To replace the mute, another substitute has been found, a scrofulous boy who may be expected soon to die. All barriers to the Dauphin’s escape will thus be removed. So much we gather from Laurent, and all his statements are borne out by documents which have been left by Royalist agents.
This second substitution effected, Laurent was able to quit his post with an easy mind, and we find that he did actually leave the Temple on March 29, 1795. His successor, Lasne, arrives two days later. Gomin, who perhaps knows part of the truth through Laurent (and, moreover, his rôle is more especially to attend to Marie Thérèse), is careful not to confide in him, knowing well the risk he would run by so doing. Lasne finds in the prison a boy who is evidently very ill, in great suffering, whose death is soon to be expected. What would be the use of asking questions? It is enough for him to attend to the child as best he may during the few weeks of life that still remain to him.
Spring had passed and June had arrived before Lady Atkyns was again to see the familiar handwriting, rounded and minute, of her friend the Breton magistrate. The letter bore the postmark of Hamburg. What was Cormier doing on the banks of the Elbe? He would seem to have had some perilous adventures. Probably he had been arrested as an émigré and had escaped the guillotine by some happy chance. However that may be, the news he had to tell of events in France came as a great relief to his correspondent.
“We have been better served, my dear friend, than we ourselves arranged. Our agents have not kept to our plan, but they have done wisely.... But we must have patience. Things are in such a condition at present that they can be neither hastened nor delayed. A false move might have very bad results.”
Within a week of the arrival of this letter, an announcement, that came to many as a surprise, found its way round London. It was officially reported that the Dauphin had died in prison on June 8, 1795. Had not Cormier’s assurances come in time to buoy her up, so categorical a statement might well have given Lady Atkyns a severe shock. She knew now, however, that it could not be of her boy that there was question.
Some weeks pass in silence, and Lady Atkyns, impatient for news, urges the “little baron” to set out for Hamburg. He starts in the first week of July, but is delayed at Ocfordnese, whence he writes to her on the 16th. At last he reaches his destination, but means of communication are so uncertain that several more weeks elapse before she hears anything further. September finds d’Auerweck returning to London with a letter from Cormier to Lady Atkyns. In October, again unable to curb her anxiety, she had just decided to send d’Auerweck to Paris, when, to her deep grief and dismay, she learnt suddenly from Cormier that everything had gone wrong—that “they had all been deceived, shamefully deceived.” The child that had died on June 8 was, indeed, the second substitute, and the Dauphin had undoubtedly escaped, but others had got possession of him, and the boy handed over to Lady Atkyns’ agents was the young mute.
“Yes,” he writes, “we have been taken in totally and completely. That is quite certain. But how have they managed to do it? And did we take every step that could be taken to make this impossible? These are matters you will want me to go into in detail, and I shall not fail to do so; but I must wait until I have time to trace the sequence of events from a diary day by day for a year past. The entries for the first two months are missing for the present—the least interesting period certainly, since down to that time, and for several months afterwards, only the project of carrying off the Dauphin was being kept in view, the project which had to be abandoned afterwards in favour of another which seemed simpler and more feasible, as well as less perilous.”
Cormier’s long letter left Lady Atkyns completely in the dark as to what exactly had happened. They had been tricked somehow—that was all she knew.
To us, as to her, the names of most of the many participants in this mysterious intrigue remain unknown. Laurent went off to San Domingo in the following year, where he died on August 22, 1807. Gomin, to some extent his accomplice in the matter of the substitution, followed Marie Antoinette’s daughter to Austria, and was careful to keep what he knew to himself. As for our three friends, Cormier, Frotté, and d’Auerweck, we shall learn presently the reasons for their silence.