Three Sides of Paradise Green

by Augusta Huiell Seaman

"It may have been a foolish whim of mine that I bring with me to this country the three portraits that are so dear to me, and especially foolish to leave the one unveiled. I had, however, my reason for that, but I did not contemplate that the public was to be admitted to my room, as it had to be during our—during Louis' serious accident. All this, however, is beside the point. I will begin by telling you that I am not, as you have so shrewdly suspected, this 'Monsieur de Vaubert' that I call myself here. Truly, 'de Vaubert' is a part of my name, but it is not all. In France I am known as the Marquis Philippe de Vaubert de Fenouil. It is a title that is ancient and honorable. It goes back to the time of Louis XIII—yes, and even before that. When our Louis discovered the 'F' on my handkerchief, he was entirely right in his surmises, and I was not very astute to leave it lying about. N'est-ce-pas?"

He smiled deprecatingly at his three listeners, with a smile so genuine, so utterly friendly, that they found their dark suspicions melting away, even before his tale was well begun.

"To go back to the portrait, however. Yes, it is a very beautiful copy of Madame Lebrun's original. It was executed many years ago by an exceedingly clever copyist, and I doubt if many would know it from the original. It is my dearest possession. I will tell you why.

"My little friend, petite Hélène here, by her wonderful ingenuity and perception has deduced the conjecture that the ill-used dauphin, who should have been Louis XVII, did not die in the Temple Tower, as history has recorded it. There have, indeed, been many legends to that effect. But the truest one, the truth, was never known to the world. There are remaining to-day but two families who are in possession of the facts,—my own and that of our friends the Meadows, whose real name, as you perhaps know, is Mettot. All the rest of that wonderful brotherhood which helped to rescue him are dead and gone, and the secret is dead with them.

"In order that you may fully understand, I will now give you a short account of the real story of the dauphin's rescue. As you know through your researches, after Simon the Cobbler was released from the care of the young king, the dauphin was placed in a small room and completely isolated from the world by bolts and bars. Not even his jailers saw him, only hearing him speak through an aperture in the door. It was the most inhuman treatment of a child that the world has known, and it is a thousand wonders that the boy survived. But he did. At the end of an awful six months, when Robespierre himself was sent to the guillotine and Barras came into power, the boy was removed from this horrible incarceration and brought to a large, clean room, where he was taken care of by two or three guardians chosen for their humanity and kindliness.

"It was at this period that a plot was formed by a league of warmhearted, loyal men,—not only royalists, but republicans, too,—to rescue the dauphin from his long imprisonment and send him somewhere, possibly out of the country, to live out the rest of his life in peace. This league was known as 'The Brotherhood of Liberation,' and the world to-day would stand amazed, did it know the members, the many famous members, who composed it. It has even been whispered that Barras himself and the great Napoleon Bonaparte—then young, poor, and comparatively unknown—were concerned in this plot. All that, however, is as it may be.

"But the main thing is this. The brotherhood was accustomed to meet secretly at the house of my grandfather, another Marquis de Fenouil, in Paris, for he was one of the chief leaders and originators of the scheme. Among them was a young fellow scarcely more than five years older than the dauphin, one Jean Mettot, who was deeply and devotedly interested in the plan. It seems that he and his little foster-sister, Yvonne Clouet, had once become acquainted with the dauphin as he played in happier years in his garden of the Tuileries. Through his intervention, the queen, Marie Antoinette herself, had given the young fellow's foster-mother quite a large sum to defray the overdue taxes on her home and thus enable her to keep it for her children. So grateful was this poor washerwoman, Mère Clouet, and her little daughter Yvonne and her foster-son, Jean Mettot, whom she had adopted from the foundling hospital, that they had vowed to help the poor, ill-used dauphin, even to the extent of risking their lives for him.

"It was Jean Mettot who played one of the most important roles in the plan to smuggle the dauphin out of the Temple Tower. He was employed in that citadel as cook's assistant, and thus was able to give aid right on the spot, as it were. One of the dauphin's three guardians, Gomin, had also become a member of the brotherhood, else the plan could never have been carried out.

"On a given day a sick child who greatly resembled the dauphin was smuggled into the Tower in a basket of clean linen brought by Mère Clouet, laundress for the Temple. This child was so ill that there was no possibility of his recovery. He was speedily substituted for the dauphin, who was carried up to the great unused attic of the Temple. There he was kept for several weeks, unknown to the world and tended only by Jean Mettot. When the sick child at length passed away, the authorities proclaimed that the dauphin was dead and that there was no further need to guard the Tower. It was then that the real dauphin was smuggled out of the Temple in a basket of soiled linen and taken to the home of the Clouets, where he remained for several days. He was finally removed by some of the members of the brotherhood in high authority, and was sent to a distant and obscure corner of France to be cared for and brought up, under an assumed name, by humble people. The brotherhood was then disbanded, being first sworn to secrecy by an inviolable oath never to reveal what had been done.