But he proceeds to assure Lady Atkyns that she still retains all his admiration and respect, and to protest that he only acquaints her with the discovery that he has made because of his attachment to her. Filled with mistrust of Frotté, Cormier withholds from him particulars as to the progress of affairs at the Temple, and only vouchsafes his information now and again in vague terms. “I refused to give Frotté the names of the agents,” he wrote to Lady Atkyns some months later. “Please remember that. I shall always be proud of that.”
It is not astonishing that Frotté should show some surprise at the way in which he was being treated, though he was prevented by other causes of annoyance—his failure to get any satisfaction out of the British Government and the repeated postponements of his departure—from taking his position in this respect too much to heart.
Lady Atkyns herself was keeping him at a distance at this time and avoiding him when she came to London. When he asks for an interview, she refuses on the pretext of her widowed state and public opinion.
“I wished to avoid seeing or writing M. de Frotté,” she herself records at a later period, “as I was not in a position to talk to him about the means being taken for the rescue of the King.”
However, on the eve of setting out from England into the unknown, the Chevalier makes one more effort to see her.
“You do not write to me,” he begins his letter (December 27, 1794), “and I should be angry with you if I could be angry with any one, now that I have all my wishes fulfilled. In three days everything has changed, and I have nothing more to ask for in England. The longed-for moment has come. P[uisaye] wants me. I go with him, and all my requests are granted. We start on Thursday at latest. It is important that I should see you. I beg of you to set out at once and spend twenty-four hours here, but without any one knowing of your journey, lest its object should be suspected. Try to be here by Monday evening, and let me know where I could see you.”
This time the appeal was too strong to be resisted. It was in the depths of winter, and the letter arrived at Ketteringham in the evening; but Lady Atkyns hired a post-chaise at once, and set out a few hours later, and travelled all night in stormy weather to London, arriving there in the morning. She seems, however, to have resisted the temptation to let Frotté into the secret of the Temple doings. Perhaps she had a presentiment that the Chevalier, for all his protestations of fidelity now, would fall away later and pass into the camp of some other pretendant to the throne.
We have spoken already of the endless intrigues which were being hatched round the British Government by the hordes of émigrés and broken-down exiles from the Continent. For these gentry, mostly penniless and forced to beg their livelihood, no resource was too base by which they could get into favour with the Ministers. Besides scheming in a thousand different fashions against the common enemy, the Revolution, they stuck at nothing in their efforts to throw suspicion upon each other. The little court which had gathered round the Comte D’Artois on the Continent was also a hotbed of plots and schemes, the influence of which made itself felt in London. Every one spied on every one else.
In the midst of this world of intruders a sort of industrial association came into being in the course of the year 1794, for the purpose of inundating France with false paper-money. It was hoped that in this way a severe blow would be dealt at the hated Jacobins and their friends. These nefarious proceedings soon became known, and called forth the indignation of some of the better class of émigrés, among them the honest Cormier.
His position among his compatriots was not at this time of the best. They had no love for this man of firm character, faithful to his principles and incapable of lending his countenance to such doings. He himself soon came to realize this.