“The regular annual announcement that I am still to be kept in the dungeon of Vincennes was made to me yesterday; will you at least have the condescension to pass an order that it may not be in this celler, in which I have lived for three and a half months.”
Two more years passed before the tribulations of d’Auerweck were completed. But in 1814, when the now victorious Allied Armies drew close to Paris, it was decided to send the inmates of the prison of Vincennes to Saumur. How d’Auerweck must have prayed for his countrymen’s speedy arrival, and that this second change of residence might be the prelude to his deliverance!
He had not been two months at Saumur when he heard a rumour that the Allies had entered Paris on March 31. He was not forgotten in his dungeon, for three days later the Grand Duke urgently demanded that his subject might be given back to him, “one of the many victims of the reign which has just come to an end;” and the next day the Minister replied that the order to set the Baron at liberty had been issued three days ago. April 16 was a day never to be forgotten by d’Auerweck and his companions. They were overcome with emotion, as can be guessed from the following lines, written by Baron de Kolli, the most extraordinary adventurer of the Imperial epoch. This person had been confined for four years at Vincennes on account of an attempt to deliver King Ferdinand VII. from Valençay, and at Vincennes he no doubt met our Hungarian. The two of them could exchange their impressions as captives by the good pleasure of the Emperor, both imprisoned without trial, and condemned to an endless captivity, thanks to regular lettres-de-cachet dug up for this occasion only.
“I will try, though in vain, to describe this scene, which will be for ever engraven upon my heart,” Kolli relates. “In the intoxication of happiness and in tears, each one throws himself upon any one he meets, and clasps him in his arms; there are forty persons, all strangers to each other, and in a second they are united by the bonds of the most tender friendship. As we emerge from our tombs, the townsmen press around us, and, undismayed by the sight of our miserable state, drag us to the bosoms of their families. In a single day we pass from want to opulence.”
Those who witnessed d’Auerweck’s return to Elgersweier, prematurely aged as he was by these seven years of misfortune, could hardly recognize in him the talkative and active man of former days. They all had a vivid recollection of that night in the month of July, 1807, when trouble hurled itself upon this family.
However, in spite of confinement and the want of fresh air, the Barons health was not as severely injured as one might have imagined. He lived on in his village for fourteen years, and delightedly took up again the old tasks of an agriculturist, a botanist, and a husbandman.... In his leisure hours he related episodes of his strange past to his family and his neighbours, and, when bragging got the upper hand of him, he recalled the happy time when he had been raised by Fortune to the post of “Ambassador to his Majesty the King of Great Britain!”
He left Elgersweier in 1828 to return to Offenburg, where he had formerly resided, and there he died two years later, on June 8, 1830. Three of his children survived him. Charles, the eldest, had a distinguished military career; as general in the army of Baden, he was governor of the fortified town of Germersheim. Adelaide d’Auerweck lived to be a very old woman, as she only died in 1881, at Munich. Finally, Armand d’Auerweck left four children, one of whom, Ferdinand, emigrated to America, where he is still living.
The descendants of the “little Baron” cherish the memory of this life, so rich in incidents, so extravagant, and so surprising; but the part which he played in the Temple adventure at the time of the great Revolution would have been for ever hidden had not an unforeseen chance served to connect him with one of the threads of this astonishing intrigue, which attracted so much curious attention.
CHAPTER VIII
AFTER THE STORM
We have seen that in spite of the announcement of the Dauphin’s death, and of all that the Chevalier de Frotté had written to her on the subject, Lady Atkyns still held persistently to her conviction that the real proof of the matter had yet to be discovered, and remained still determined to solve the mystery. If, as she continued to believe, the young King had been spirited away, it might still be possible to find him.