A friend of Marie-Antoinette (Lady Atkyns)

by Frédéric Barbey

INTRODUCTION

To tell once again the oft-told story of Queen Marie-Antoinette; to go over anew all the familiar episodes of her sojourn at the Tuileries, her captivity in the Temple, her appearance before the Revolutionary tribunal, and her death; to append some hitherto undiscovered detail to the endless piles of writings inspired by these events, and in our turn sit in judgment alike upon her conduct and the conduct of her enemies, and, as a natural sequence, upon the Revolution, its work and its issues: to do any or all of these things has not been our intention.

This book has a less ambitious aim—that of restoring the picture of a woman, a foreigner, who was brought by chance one day to Versailles on the eve of the catastrophe, whom the Queen honoured with her friendship, and who knew no rest until she had expended all her energy and all her wealth in efforts to procure the liberty not only of Marie-Antoinette herself, but of those belonging to her. How Lady Atkyns set out upon her project, whom she got to help her, what grounds for hope she had, and what hindrances and disappointments she experienced, the degrees of success and of failure that attended all her attempts—these are the matters we have sought to deal with.

In the maze of her plots and plans, necessarily mixed up with the enterprises of the émigrés and of the agents of the counter-revolution—up above the network of all these machinations within France and without—one luminous point shines forth always as the goal of every project: the tower of the Temple. All around the venerable building strain and struggle the would-be rescuers of its prisoners. Its name, now famous, instils into the Royalist world something of the terror that went forth of old from the Bastille. What went on exactly inside the dungeon from 1792 to 1795? The question, so often canvassed by contemporaries, is still where it was, crying out for an answer. However hackneyed may seem the matter of the Dauphin’s imprisonment, we have not felt warranted in deliberately avoiding it. Had we been so minded when embarking upon this study (the voluminous bibliography of the subject is calculated to discourage the historian!), we should in any case have been forced into its investigation by a heap of hitherto unpublished documents which we unearthed.

This leads us to the enumeration of the sources whence we have drawn the materials for our work.

All that has been hitherto known of Lady Atkyns amounts to very little. M. de la Sicotière, coming upon her name in the course of his study of the life of Louis de Frotté, refers to her merely in a brief note, necessarily incomplete.[1] Four years later, M. V. Delaporte, on the occasion of the centenary of Marie Antoinette, published in his Études a correspondence in which the name of the Queen’s English friend repeatedly appeared. These papers caught our attention. Under the friendly guidance of M. Delaporte we sought to recover the papers which Lady Atkyns left behind her on her death. In the course of systematic researches, into the nature of which we need not enter here, we were enabled by an unlooked-for piece of good luck to lay hands upon the entire collection of Lady Atkyns’s correspondence, covering her whole life. This correspondence, docketed and arranged by the notary entrusted with the regulating of the affairs of the deceased, was found lying in the archives of the notary’s study, where, by the permission of the present owner of the documents, I was able to consult them.

The letters are all originals. Some of them, of which copies had been made by some one unidentified, had been destined probably for use in supporting claims put forward by Lady Atkyns. Many letters, unfortunately, are missing, having been confided by the too trustful lady to members of the Royal Household or to Louis XVIII. himself.

To know what value to attach to these letters, it was necessary to know something about the writers. Apart from General Louis de Frotté, who has been made the subject of a detailed biography, the characters mixed up with Lady Atkyns’s adventures appear for the first time upon the stage of history.

The Archives Nationales, and those of the Ministry for War and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, enable us to recall these forgotten worthies with sufficient accuracy. We have made use in the same way of the Municipal Archives of Dunkerque in our account of the flight of the Chevalier de Conterne and his companion out of the kingdom; of the Archives of Lille; and of the Archives of the Grand Duchy of Baden, preserved at Carlsbad.

This bald enumeration suffices to indicate the spirit in which our task has been conceived and carried out. In a question such as this, obscured and confused by any number of dubious second-hand and third-hand testimonies and untrustworthy narratives, it was necessary to get hold of absolutely irrefutable documents. Letters from contemporaries seemed to us to fulfil better than anything else the conditions thus imposed. They have made it possible for us to supplement in large measure the information acquired from the Archives of the State: many of these letters are derived from private family archives which have most generously been placed at our disposal.

Thanks to these friendly helpers, we have succeeded in completing a task undertaken in a spirit of filial affection. We cannot forget her who guided and took part in our researches and helped with her sympathy and encouragement. To her it is that we must make our first acknowledgment of indebtedness, and then to the historian to whom this book is inscribed, and whose valued and assiduous help we have never lacked.

We have to express our gratitude also to all those who have helped us with their advice and good offices: the Duc de La Tremoïlle, Member of the Institute; the Marquis de Frotté; Comte Lair; General de Butler; our lamented confrère, M. Parfouru, archivist of the Department of Ille-et-Vilaine; and to M. Coyecque; M. Lucien Lazard, assistant archivist of the Department of the Seine; M. Schmidt, keeper of the Archives Nationales; M. Desplanque, municipal librarian at Lille; M. Georges Tassez, keeper of the Lille Archives; M. Edmond Biré; M. le Dr. Obser, the learned editor of the political correspondence of Karl Friedrichs von Baden; M. Léonce Pingaud; M. Barthélemy Pocquat; our colleague and friend, M. E. L. Bruel; and to Mr. Freeman O’Donoghue, of the Print Room of the British Museum.

Paris,
March 22, 1905.