That was a red-letter day! From the very first letters that were looked at, it seemed that henceforth all doubts would be at an end: the Royal youth had assuredly been carried away from the Temple! Between the lines, beneath all the studiously vague and discreet wording of the correspondence, we were able to follow, in one letter after another, all the plotting and planning of the escape, the anxieties of the conspirators, the precautions they had to take, the disappointments, the treacheries, the hopes.... At last, we were on the threshold of the actual day of the escape! Another week would find us face to face with the Dauphin! Three days more...! To-morrow...! Alas! our disappointment was great—almost as great as that of Lady Atkyns’s fellow-workers. The boy never came into their hands. Did he escape? Everything points to his having done so, but everything points also to his having been spirited away out of their hands just as he was being embarked for England, where Lady Atkyns awaited feverishly the coming of the child she called her King—her King to whose cause she made her vows, but on whose face she was destined probably never to set eyes, and whose fate was for ever to remain to her unknown.
Such is the story we are told in this book of Frédéric Barbey’s—a painful, saddening, exasperating story, extracted (is it necessary to add?) from documents of incontestable authenticity, now made use of for the first time.
But can it be said to satisfy fully our curiosity? Is it the last word on this baffling “Question Louis XVII.,” the bibliography of which runs already to several hundreds of volumes? Of course not! The record of Lady Atkyns’s attempts at rescuing the Prince is a singularly important contribution to the study of the problem, but does not solve it. What became of the boy after he was released? Was this boy that they released the real Prince, or is there question of a substitute already at this stage? Did Marie-Antoinette’s devoted adherent succeed merely in being the dupe of the people in her pay? At the period of her very first efforts, may not the Dauphin have been already far from the Temple—hidden away somewhere, perhaps gone obscurely to his death, in the house of some disreputable person to whom his identity was unknown? For must we not place some reliance upon the assertions of the wife of Simon the shoemaker, who declared she had carried off the Prince at a date seven months earlier than the first steps taken by Lady Atkyns? It is all a still insoluble problem, the most complex, the most difficult problem that the perspicacity of historians has ever been called upon to solve.
The most important result of this new study is that it relegates to the field of fiction the books of Beauchesne, Chantelauze, La Sicotière, and Eckart among others; that it disproves absolutely the assertions of the official history of these events—the assertion that there is no room for doubt that the Dauphin never left his cell, that he lived and suffered and died there. Henceforward, it is an established fact, absolutely irrefutable, that during nearly five months, from November, 1794, to March, 1795, the child in the jailer’s hands was not the son of Louis XVI., but a substitute, and mute. How did this deception end? Was the issue what was expected? The matter is not cleared up; but that this substitution of the Prince was effected is now beyond dispute, and this revelation, instead of throwing light upon the impenetrable obscurity of the drama, renders it still more dense. This mute boy substituted for the boy in prison, who was himself possibly but a substitute; these sly and foolish guardians who succeed to each other, muddling their own brains and mystifying each other; these doctors who are called to the bedside of the dying Prince, and who, like Pelletan, long afterwards invent stories about his death-bed sufferings—though at the actual time of his death they were either so careless or so cunning as to draw up an unmeaning procès-verbal, as to the bearing of which commentators for more than a century have been unable to agree;—all these official statements which establish nothing; the interment recorded in three separate ways by the three functionaries who were witnesses; the obvious, manifest, admitted doubt, which survived in the minds of Louis XVIII. and the Duchesse d’Angoulême; the manœuvres of the Restoration Government, which could so easily have elucidated the question, and which, by maladresse or by guilefulness, made it impenetrable, by removing the most important documents from the national archives; finally, the foolish performances of the fifteen or so lying adventurers who attempted to pass themselves off as so many dauphins escaped from the Temple, and each of whom had his devoted adherents, absolutely convinced of his being the real prince, and whose absurd effusions, when not venal, combine to produce the effect of an inextricable maze; these were the factors of the “Question Louis XVII.” The worst of it all is that one must overlook no detail: it is only by disproving and eliminating that we can succeed in bringing out isolated facts—solid, indisputable facts that shall serve as stepping-stones to future revelations.
It is necessary to study, scrutinize, and reflect. One opinion alone is to be condemned as indubitably wrong: that of the historians who see nothing in all this worthy of investigation and of discussion, to whom the story of the Dauphin is all quite clear and intelligible, and who go floundering about over the whole ground with the calm serenity of the blind, assured of the freedom of their road from obstruction, and that they cannot see the obstacles in their way. Frédéric Barbey’s work unveils too many incontestable facts of history for it to be possible henceforth for any one to see in this marvellous enigma nothing but fantasies and inventions.
VICTORIEN SARDOU.
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.