lost and forgotten in the despatch-boxes of the Ministry of Police. The region, near as it was to Rastadt, where d’Auerweck was reported to have made his appearance, was a valuable and important indication, which of itself was sufficient to make the man an object for watchful suspicion. The ominous nature of the times must, of course, be remembered. Fouché, who had just been restored to favour, and had been placed for the second time at the head of the Ministry of Police, was anxious to prove his zeal afresh, to please the Emperor and to deserve his confidence, while his mind was still troubled by the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, by the exploits of Georges Cadoudal, and by the discovery of the English Agency at Bordeaux, which were all fitting reasons for attracting the Minister’s attention and for exciting his curiosity. So, when on October 11, 1804, his Excellency decided to make further searching investigations into d’Auerweck’s case, and gave precise orders to the prefects of the frontier departments of the Grand Duchy, it is doubtful whether he was careful to note in his charge the principal reasons for attaching suspicion upon the Baron, viz. those which had to do with the assassination of the plenipotentiaries at Rastadt.

It was some time before the required information could be obtained, and though the first inquiries about d’Auerweck made by Desportes, the prefect of the Upper Rhine, added little in the way of news, they agreed, nevertheless, in certifying that the Baron lived very quietly in the outskirts of Offenburg—

“that he there devoted himself entirely to his agricultural occupations, and that the kind of life he led did not foster any suspicion that he kept up his old campaigns of intrigue.”

Six months later, Desportes, in returning to the subject, showed himself more positive than ever, for he affirmed—

“that no active correspondence can be traced to d’Auerweck, and that he saw scarcely any one. He is a man of a caustic and critical turn of mind, who often lets himself go in conversation without reflection in his anxiety to talk brilliantly. A point which is particularly reassuring about him is that he is without credit, without fortune, and of no personal account, and that if he wanted to mix himself up afresh in intrigues he would choose some other place than Offenburg, where there are now only three émigrés, the youngest of whom is seventy-seven years of age.”

But, in spite of these very positive statements, the Minister preserved his attitude of mistrust, which was strengthened by the arrival of fresh notes, in which the same denunciations of the “little Baron” were repeated. He was described as being “restless by inclination, violently fanatical in all his opinions, and longing to make himself notorious by some startling act.” But his position was made worse by the information which was received, that in the autumn of 1805 d’Auerweck had absented himself from home for several days, frightened, no doubt, by the proximity of the French armies, which were dotted about on the banks of the Rhine. How could this sudden flight be accounted for? And his alarm at the sight of the Emperor’s soldiers at close quarters? Such conduct struck Fouché as being very suspicious. He ordered a supplementary inquiry, and this time he did not content himself with the information afforded by the prefect of the Upper Rhine, but let loose one of his best bloodhounds on his scent. At the time, two years ago, when preparations were being made for the kidnapping of the Duc d’Enghien and for watching his residence at Ettenheim, recourse was had to the services of the Commissary of Police, Popp by name, who was stationed at Strasburg. In this frontier town near Basle an active and intelligent man was needed, who could maintain a constant watch on the underhand practices of the Royalist agents. Commissary Popp seemed to be made for the job. His handling of the Duc d’Enghien’s affairs earned the approval of Napoleon; and Fouché, since his reinstatement in the Ministry, recognized in him a clever and expert functionary, on whom he could always count.

This was the man who was charged with the task of spying on d’Auerweck, and throughout the whole of 1806 Popp was hard at work on this mission. His original authentications differed very little from what Desportes had written, and there was nothing to prove that the Baron had in any way departed from his passive attitude.

“I have not discovered,” wrote Popp on April 22, 1806, “that he is in correspondence with the English agitation, or that he shows any inclination to excite and embitter people’s tempers. I believe that he, like many others, is more to be pitied than to be feared.”

Some weeks later Popp managed to loosen the tongue of an ecclesiastic, a dweller in those parts, and from him he got information about the business and movements of the Baron. “He is quite absorbed in rural economy, which is his chief thought to all appearances,” he reported to Fouché; but then, stung to the quick by the repeated orders of his chief (who never ceased from impressing upon him the necessity for the closest watch on d’Auerweck’s traffickings), Popp, impatient for an opportunity to prove his zeal, began to magnify his words by introducing subtle insinuations.

By this time d’Auerweck had come to the conclusion that his stay at Schutterwald was too uncomfortable, and having heard of a bit of land at a reasonable price in Elgersweier, which was not far from Offenburg, indeed about the same distance from the town, he made up his mind to take shelter there and to build a little house, which would be his own property. The question was asked how could he, whom every one looked upon as a penniless man, obtain the funds required to complete this bargain? Without doubt he borrowed from his mother-in-law, Madame de Gelb, who had always lived with him, and whose modest income was so pleasantly augmented by the pension which she received from the English Government. And so, in the middle of the summer of 1806, the “little Baron” transported his penates to Elgersweier, where he settled his belongings very comfortably. By this time two other sons, Armand and Louis, had been added to the one born at Munich, and shortly after arriving at the new home Madame d’Auerweck gave birth to a daughter, who was named Adelaide.

Commissary Popp knew all about these happenings, and his supervision never slackened for an instant. Encouraged by his success in arranging the preliminaries for the affair at Ettenheim, he was perfectly prepared to repeat the operation. With this in view, he began to show the Minister, in ambiguous language at first, his very good and sufficient reasons for desiring d’Auerweck’s presence in France. If necessary, he urged, we could easily get permission from the Grand Duke of Baden to arrest him in his own home. This suggestion was expressed very cautiously at first, but was soon made more explicit, although there was not the slightest shadow of an excuse for such violence, for all his statements “agreed in demonstrating the perfectly peaceful nature of the “little Baron’s” existence.

“It would be advisable to make certain of his person,” wrote Popp, “and my opinion will always be the same if certain difficulties with the House of Austria happen to be renewed; for d’Auerweck, posted as a sentinel on the opposite bank, and doubtless possessing friends on our side, would be one of the very first bearers of information about our military position and political topography.”

About the same time, Bourrienne, one of Minister Reinhard’s successors at Hamburg, arrested an émigré who had lately landed from London, and who was supposed to be in possession of important secrets. This was the Viscount de Butler, Cormier’s half-brother, who, after having “worked,” as we have seen, for the Royalist Committee in London, now found himself stranded in Hamburg in the greatest misery. It was decided to send him to Paris, as he offered to give up certain documents. He was imprisoned in the Temple, and there questioned by Desmarets, who extracted from him all kinds of information with regard to his missions. Naturally, Butler related all he knew about d’Auerweck, how he had made his acquaintance, and what sort of terms he was on with Dutheil and with Lord Grenville. As his answers proved satisfactory he was sent back to Hamburg, where Bourrienne continued to make use of him for many years.

Finally, to complete the bad luck, the police were warned of a certain Sieur de Gelb, a former officer in the army of the Princes, whose behaviour had been discovered to be very mysterious, and who paid frequent visits to the frontier. Now, this émigré was no other than Baron d’Auerweck’s brother-in-law.

All these stories, cleverly made the most of and carefully improved upon, served to greatly excite the curiosity of the Minister of Police, all the more as the Royalists were showing much increased activity in many places. To add to the effect, Normandy became the theatre of several audacious surprises, such as coaches being robbed, convoys plundered, and attacks on the high road, many of which were the handiwork of the inhabitants of the castle of Tournebut, led by the Viscount d’Aché and the famous Chevalier. Besides, the Emperor was waging war in Prussia at the head of his armies, a thousand leagues from Paris, and in his absence the conspirators’ audacity redoubled; but he did not lose sight of them, and from his distant camps he kept so closely in touch with all that was happening in France that he compelled Fouché’s incessant vigilance. An event which took place next year, when war with Germany broke out afresh, clearly demonstrated once more the danger of attracting for too long the attention of his Excellency the Minister of Police.

One evening, in the month of June, 1807, a policeman on his rounds noticed in one of the squares in the town of Cassel a young man behaving very strangely, and speechifying in the middle of a crowd. He drew near, and ascertained that the individual, who was very excited, was pouring forth a stream of insults and threats against Napoleon, whom he went so far as to call “a good-for-nothing scamp.” This was quite enough to decide the representative of public order upon arresting the silly fellow. He was taken off to the police station and questioned. He stated that his name was Jean-Rodolphe Bourcard, “formerly a ribbon manufacturer,” aged twenty-three years, and that he was a native of Basle, in Switzerland. In the course of his examination it was discovered that he had arrived the same day from Hamburg, and that he was full of some very suspicious projects. His story caused him to be suspected, and a report was promptly drawn up for transmission to Paris. Cassel was destined before very long to become the capital of the new kingdom of Westphalia, created for Jerome Bonaparte, and the police supervision of émigrés was exercised as strictly there as in every other part of France. While waiting for orders a search was made in the lodging-house whence the prisoner had come. Nothing much was found in his scanty luggage; some papers, one of which was “a plan and a description of the battle of Austerlitz,” and besides this two or three apparently mysterious notes. One of them contained the words: “Must see Louis—without Louis nothing can be done.” Everything was minutely collected together, and some days later Bourcard was sent off for a compulsory visit to Paris.

He was put in the Temple, and, although it was easy to see from his talk and his strange behaviour that he was a madman, subject to fits of violence, Fouché could not make up his mind to let him go. The examination of his record and the papers which were found in his possession had suddenly given the Minister an ingenious idea. Who could this Louis be who was obviously connected with Bourcard? Certainly a Royalist spy, since the man of Basle had just come from Hamburg, the headquarters of these people. And the Record Office of the Ministry contained many notes referring to a “well-known agent of England and of Austria,” Baron Louis d’Auerweck of Steilengels, who was known to be living on the banks of the Rhine. There was no room for doubt: this person “had assumed the name of Louis in the various missions which he had undertaken.” Was not this the man who was denoted by Bourcard’s note?

Fouché was fascinated by this solution, and, anxious to have it verified, he seized upon the unhoped-for opportunity which had presented itself. And that was why an order was sent from Paris on July 17, 1807, to immediately effect the arrest of the “little Baron.” It would, however, have been impolitic and almost impossible to make use of the same violent measures which had been employed in the Duc d’ Enghien’s case. Besides, Massias, the French Chargé d’Affaires at the Grand Duke of Baden’s court at Carlsruhe, when he received Fouché’s letter, considered it necessary, in order to carry out his chiefs commands, to obtain the Grand Duke’s permission and assistance before moving in the matter.

“But,” he wrote to Fouché, “my seven years’ experience had firmly convinced me that, if I ask for this person’s arrest by the ordinary process of an official letter, he will be warned and will manage to make his escape, so I think I should set off the same day for Baden, where the Baron de Gemmingen, the Cabinet Minister, is now staying with his Royal Highness, for I have on several occasions received proofs of his kindly disposition towards me.”

Massias was not mistaken; his application to the Sovereign of Baden met with immediate and complete success. For the latter, who knew none of the details of the case—not even that d’Auerweck was his own subject—and did not want to offend the Emperor, listened to his representatives petition, and the same day issued orders, from his palace of La Favorite in the outskirts of Baden, to M. Molitor, the Grand Ducal Commissary, to act in concert with Massias, and with the help of the police of Baden to arrest Baron d’Auerweck. For Massias had pointed out that if the order were sent in the first place to the bailiff of Offenburg, “where d’Auerweck must have formed many friendships,” there were a thousand reasons for fearing that the latter would receive warning, “for he is a vigilant man and is on his guard.” At Elgersweier no one had the slightest inkling of the impending danger. The “little Baron” had just returned from one of those expeditions which the police were watching so carefully, and had gone in to see his wife, who had lately given birth to her fourth child. For d’Auerweck had settled down a short time before in his new home, and was perfectly content to enjoy the peaceful existence, which allowed him to move about and finish his Historical Notes on Hugues Capet, and his Dissertation upon the Secularization of Germany under French Methods.

So it can be imagined what a crushing blow was dealt him when Commissary Molitor and his assistants appeared at Elgersweier unexpectedly on the evening of July 23, 1807. We can picture the “little Baron’s” agitation, his distorted face, as he went himself to admit the police officers; his wife’s despair; the house rummaged from cellar to garret; the cries of the children woken up by the hubbub; Madame de Gelb’s indignation; and then the setting forth, in the midst of the police, of the unhappy head of the family, in spite of his useless protestations, and the broken-hearted family, overwhelmed by stupefaction, in their ravished home.

The prisoner soon recovered his presence of mind, and at Offenburg, where he was taken, he set to work to prepare his defence to the best of his ability, and he soon drew up a justificatory document, which was designed to confound his accusers. At the same time—luckily for d’Auerweck—the Grand Duke found out that it was one of his subjects who was concerned, and he withdrew the authority for arrest which he had given, and issued orders to keep the Baron and his papers for his disposal. The preliminary examination of these documents plainly demonstrated the flimsy nature of the charge, and that there was no justification for the outrage which had been committed.

The day after the fateful event, Madame de Gelb went to La Favorite, and, throwing herself at her Sovereign’s feet, implored him to protect her son-in-law. She described the falsity of the charges brought against him, the distress of the mother and of the four children. The Grand Duke could not but be touched by this petition, although he was anxious not to displease M. Fouché.

“I am transported with delight,” Massias said to Councillor Gemmingen, “at having so successfully executed the commands of the Minister of Police, for they were not easy of accomplishment;” and he added, in order to appease the Grand Duke’s fears and regrets, “This affair seems to have taken a turn, which is very fortunate for the prisoner; and I have already advised his Excellency the Minister about it. You can assure his Royal Highness that I will do my very best to finish off the case in a way that shall be agreeable to both Governments.”

But such a result seemed very unlikely, for it would have required very strong compulsion to make Fouché renounce his plan, more especially now that the arrest was an accomplished fact. It seemed absolutely necessary to him to extradite d’Auerweck and to fetch him to Paris; and he had already, by August 5, warned the Prefect of the department of Mont Tonnerre and Moncey, the Inspector-General of Police, to be in readiness “to take charge of and to escort Lord d’Auerweck.”

It was just at this time that Commissary Popp, whose assistance had not been utilized as much as he hoped it would be, began to be worried by the silence which was observed as far as he was concerned, and he entreated his Minister not to allow the Baron to slip out of his hands.

“It was very distasteful to have to make this arrest,” he said, “and it was only effected because it was necessary; and you can guess how carefully, under these circumstances, we have examined his papers, which it was of supreme importance to lay our hands upon.”

However, these papers, which Popp so confidently reckoned would expose the Baron’s intrigues, were found to consist only of purely private correspondence, altogether wanting in political interest; besides the historical works undertaken by d’Auerweck, the search of his house had only brought to light some insignificant letters, amongst which were “a bundle of love letters which d’Auerweck had exchanged with a young émigrée now settled in London. It appears that this entanglement did not meet with the approval of the young lady’s uncle, the girl having lost her parents when she was fifteen years of age.”

The Grand Duke, having heard these particulars, was all the more unwilling to hand over his unfortunate subject to Fouché and his myrmidons. He was convinced “of his perfect innocence.” Therefore the Baron de Dalberg, his Ambassador in Paris, was charged “to urge His Excellency, Minister Fouché, most forcibly to cease from troubling these persons, who were very sincerely to be pitied.” But he only encountered the most obstinate resistance. Fouché had received the plea of exculpation, which d’Auerweck had drawn up two days after his arrest, but he decided it was insufficient, “because it only touched lightly on many of the principal details of his intrigues, and it did not refer at all to his doings before 1800,” and in the margin of the sheet he recorded his sentiments in a kind of cross-examination.

“With whom had he had dealings since his second journey to Paris? Where did he lodge? To whom in London had he written? Did he not hide himself in a house in the Rue Basse-du-Rempart?

“What commission had he been charged with at Rastadt? Had he not made this extraordinary remark to some one before he left Hamburg: ‘I am going to Rastadt; you will soon hear of a great event, in which I shall have had a hand’”?

And Fouché went on to allude to the Baron’s hurried flight at the time when the French troops were drawing near.

“Why did you fly at the time of the commencement of hostilities? You are not a Frenchman? If you had not intrigued against France, or even if you had ceased to intrigue, why did you leave your wife because our troops were about to arrive, since you were a German and settled in Germany on the territory of a Prince, who is on good terms with this same France? But we have reason to believe that you were still carrying on your intrigues. We have reason to think that you came secretly to Paris five or six months ago. You were seen in the Rue de Richelieu. Further, we have reason to think that, stationed as you were on our frontier, you were perilously inclined by your long experience as a spy to continue to spy on us, and that you did not confine yourself to a correspondence with our enemies, but actually controlled men of the class of those whom you directed at Rastadt according to your own acknowledgment.”

Such were the complaints formulated by the Minister, and they were sufficient, it must be admitted, to convince him of the importance of his capture. Even if the Baron’s past life since 1800 could be voluntarily ignored—although this past life could not fail to arouse a host of just suspicions—there still remained his complicity in the drama of Rastadt, and also the coincidence—though not a very convincing one—of Bourcard’s arrest with the Baron’s presence on the banks of the Rhine. So Fouché, in his reply to Baron de Dalberg, who had begged him to comply with his requests, wished to show that he had made up his mind.

“You understand, monsieur, from what has passed,” he wrote on August 29, “that Baron d’Auerweck cannot be set free, and that it is necessary to convey him to Paris in order to give his explanation of the fresh and singular information which has been received about him. Your Excellency may rest assured that his examination will be conducted with perfect impartiality, such as he may desire, and that he will obtain the fullest justice, if he can clear himself.”

The unfortunate Baron had now been kicking his heels for more than a month in the jail at Offenburg, where he was kept under observation day and night by a sentinel. The heat was intense, and d’Auerweck, suffering as he was from an internal complaint, which made his detention all the harder to bear, cursed his bad luck. He reproached his Sovereign in picturesque language with having allowed him to be imprisoned without any proof of crime upon “knavish accusations,” him—

“a citizen, a man of valour, whose honour no man doubts; whose fair dealing every one confides in; who is not ashamed to show his love of religion, and whose life is by no means a useless one; who has sufficient brains to have principles, and sufficient heart to sacrifice himself for his principles when they demand it; whose head and heart are in harmony; who has taken no part in political events except according to his oath and his duty; who, in short, has for the past five years lived as a peasant in a little house, which he had built himself, there tending his garden and rearing his children.”

The Grand Duke, touched by the truth of these reproaches, did his best to avoid granting Fouché’s demand. He believed he had hit upon an expedient when he proposed to the Minister to send the prisoner only as far as Strasburg, where the French Justiciary could examine him comfortably. But Fouché showed himself unmanageable, so fifteen days later the Grand Duke, tired of the struggle, and with the excuse of “the ties of friendship and the peculiar harmony which existed with the French Court,” at last consented to the extradition of Baron D’Auerweck, although—

“His Highness considered that he had the right to expect to be spared the unpleasantness of having to hand over to a foreign jurisdiction one of his subjects, against whom there did not exist any properly established suspicions, and whose papers furnished no proof against him.”

Once again the wrathful spectre of Napoleon, ready to crush the man who opposed his will, had succeeded in triumphing over everything which could be hoped for from justice and good laws.

On September 22 Commissary Molitor took d’Auerweck out of the prison of Offenburg and brought him to Strasburg to hand him over to the French police. In order to preserve precedent and to save his face, the Grand Duke had ordered his councillor to announce that—

“although His Royal Highness, in his particular condescension, had allowed his subject Auerweck to be extradited so as to facilitate the information and accusations which were brought against him this was done in full confidence that he would be treated as considerately as possible, and that he would not be subjected to any unpleasant or harsh treatment in consideration of the peculiar circumstances of his case.”

But what M. Fouché’s instructions were was well known, and no one had any misconception on the subject, least of all the Grand Duke. The pitiful letter which Madame d’Auerweck sent to him next day, and in which she appealed to his kind heart and his pity, must certainly have aroused some feeling of remorse.

After a stay of forty-eight hours in Strasburg, d’Auerweck started on his journey on September 25. In the post-chaise which carried him were a junior officer and a policeman, charged with his care. After crossing the Vosges, they travelled by way of Nancy and Chalons, and reached Epernay on the 28th; in a few hours they would arrive in Paris. Taking advantage of a short halt in the inn, the Baron hurriedly scribbled the following note, which was intended to reassure his family:—

“I have arrived here, my good and tender friend, as well in health as I could hope to be, and much less tired than I feared. I write these few words to you to calm your mind, and to beg you again to take care of yourself. To-morrow, by eight o’clock in the morning, we shall be in Paris, whence, as I hope, I shall be able to write to you. I embrace you, and beg you to kiss Charles, Louis, Armand, and your mother for me.

“May God guard you.

“Epernai, 28th September.”

The post-chaise entered Paris in the morning of the 29th, and passed along the quays till it stopped in front of the general office of the Minister of Police, where the prisoner had to be delivered. Where would they take him? For certain to the Temple tower, where at this time political prisoners were kept. And there it was that d’Auerweck was conducted and locked up. The order in the gaol-book directed that he should be placed in solitary confinement until further notice. It was now the Baron’s turn to enter the gloomy dungeon, which he had so often, twelve years before, gazed at curiously from afar. It was his fate, like his “big friend” Cormier, to closely inspect this building, the name of which evoked such reminiscences of mystery.

Six days were allowed him in which to prepare, without disturbance, his reply to the questions which were to be put to him. On October 5, 1807, a commissary, sent by the Minister of Police, came to see him and to hear what he had to say. A curious thing was that the same proceeding which was employed with Cormier at the time of his imprisonment was renewed for d’Auerweck’s benefit; no reference whatever was made to the whole period antecedent to 1800. Whatever might have been d’Auerweck’s conduct during the Revolution and under the Directoire, what his actions were, in what direction he went and came, who were his friends, all these points were held of no importance by his Excellency M. Fouché, and by Desmarets, who was on special duty in connection with the case. What they were most concerned with was to find out the object of d’Auerweck’s frequent absences during the last few years, and to extort a confession from him of his participation in the murder of the plenipotentiaries of Rastadt. They came to the point without any concealment, but d’Auerweck was on his guard. He flatly denied that he had paid a visit to Paris in the months of April and May, as was alleged.

“I did not travel at all in France, and I have not been in Paris since the year when the Directoire was installed. I can furnish the clearest proofs of this fact. I was warned two years ago that the French police were watching me, and that they accused me of a number of intrigues, the greater part of which I had nothing whatever to do with, for I declare most solemnly that since the July or September of 1799 I have taken no part in any matter against France. I challenge the world to allege a single proceeding of mine, or a single line, against the interests of the French Government. The person who warned me that the French were watching me was the late Abbe Desmares, who lived in Offenburg; the warning was conveyed in an anonymous letter, to which he never owned up, but which I am convinced came from him.”

As regards his sudden flight from Baden at the time of the approach of the French armies, the Baron explained that it was due to his desire to appease the fears of his mother-in-law, Madame de Gelb. Besides, they had only to question the authorities of Rothenburg, of Ulm, and of Nuremberg, and to obtain from them the counterfoils of his passports, in order to find an absolute confirmation of his statements. Then there was the question of his connection with Bourcard. What could the accused reply to that? Was it not at Ulm itself that he had met “Monsieur Bourcard, the father, who was an official from the Canton of Basle?” D’Auerweck’s answer was ready:—

“I have not spent more than twenty-four hours in Ulm. I had my dinner and supper there. The Austrian army had not at that time been forced back upon the town, which was being fortified. I only saw three officers at the table d’hôte, two of them Croatians and one German captain. I had no kind of business with any one. The man called Bourcard, a Swiss official, is quite unknown to me.”

All his denials were very precise—and they were easily to be verified by the means he had suggested—so that there was now very little left of the terrible evidence which weighed so heavily upon the “little Baron,” or of “the crime of conspiracy against the security of the State,” with which he was charged. The slight clue, indicated by Bourcard’s arrest, but damaged by the papers seized at Elgersweier, was completely destroyed when the latter was declared to be mentally afflicted. In short, the tragic adventure which had overtaken d’Auerweck seemed to have been the result of the most vexatious misunderstanding; at least, that is what his cross-examiner expressed to him when he left him.

“You can now consider your case to be finished, and you can see how it is possible to find one’s self compromised by unfortunate coincidences, without any one being to blame.”

Encouraged by this assurance, the Baron suffered patiently in spite of the passing of much time. He knew that he was not forgotten at the Grand Duke’s Court. Dalberg, the Ambassador, had already managed to convey to him some money, with which to defray the first expense of his visit to the Temple, and yonder, at Elgersweier, Madame d’Auerweck was in receipt of assistance from Carlsruhe; for, as a matter of fact, the mother, grandmother, and children, robbed as they were of the head of the family, had been suddenly plunged into the most terrible state of want.

The poor woman, in spite of her condition, desired only one thing: to obtain a passport so as to be able to get to Paris. With this object she overwhelmed the Ambassador of Baden with letters, in which she also implored him to help to set her husband free.

“I know that he is innocent, your Excellency,” she continually wrote to him, “and if your Excellency wants any more proofs of my husband’s peaceful habits, I will rout out all the available evidence to prove it. My husband can only benefit by the search ... and I am sure that your Excellency has pity for my terrible plight and that of my poor little children.”

Dalberg ended by getting annoyed with these letters.

“I receive frequent epistles from Madame d’Auerweck,” he wrote to Carlsruhe; “but this wifely impatience is waste of time, because I can do nothing as long as the presence of the prisoner is necessary for the conduct of the case.”

In the mean time, the Baron, by way of killing time, drew up a second justificatory memorandum, which must doubtless have staggered Desmarets. In it he exposed all the hiatus in his cross-examination, and the absence of any proof against him. Why was it that he was not set at liberty, now that the falsity of the accusations brought against him had been so completely demonstrated? For he had just heard that the Minister of Police had received a very detailed report, which proved his residence, in succession, in the Grand Duchy of Baden from 1798 to 1800, in Offenburg from 1802 to 1803, and in Schutterwald up to September, 1806; it mentioned his journey to Rothenburg and to Nuremberg in 1805, and declared that—

“wherever the said d’Auerweck had lived, he had always conducted himself peacefully and with decency, and had never meddled in politics; that, on the contrary, he had always been occupied with building, agriculture, botany, and rural economy, which had been partly proved by many of the papers found upon him at the time of his arrest.”

So M. Desmarets and his master were in possession of an unquestionable justification of the Baron’s protests. It was, indeed, inconceivable that they would continue to keep him in confinement, and, what is worse, without putting any fresh questions to him.

However, early in the month of March, 1808—and d’Auerweck had now been nearly seven months in the Temple—Baron de Dalberg was informed that Fouché’s intervention was not enough by itself, and that a pardon for the prisoner had been submitted to the Emperor, who was about to leave Paris for a campaign in Spain, but he had refused to sign it. The situation became serious. Dalberg fully recognized the difficulty which he would experience in delivering the unfortunate Baron from prison; for he was looked upon as “an English Agent,” and, as such, infinitely more an object of suspicion than if he had been an emissary of any other Power. The hatred of England was then at its height, and Napoleon’s sentiment was that an English spy deserved to be taken care of, and, indeed, well taken care of. D’Auerweck could not deny that he had at one time been in the service of the hated nation; for all that, he laid claim to being a subject of Baden.

The weeks rolled by, and d’Auerweck began to despair. He had, perhaps, a momentary glimmer of hope that his deliverance was at hand, when he became aware of an unexpected confusion and tumult in the Temple. What had happened? Was Paris once more agitated by a change of Government? Had the Emperor met with defeat? Alas! It was nothing of the kind. But Napoleon had ordered the Temple tower to be demolished, and the seventeen prisoners who were kept there had to be carted off to another lodging. They were taken to Vincennes, and d’Auerweck’s faint hope was blighted. He was more miserable than ever, and, as soon as he had settled down in his new quarters, despatched a vehement protest to Desmarets.

“What is the reason, in the name of God, that I find myself dragged from one place to another six months after the arrival of written statements which ought to have proved my innocence? If my character had again been blackened by spite, at least give me the opportunity of fixing the lie. I cannot think that any one in this world has ever been placed in a more unhappy case than I. My eyesight is impaired, my health ruined, and my wits are worn out. I can only think of my unfortunate children, ruined and deprived of every necessity, and this in the case of a man who is absolutely innocent of all wrong-doing.”

It never once occurred to him that his rigorous imprisonment might be due to some indiscretion connected with his past and with his conduct in 1795, or with the part which he had taken in the “Temple affair.” Why should these old times, which were wrapped in a mist of obscurity, be remembered? And, besides, there was no reason for suspecting anything of the kind.

Neither the Grand Duke nor his Ambassador in Paris relaxed in any degree their efforts to help the Baron, and a voluminous correspondence was carried on between Paris and the Court at Baden about him during the following years; but, to all Dalberg’s demands, Fouché replied that no one denied Baron d’Auerweck’s “perfect loyalty;” the matter depended on the Emperor’s will, and he refused to pass any final order. In order to soften Madame d’Auerweck’s affliction—for she never left them alone—supplies were regularly sent to the prisoner at Vincennes, and he was assured that his family were not being neglected or in want.

“My detention is the outcome of a lengthy series of slanderous informations,” the Baron declared over and over again, “which has been woven and pieced together, more or less cleverly, but the falseness of which has already been demonstrated to those who have been bribed to utter it.”

He was then informed that yet another accusation had been added to the former charges against him: an accusation of having published in the Moniteur, in 1799, certain letters dated from Naples, which were insulting to the First Consul: Now, the Journal Politique de l’Europe had at once, in the name of d’Auerweck, given the lie direct to these statements. But what had he to say for himself?

“You know perfectly well, monsieur, that for the last two years, less ten or twelve days, I have only heard the voice of the Government through the medium of the bolts which have been shot in my face.”

In this way three years slipped by, in the course of which Madame d’Auerweck (who, by the way, does not appear to have led a very virtuous life in her husband’s absence) never stopped pestering the Ambassador of Baden in Paris with her entreaties; de Ferrette, who, on his arrival in France, had succeeded Baron de Dalberg, took up the unfortunate Baron’s case, and determined to bring it to a conclusion. So as to increase the authority of his demands, he managed to interest the Minister of the King of Bavaria on d’Auerweck’s behalf, and the two combined to present a very urgent memorandum, in the summer of 1810, to the Minister of Police. This was not Fouché, for he had been degraded for the second time, and his post was occupied by Savary, the Duc de Rovigo. The two Ministers made their application to the latter.

“Yesterday, at this unpleasant ball,” Ferrette wrote on July 2, “I importuned the Duke of Rovigo to let Lord Auerweck out from Vincennes; this was just before the Emperor arrived. He said to me: ‘His case is not unpardonable, but you may rest assured that we are not keeping him locked up like this without very good reasons. You must wait.’”

At last, on October 16, Savary presented to Napoleon the anxiously-looked-for report, which advised the prisoner’s discharge. To every one’s astonishment, the Emperor only made the following observation: Better keep him until universal peace is declared. There was nothing to be done but to submit to this merciless imprisonment, and to accept the explanation which was given, viz. that d’Auerweck was “a bold intriguer, who was to be found everywhere: sometimes in the interests of Austria, sometimes in England’s.”

Afterwards, as though to find an excuse for this prolonged detention, the Baron was brought in contact with one of those persons who are known as Moutons; his line of action was to get on friendly terms with the prisoner, and to try to get him to talk, the result of these conversations being handed on to the police. A man called Rivoire was chosen for this purpose. He was formerly a naval officer, but had been arrested and imprisoned for conspiracy; he escaped, but was caught and put in prison for the fourth or fifth time. The “Chevalier de Rivoire” was at the end of his resources, and hoped to obtain a remission of his sentence by spying on his companions in misfortune. It was impressed on him that he must specially pump Baron d’Auerweck on the subject of the Rastadt assassination. The two reports, which he sent to Desmarets during the year 1811, give a rather amusing account of the success of his enterprise: a success, of course, skilfully exaggerated.

“D’Auerweck is very suspicious when one begins to put questions to him, so I adopted the ruse of contradicting him and of only grudgingly giving in to him. Then, after having started him in the right direction, if I resign myself to listening patiently, he obligingly begins to overwhelm me with confidences, both false and true, and with all the rubbish which his conceit and his insatiate garrulity inspire in him.... He boasted of having rendered the most important services to the English, both on the Continent and in their own country, where he had exposed and baffled many plots, and had been the cause of the arrest and punishment of many French agents.... When we began to talk about the Rastadt affair, he at first repeated the story which had been manufactured in order to divert suspicion from the real culprits.

“Rivoire: ‘Only children will believe such a fairy tale.’

“D’Auerweck (laughing): ‘That’s true; but we must always tell it, and by dint of many repetitions they will begin to believe it. The matter concerns other people’s interests. I only left Austria when I saw that its Government was fatally weak; so much so that it has to be treated like a spoilt child that does not want to take its medicine. Besides myself, there are not more than two people who are acquainted with the correct details of this affair.’

“Seeing that he had said too much, he then, like a fool, began to retract, saying, ‘Besides, I was attached to a certain Prince’s Minister, who was not there with reason, and I was perfectly neutral in all that happened.’”

Rivoire concluded by saying, “D’Auerweck was the leader, or one of the leaders, in this crime, which was committed at the instigation of the English Government; and he forthwith went off to give his report; and he was at this time in London, travelling viâ France.”

These fresh accusations, however flimsy their foundation, were not neglected, and succeeded in so increasing the gravity of the Baron’s case that his durance was prolonged indefinitely. At the same time they served to maintain the harshness of his imprisonment. Using the Ambassador of Baden in Paris as the go-between, d’Auerweck, who declared himself to be seriously ill, had begged that he might for the time being be sent to a private hospital, where he could be attended to. But they questioned whether his illness was only a pretext, and that he was plotting some plan of escape. Accordingly the Minister of Police refused his request.

“The reasons for the detention of this prisoner,” the Duke of Rovigo declared to his colleague of Foreign Affairs, “do not admit of his being transferred to a private hospital. But I have just given the adequate order that the doctor, whose business it is to attend the invalids in the prison of Vincennes, should visit this prisoner as often as his state of health may require it.”

On May 31, 1812, d’Auerweck was told that no instructions as to his fate had been given, so, bearing his troubles patiently, he sent a fresh request, couched in the following humorous style, to Desmarets:—

“The regular annual announcement that I am still to be kept in the dungeon of Vincennes was made to me yesterday; will you at least have the condescension to pass an order that it may not be in this celler, in which I have lived for three and a half months.”

Two more years passed before the tribulations of d’Auerweck were completed. But in 1814, when the now victorious Allied Armies drew close to Paris, it was decided to send the inmates of the prison of Vincennes to Saumur. How d’Auerweck must have prayed for his countrymen’s speedy arrival, and that this second change of residence might be the prelude to his deliverance!

He had not been two months at Saumur when he heard a rumour that the Allies had entered Paris on March 31. He was not forgotten in his dungeon, for three days later the Grand Duke urgently demanded that his subject might be given back to him, “one of the many victims of the reign which has just come to an end;” and the next day the Minister replied that the order to set the Baron at liberty had been issued three days ago. April 16 was a day never to be forgotten by d’Auerweck and his companions. They were overcome with emotion, as can be guessed from the following lines, written by Baron de Kolli, the most extraordinary adventurer of the Imperial epoch. This person had been confined for four years at Vincennes on account of an attempt to deliver King Ferdinand VII. from Valençay, and at Vincennes he no doubt met our Hungarian. The two of them could exchange their impressions as captives by the good pleasure of the Emperor, both imprisoned without trial, and condemned to an endless captivity, thanks to regular lettres-de-cachet dug up for this occasion only.

“I will try, though in vain, to describe this scene, which will be for ever engraven upon my heart,” Kolli relates. “In the intoxication of happiness and in tears, each one throws himself upon any one he meets, and clasps him in his arms; there are forty persons, all strangers to each other, and in a second they are united by the bonds of the most tender friendship. As we emerge from our tombs, the townsmen press around us, and, undismayed by the sight of our miserable state, drag us to the bosoms of their families. In a single day we pass from want to opulence.”

Those who witnessed d’Auerweck’s return to Elgersweier, prematurely aged as he was by these seven years of misfortune, could hardly recognize in him the talkative and active man of former days. They all had a vivid recollection of that night in the month of July, 1807, when trouble hurled itself upon this family.

However, in spite of confinement and the want of fresh air, the Barons health was not as severely injured as one might have imagined. He lived on in his village for fourteen years, and delightedly took up again the old tasks of an agriculturist, a botanist, and a husbandman.... In his leisure hours he related episodes of his strange past to his family and his neighbours, and, when bragging got the upper hand of him, he recalled the happy time when he had been raised by Fortune to the post of “Ambassador to his Majesty the King of Great Britain!”

He left Elgersweier in 1828 to return to Offenburg, where he had formerly resided, and there he died two years later, on June 8, 1830. Three of his children survived him. Charles, the eldest, had a distinguished military career; as general in the army of Baden, he was governor of the fortified town of Germersheim. Adelaide d’Auerweck lived to be a very old woman, as she only died in 1881, at Munich. Finally, Armand d’Auerweck left four children, one of whom, Ferdinand, emigrated to America, where he is still living.

The descendants of the “little Baron” cherish the memory of this life, so rich in incidents, so extravagant, and so surprising; but the part which he played in the Temple adventure at the time of the great Revolution would have been for ever hidden had not an unforeseen chance served to connect him with one of the threads of this astonishing intrigue, which attracted so much curious attention.

CHAPTER VIII
AFTER THE STORM

We have seen that in spite of the announcement of the Dauphin’s death, and of all that the Chevalier de Frotté had written to her on the subject, Lady Atkyns still held persistently to her conviction that the real proof of the matter had yet to be discovered, and remained still determined to solve the mystery. If, as she continued to believe, the young King had been spirited away, it might still be possible to find him.

But there were new difficulties in the way. Money, for one thing, was lacking now, and she knew only too well how necessary money was. Now, too, she was alone. To whom was she to apply for assistance? Of all her old associates, Peltier alone was accessible, and he was absorbed in his work, as journalist and man of letters.

Why, she asked herself, should she not seek the help of a member of the Royal Family of France? The Comte d’Artois, who had taken in his turn the titles of Monsieur and of Comte de Provence, since his brother’s proclamation as King, was living in England. Why not apply to him? The ingenuous lady did not think of the very weighty reasons why such an appeal must be in vain. Convinced that the Dauphin still lived, she imagined that she could convert the Comte to her way of thinking, and induce him to join her in her search after the truth.

Encouraged by the attitude taken up by the British Government towards her project of inquiring minutely into the matter on the Continent, Lady Atkyns decided before leaving England to approach the Comte, hoping to secure not merely his approval, but also some material assistance. Had she not sacrificed a large portion of her own worldly goods for the benefit of his family? Thus reasoning, she did not conceive the possibility of a refusal. But Monsieur could not regard as anything short of fantastic the supposition upon which her project was based—the supposition that his nephew still survived. To present this hypothesis either to him or to his brother the King was to put one’s self out of court at once.

We can imagine how her application was received. She chose as her intermediary with the Prince the Baron de Suzannet, who had facilitated the purchase of the ships and equipages which were procured in readiness for the rescue of the Queen and the Dauphin.

Having the entrée to the Court, and being one of the most notable of the émigrés in London, he consented to submit his friend’s request to Monsieur. Did he foresee the issue? Apparently not. Here is what he writes to her on August 19, 1797:—

“After the decision M[onsieur] has come to, my dear lady, not to give his countenance to your affair until it has been taken up by others, and after speaking to him so often on the subject, I cannot carry the matter any further, and could not ask him for money. But I see no reason why you should not yourself write to him more or less what you have told me, viz. that you were about to return to France with the consent of the Government, that you ought to be provided with the same amount for returning as you have been for going, but that fifty louis is very scant provision for that—especially considering that you have had to hide yourself away here so long—and that you are afraid you will not have sufficient to enable you to remain long enough in Paris to get together all the particulars required by the Government, and to pay the messenger for bringing them here; and you might point out that you have acted throughout entirely in the interests of the Royal Family, that you do not regret the £1000[76] which your attachment has cost you, or regret them only because you no longer have the money to devote to the cause; and that if M[onsieur] for his part could give you £50, it would free you from anxiety as to ways and means....

“I shall tell M[onsieur] that I am aware you have written to him, and that I shall convey his answer to you. He has been taking medicine to-day and can see no one. To-morrow he is to see some people at the Duc d’Harcourt’s, if well enough. He will not be going away before Wednesday. His address is 55, Welbeck Street. I think you would do well to send your letter to him by hand, sealed and addressed ‘À Monsieur Seul,’ enclosed in an outer envelope with his ordinary address: ‘Son Altesse Royale Monsieur, frère du Roi.’ Send me a line to tell me what you have done. Adieu.”

It was not till after a long delay that Lady Atkyns at last succeeded in meeting the Prince at an inn, only to meet with a point-blank refusal. But she was not to be discouraged. The very next day she wrote again to the Comte asking for an audience. This time it was another member of his suite, the Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, who replied to her communication—

“The moment I saw M[onsieur] yesterday, my dear lady, he told me about your letter, which gave him great pleasure, though it is a matter for great regret to him that he is quite unable to do as you wish, and as he himself would wish. Since his recent attack he has been unable to dress or go out; he has not been able to receive any ladies, anxious though he is to welcome those who are here and who were attached to the Princess. He could not receive one without its being known, and then he would be expected to receive a number of others. You know how things get about and what a close watch is kept on Princes, and how careful our Prince must be to do nothing that would lay him open to criticism or even to suspicion. If his stay here were prolonged, and he found he could see other ladies also, the thing might be managed; but there would be difficulties even then, in view of your secret being perhaps of a compromising nature. I am but expressing to you the Prince’s own views. I hope to see you to-morrow between midday and three o’clock.”

The great of this world are never at a loss for pretexts for refusing requests. Monsieur was particularly anxious to evade an interview which he felt to be undesirable, and therefore confined himself to sending her these amiable phrases.

About the same time M. de Thauvenay, one of the King’s most devoted courtiers, who happened to be in London, seems to have promised to use his good offices with his master on her behalf, telling him of her record and perhaps of her hopes.

Having exhausted all the means at her disposal in England, Lady Atkyns saw that she must manage her journey as best she could from her own resources, and resolved to make yet another sacrifice to this end. She had obtained a considerable loan already once upon a mortgage on her beautiful estate of Ketteringham. As this was her only source of revenue, there was no alternative to raising a further mortgage on it, and this she managed, though with greater difficulty than before. (The property was not, in fact, her own at this time, being entailed on her son Edward.)

She seems to have raised in all about £3000 in this way in 1799 and the three following years.

Some weeks before the “18th Brumaire” and Bonaparte’s coup d’état, she set out for the Continent. What exactly was her purpose? What use was she going to make of her money? It is impossible to say. To clothe her errand in the greater mystery, she decided to land in France under an assumed name, and to veil her personality under the designation of the “Little Sailor” (le petit matelot).

“I feel I must again send my good wishes for a pleasant journey to the charming ‘Little Sailor,’” some unidentified friend writes to her on September 7, “and I cannot too often beg him to bear in mind that he leaves behind him in England friends who take a deep interest in his welfare, and who will learn with pleasure that he has arrived safely at his destination, and, above all, that after fulfilling his mission he has escaped all the unpleasantness and dangers to which his truly admirable devotion and zeal will expose him. I hope one day to prove to the ‘Little Sailor’ how he has long filled me with the most genuine sentiments—sentiments which I have refrained from expressing for reasons of which the ‘Little Sailor’ will approve. I cannot say too often to the amiable ‘Little Sailor’ what pleasure I shall have in repeating to him in France—and in France preferably to elsewhere—the assurance of eternal and tender attachment that I have vowed him for ever and ever.”

It is difficult to know what the “Petit Matelot” did on arriving in Paris. It was a moment of crisis, for the Consulate was being established. Most of those who had been mixed up in the Temple affair were inaccessible, and yet it was important to get into touch with them if anything was to be ascertained about the Dauphin. It would not have done, however, to provoke suspicion, or Fouché would have been on her track.

Certain only it is that for several months she seems to have disappeared from sight. At last she was run to earth and hunted out by Fouché’s agents, and was obliged to make away to the Loire, where she had devoted friends.

The Verrière family lived in the country six miles from Saumur, in Anjou, where many nobles, fleeing from the storm, had found a safe refuge. The vicinity of the forest of Fontevrault enabled them to gain the Vendée, and thus escape the fury of the Revolutionists. Mme. Verrière had met Lady Atkyns in Paris years before, perhaps during the golden days of Versailles. Recalling their former friendliness, Lady Atkyns went to them in her trouble. The welcome they extended to her justified her hopes, and she dwelt with them for some time, until the police had lost all trace of her.

About this period, vague reports began to be spread about with reference to the imprisonment of the children of Louis XVI. in the Temple. The obscurity which had cloaked the last hours of the Dauphin was still keeping certain brains at work. And a book which was published in 1800 helped to reawaken public curiosity. In Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, a romance written by an author until then little known, Regnault-Warin deliberately questioned the alleged death of the Dauphin, and, in fact, based a story of adventure upon the supposition of his being still alive. Written in the fashion of the time, full of surprising episodes, and bristling with more or less untrustworthy anecdotes touching on the captivity of the Royal Family in the Temple, this novel had an immense success. If it came before Lady Atkyns it must have served to stimulate her anxiety to solve the problem she had so much at heart.

In the summer of 1801 Lady Atkyns appears to have addressed herself to Louis XVIII., unwarned by her failure with Monsieur. In this case also failure was to be her portion.

“Your letter,” ran the reply, signed by M. de Thauvenay (whom she had met some years before), and addressed, as a precaution, to Monsieur James Brown, dated October 2, “would have been enigmatic to me had I not placed it before my master, who, by a curious series of accidents, had received only a few days before the communication you sent him on the 12th of July. In requesting me to reply to you, monsieur, he charges me to express to you his recognition of your constant interest and indefatigable zeal for his welfare, and his regret that he is prevented by his present position from learning the particulars of the speculation that your heart has formed, and that he cannot have any share in it.”

Six weeks later Lady Atkyns received a second letter, despatched, like the first, from Varsovie, reinforcing the above:—

“I wish,” writes M. de Thauvenay, “that I could convey to you the deep and tender feeling with which my dear and venerated master has read these new and touching testimonies of your interest and friendship, and his deep regret at being unable to enjoy the consolations that your sympathetic and generous nature has proffered him! No, monsieur, I swear to you, no other house has offered him any kind of interest in the speculation you have proposed to him. I should add that there is no one with whom he would rather have shared the chances than with you; but his position is such that, for the moment at least, he can only display passive courage in the face of misfortune. I need not remind you, monsieur, that the most appreciative and most generous of hearts has eternal claim upon a heart such as yours. Never, I feel convinced, will your noble and moving sentiment be modified by time or place. This conviction is sweet to me, and it is with the utmost sincerity that I render you once again my tender (if I may use the word) and admiring respect.”

It is not easy at first to understand what M. de Thauvenay means by this “speculation,” in which the King refuses to take part. On reflection it seems probable that Lady Atkyns’s proposal, thus described, had reference to the affair of the Temple, for it seems impossible that she should have flattered herself that she could see a way to the return of the exiled King.

However that may be, these two letters convinced her that it would be useless to prolong her stay in France, and she returned to Ketteringham, after an absence of three years, without having effected her purpose.

---

Two tragic events occurred in the year 1804 to startle the French who were still taking refuge in England. The first was the arrest and shooting of the Duc d’Enghien at Vincennes. If Bonaparte had punished one of the many schemers who had plotted against him on English soil, his action would have found defenders. But this execution of a Prince, who was absolutely innocent and who had held apart from all political intrigues, aroused the same kind of horror that had been evoked eleven years earlier by the death of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette.

The Prince de Condé, the Duc d’Enghien’s grandfather, was staying in England at this time, like Monsieur, the King’s brother, and their residences were naturally the centre of the excitement over this event. The Baron de Suzannet describes the state of things in their entourage in a letter to Lady Atkyns:—

“It would seem, madame,” he writes to her on April 14, “that the murder of the Duc d’Enghien has horrified not merely all true Frenchmen, as was to be expected, but also Englishmen of every class, the perfidy as well as the cruelty of it is so revolting to all in whom the sentiment of justice and honour is not extinct. I shall not speak of the courageous and heroic death of this ill-fated Prince, but of the condition of his unhappy relatives. Since the day when Monsieur carried him the terrible news, the Prince de Condé (save for two journeys to London necessitated by his anxiety) has not left his room or been down to dinner. Plunged in grief, he sees no one, and it is much feared that his death may follow that of the Duc d’Enghien. He loved the Duc as his grandson and his pupil, and perhaps even more as one qualified by Providence to add still further to the glory of his illustrious name. The sorrow of the Duc de Bourbon is not less deep and intense.”

At the same moment, the news of the arrest of Cadoudal in Paris, the discovery of his plot, the sensational trial of his twelve accomplices, together with a number of insurgents—forty-seven prisoners in all—and finally the execution of the famous brigand on the morning of June 25, came to intensify the agitation of the French in England.

Of these events Lady Atkyns heard particulars from the Comte de Frotté, father of her friend the General. Throughout five years the venerable Comte had followed with joy or anguish the career of his son as a leader of the insurrection in Normandy. Repeatedly he had come to his aid with money and encouragement. Suddenly the fatal bullet had ended everything. Henceforth the unhappy father had followed eagerly everything that could bring back the memory of the Chevalier, and he had been drawn to Lady Atkyns by his knowledge of the long-standing friendship that had existed between her and him.

To add to his sorrow, Charles de Frotté, half-brother to Louis, had been arrested and imprisoned by Napoleon’s police soon after the execution at Verneuil. He was kept at the Temple for two years, without apparent reason, then sent to the Fort of Toux, in Jura.

“I learnt yesterday,” writes the Comte de Frotté to Lady Atkyns, “that my unhappy son has been transferred from the Temple to a château in Franche Comté. How cruel is this persecution! How terrible this imprisonment, not only for himself, but for us who are bound to him by ties of kinship and for his friends.”

Thus Lady Atkyns, though in the seclusion of the country, far from London and the Continent, remained bound in thought to her life of earlier days. She had no one now to love except her son, who was an officer in the first regiment of Royal Dragoons. Owing to the delicacy of his health, young Edward Atkyns had been obliged to go on leave for a time, and his mother invited the son of Baron de Suzannet to Ketteringham to keep him company. But the visit did not come off, and two months later the young soldier died of the malady from which he had been suffering for some years.

Two years earlier a somewhat strange incident had occurred in France. On February 17, 1802, the police court at Vitry-le-Françoi had to sit in judgment upon a young man named Jean-Marie Hervagault, charged with swindling, passing under a false name, and vagabondage. This individual, arrested and imprisoned for the first time in 1799, claimed to be the Dauphin, escaped miraculously from the Temple. The son of a tailor of Saint-Lo, Hervagault, in the course of his wanderings, had managed to convince a certain number of people that he really was the Prince. Public curiosity was aroused. Many people went to visit the youth in prison. To put a stop to this movement, the Vitry Tribunal condemned the adventurer to four years’ imprisonment. His trial disclosed the fact that amongst his dupes were many persons of distinction, including M. Lafont de Savines. Some weeks later the Vitry sentence was ratified at Rouen, and Hervagault was incarcerated in the prison of Bicêtre in Paris. But the feelings of sympathy and pity that had been called forth, Hervagault’s assertions and his circumstantial accounts of the way in which he had been carried off from the Temple—all these things attracted the more attention by reason of the appearance a short time before of Beauchamp’s work, Le faux Dauphin actuellement en France.

Lady Atkyns was quick to secure details as to the story of the prisoner at Bicêtre. There were many contradictions in it that must have come home to her. And Hervagault mentions the name of the General Louis de Frotté as that of one of his liberators, whereas, in his letters to her, the Chevalier had made it quite clear that this could not be so. However, it seemed worth her while to write to the old Comte de Frotté on the subject.

“I have just received your letter,” he replies, August 16, 1804, “and I hasten to send you a line. I have spent a whole week rummaging among papers. I can assure you that what is stated in the book you have sent me is all fiction. Louis and Duchale are mentioned in 1802 because they were both dead. I am almost certain that in 1795 (in the month in question) Louis was fighting in Normandy, and that he did not leave his companions once all that year. But we shall go into all this on your return, and no doubt will be left in your mind. If you arrive towards the end of the month, tell me at once. I shall call on you and tell you all I can, and make you see why I am convinced that this fellow is a puppet in some one else’s hands.”

Lady Atkyns was reluctant to give up the faint hope that there might be something in this Hervagault narrative, but after some conversations with the Comte de Frotté, and after comparing the pretender’s statement with documents left by the Chevalier, she was at last convinced that the whole thing was a fraud.

We hear of her again in October, 1809, taking a prominent part in the celebrations being held in her neighbourhood in honour of the jubilee of George III. Then we lose sight of her until 1814, and the triumphant return to Paris of Louis XVIII. Lady Atkyns hastens now to secure the good offices of the Duc de Bourbon, with a view to drawing attention to all her sacrifices and the sums of money she has expended.

She is delayed, however, over her contemplated journey to France for this purpose, and Napoleon’s escape postpones for two years more all hope of accomplishing her return to Paris.

When at last the monarchy is restored once more, she finds that her aspirations are destined to be disappointed, despite all the kind words with which she was soothed in England, and we find her uttering the word “ingratitude,” which is henceforth to be so often on her tongue. There were so many who held themselves entitled to gratitude and recognition at the hands of Louis XVIII.—émigrés returned to France after twenty years of sorrow and indignities, and now counting upon the recovery of their possessions or on being reimbursed in some way by the act of the Sovereign. What an awakening they met with when the time came to formulate their applications and they found themselves obliged to condescend to the drafting of innumerable documents, and to put up with interminable delays!

On September 27, 1816, Lady Atkyns writes to her friend Mme. de Verrière an account of her disappointing experiences. She had been well received at Court, but that was all.

“The kind of ingratitude I have been meeting with is not very consoling. They give me plenty of kind words, but nothing more. I have written a long letter to the man of business, begging of him to get the employer to reimburse me a little for the moment, but I have received nothing yet, and this puts me out greatly. Perhaps something will turn up between now and the end of the week. If not I must go and see my poor mother and beg to get my affairs into order.”

The state of her affairs, for long precarious, was now giving the poor lady very serious anxiety. By recourse to various expedients she had managed to hold out until the return of the Bourbons, and to stave off her creditors. But she was now at her last gasp. If the King refused to help her, to “reimburse” her, she was ruined. The Comte de la Châtre had assured her that her application was under favourable consideration, that the King regarded it approvingly, that the Comte de Pradel, the head of the King’s household, had it in hand; but, in spite of this, there was a series of delays.

At last, worn out with waiting, she writes in her naïve style to the Comte on October 10, 1816—

“I beg of you to be good enough to get the King to decide this matter as soon as ever possible. I must get away to England in three weeks to see my mother, who is ill, and I can’t possibly do this until I know the King’s decision in regard to me. I know his Majesty is too good to injure one who has given so many proofs of boundless devotion to the Royalist cause and to the entire Royal Family. Although I have a splendid estate in England, I am now in great difficulties by reason of this devotion. I tell you all this, Monsieur le Comte, so that, like the good Frenchman you are, you may do me this kindness of getting the King to give you his orders. I have run every conceivable kind of evils during these twenty-four years. I beg of you to excuse all the trouble I am giving you, and I have the honour to be, Monsieur le Comte,

“Your very obedient servant,
“Charlotte Atkyns.”

This appeal seems to have been no more successful than the preceding ones, for three months later we find Lady Atkyns still awaiting the promised audience. To distract her thoughts from the subject, she goes about Paris—a new city now to her—is present at sittings of the Chamber of Deputies, and hears the speech from the Throne. On All Souls’ Day she joins in the solemn pilgrimage to the Conciergerie. Who could have been more in place on such an occasion? But with the sad thoughts evoked by the sight of the Queen’s prison were mingled regrets that the sanctuary had not been left as it was. The place had been enlarged, and a massive, heavy-looking tomb stood now where the bed had been.

“I knelt before this tomb,” she writes to Mme. de Verrière, “but I should have preferred to have seen the prison room unaltered, and the tomb placed where the Queen used to kneel down to pray. The place has been made to look too nice, and a simple elegance has been imparted to it which takes away all idea of the misfortunes of that time. I would have left the bed, the table, and the chair. There is a portrait of the Queen seated on the bed, her eyes raised heavenwards with the resignation of a martyr. This portrait is very like, especially the eyes, with that look of angelic sweetness which she had. There is another tomb with a crucifix on it, as on hers, upon which are inscribed the words: ‘Que mon fils n’oublie jamais les derniers mot de son père, que je lui répète expressément; qu’il ne cherche jamais à venger notre mort.’ You go in by the chapel, and behind the altar, to get to where the Queen used to be.... I repeated on the tomb what I vowed to the Queen—never to abandon the cause of her children. It is true that only Madame remains now, but she one day will be Queen of France, and if she has need of a faithful friend she will find one in me.”

These last lines seem a strange avowal. Lady Atkyns seems to be renouncing her faith. What is the explanation? It is simple enough. She has realized that as long as she puts forward her inopportune plea regarding the child in the Temple she must expect to find nothing but closed doors. Yet she has by her proofs of what she alleges, and she is prepared in substantiation of her memorials to hand over a selection of the precious letters from her friends which she has received in the course of her enterprise. These, doubtless, would be accepted, but would never be given back. What, then, is she to do? Threatened on the one side by the distress which is at her heels; a prey, on the other hand, to her inalterable conviction, the luckless lady comes for a moment to have doubts about her entire past. However, this disavowal, as it seems, is but momentary; a calmer mood supervenes, and she returns to her former point of view, unable ever to free her mind from doubts as to the real fate of the Dauphin.

The King’s generosity in this year, 1816, does not appear to have given her much satisfaction.

“At last I have received a little money,” she writes to Mme. de Verrière just before Christmas, when preparing to return to England, “but so little that it is really shameful.”

The following spring she is back again in France, still carrying on her campaign. From 1817 to 1821 her letters pour in upon the Ministry of the Royal Household. Did they contain indiscreet allusions to the affair of the Temple? Perhaps. In any case, with a single exception, all these letters have disappeared.

We find a curious reference to Lady Atkyns in a letter dated January 11, 1818, preserved in the archives of the Comte de Lair—

“She is still in Paris,” says the writer. “For the last two months she has been going every week! She declares now she will start without fail on Tuesday morning, but the Lord knows whether she will keep her word.... She is still taken up with the affair in question, and passes all her time in the company of those who are mixed up in it. I assure you I don’t know what to make of it all myself, but it is certain that a number of people believe it.”

The “affair in question” was the detention at Bicêtre of an individual about whom the most sensational stories were current. A maker of sabots, come over—no one quite knew how—from America, Mathurin Bruneau, playing anew the Hervagault comedy, had been passing himself off as the Dauphin. Arrested and imprisoned on January 21, by order of Decazes, the Minister of Police, Bruneau had for two years been leading a very extraordinary life for a prisoner.

He was by way of being in solitary confinement, but there was in reality a never-ending succession of visitors to him in his prison. A certain Branzon, formerly a customs-house officer at Rouen, who had been condemned to five years’ imprisonment with hard labour, had become his inseparable companion. With the support of a woman named Sacques and a lady named Dumont, Branzon got together a species of little court round the adventurer, issuing proclamations, carrying on a regular correspondence with friends outside, and playing cards until three o’clock in the morning—finally composing, with the help of large slices out of Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, a work entitled Mémoires du Prince. Some unknown painter executed a portrait of the prisoner as “a lieutenant-colonel or colonel-general of dragoons,” and a mysterious baron, come from Rouen to set eyes upon his Sovereign, took the oath of fidelity to him on the Holy Scriptures in the jailer’s own room! On April 29, 1817, the walls of Maromme, Darnétal, and Boudeville, near Rouen, were covered with placards calling upon France to proclaim its legitimate King. And all this happened under the nose of Libois, the Governor of Bicêtre.

There seems, in fact, to be no room for doubt that, as has been well said, “in this prison, in which there has been a constant procession of comtes and abbés, and a whole pack of women, there has been enacted in the years 1816-1818 a farce of which his Excellence Decazes is the author.” The object of this mystification was simply to baffle the Duchesse d’Angoulême in the first instance, and to prevent public opinion from being led astray in another direction. Bruneau did not stand alone. Six months earlier another pretendant, Nauendorff, a clockmaker at Spandau, had written to the Duchesse d’Angoulême to solicit an interview. It was all important to put a stop to this dangerous movement. Therefore when on February 9, 1818, the proceedings were opened at Rouen, no pains had been spared to give the affair the appearance of a frivolous vaudeville. On February 19 Mathurin was condemned to five years’ imprisonment. The court was crowded with all kinds of loafers and queer characters, many of them from Paris, drawn by the rumours so industriously spread about.

Lady Atkyns would seem to have given some attention to this new alleged Dauphin without being carried off her feet. She lost no opportunity of endeavouring to get at the truth, it is clear, and this, as we learn from a police report, involved a number of visits to the house in which Gaillon was imprisoned, and to which Bruneau was transferred after his condemnation. It was even stated that she had offered sums of money to enable Bruneau to escape. She soon had her eyes opened, however, to this new fraud.

The accession of Monsieur to the throne, in 1824, does not seem to have had any favourable result for Lady Atkyns, for we find her at last reduced in this year to taking a step, long contemplated but dreaded—the handing over of Ketteringham to her sister-in-law, Mary Atkyns, in consideration of a life annuity.

She continues, however, to make her way every year to France, buoyed up by the assurances of interest in her which she has received from officials of the Royal Household. At first she stays with friends, the Comte and Comtesse de Loban. Then in 1826, when her mother dies, aged eighty-six, she establishes herself definitively in Paris, taking up her abode in a house in the Rue de Lille, No. 65, where she rents a small appartement on the first floor. Here she gets together the few souvenirs she has saved from Ketteringham—some mahogany furniture covered with blue cloth, a sofa covered with light blue silk, and portraits on the walls of the Dauphin, his father, his uncle, and the Duc de Berry.

It was while residing here that Lady Atkyns lived through the revolution of Italy, after witnessing in turn the reign of Louis XVI., the Terror, the Empire, the Restoration, and the reign of Charles X. What an eventful progress from the careless, happy days when she played her part in the dizzying gaieties of Versailles!

Some weeks before the fall of Charles X., Lady Atkyns drew up yet another petition for presentation to the chief of the King’s household. She did not mince her words in this document.

“I little thought that lack of funds would be advanced as a reason for delaying the execution of the King’s orders. I will not enlarge upon the strangeness of such an avowal, especially as a reimbursement of so sacred a character is in question, sanctioned by the Royal will. I would merely point out to you, Monsieur le Marquis, that I have contrived to find considerable sums (thereby incurring great losses) when it was to the interest of France, and of her King, and of her august family. Failing a sufficiency of money to liquidate this debt, I have the honour to propose to your Excellency that you should make out an order for the payment, and I shall find means of getting it discounted. In your capacity as a Minister to the King, your Excellency will be able, without delay, to obtain the amount necessary, minus a discount, from the Court bankers. Will you not deign, monseigneur, to ask them to do this, and I shall willingly forego the discount that may be stipulated for.... Finally, monseigneur, I beg of you to tell me immediately the day and the hour when I may present myself at the Ministry to terminate this matter. I must venture to remind you that the least delay will involve my ruin, and therefore I cannot consent to it.”

Lady Atkyns’s persistence and the King’s procrastination seem intelligible enough when one learns that the sums expended by her, from the time when Louis XVI.’s reign was projected down to the last year of the Consulate, amounted to more than £80,000. The Englishwoman might well speak of the sacrifices she had made and the loss of her fortune at the dictates of her heart.

One other letter we find amongst Lady Atkyns’s papers—a letter notable for its fine, regular penmanship. It evidently reached her about this date. The writer was yet another soi-disant Dauphin, the third serious pretendant. The Baron de Richemont—his real name was Hebert—had published in 1831 his Mémoires du Duc de Normandie, fils de Louis XVI. écrits et publiés par lui-même, and he was not long in convincing a number of people as to his identity. He probably owed most of his particulars as to his alleged escape from the Temple to the wife of Simon, whom he had visited at the Hospital for Incurables in the Rue de Sèvres. Possibly it was through her also that he heard of Lady Atkyns. At all events, he thought it worth while to approach her.

“Revered lady,” he writes to her, “I am touched by your kind remembrance.... The idea that I have found again in you the friend who was so devoted to my unhappy family consoles me, and enables me the better to bear up under the ills that Providence has sent me. I shall never forget your good deeds; ever present to my memory, they make me cherish an existence which I owe to you. I cannot tell what the future may have in store for me, but whatever my fate you may count upon all my gratitude. May the Lord be with you and send prosperity to all your enterprises! He will surely do so, for to whatever country you may take your steps, you will set an example of all the virtues.

“We shall see you, I hope, in a better world. Then and in the company of the august and ill-fated author of my sad days, you will be in enjoyment of all the good you have done, and will receive your due recompense from the Sovereign Dispenser of all things.

“There being no other end to look for, I beg of God, most noble lady, to take you under His protection.

“Louis Charles.”

Richemont shows some aptness and cleverness in the way he touches the note of sensibility, and attains to the diapason appropriate to the rôle he is playing. Had his letter the effect desired? It is hardly likely, but it is the last item in Lady Atkyns’s correspondence, and we have no means of finding an answer to the question.

---

In the night of February 2, 1836, Lady Atkyns died. By her bedside one person watched—her devoted servant, Victoire Ilh, whose conduct, according to her mistress’s own statement, “had at all times been beyond praise.”

The few friends who could attend gathered together in due course to pay the last honours to the dead. Her remains were conveyed to England for burial at Ketteringham, in accordance with the wish she herself had expressed.

Time passed inexorably over her memory, and twenty years later there was nothing to recall the life of love and devotion of this loyal and unselfish Englishwoman.