Of these events Lady Atkyns heard particulars from the Comte de Frotté, father of her friend the General. Throughout five years the venerable Comte had followed with joy or anguish the career of his son as a leader of the insurrection in Normandy. Repeatedly he had come to his aid with money and encouragement. Suddenly the fatal bullet had ended everything. Henceforth the unhappy father had followed eagerly everything that could bring back the memory of the Chevalier, and he had been drawn to Lady Atkyns by his knowledge of the long-standing friendship that had existed between her and him.
To add to his sorrow, Charles de Frotté, half-brother to Louis, had been arrested and imprisoned by Napoleon’s police soon after the execution at Verneuil. He was kept at the Temple for two years, without apparent reason, then sent to the Fort of Toux, in Jura.
“I learnt yesterday,” writes the Comte de Frotté to Lady Atkyns, “that my unhappy son has been transferred from the Temple to a château in Franche Comté. How cruel is this persecution! How terrible this imprisonment, not only for himself, but for us who are bound to him by ties of kinship and for his friends.”
Thus Lady Atkyns, though in the seclusion of the country, far from London and the Continent, remained bound in thought to her life of earlier days. She had no one now to love except her son, who was an officer in the first regiment of Royal Dragoons. Owing to the delicacy of his health, young Edward Atkyns had been obliged to go on leave for a time, and his mother invited the son of Baron de Suzannet to Ketteringham to keep him company. But the visit did not come off, and two months later the young soldier died of the malady from which he had been suffering for some years.
Two years earlier a somewhat strange incident had occurred in France. On February 17, 1802, the police court at Vitry-le-Françoi had to sit in judgment upon a young man named Jean-Marie Hervagault, charged with swindling, passing under a false name, and vagabondage. This individual, arrested and imprisoned for the first time in 1799, claimed to be the Dauphin, escaped miraculously from the Temple. The son of a tailor of Saint-Lo, Hervagault, in the course of his wanderings, had managed to convince a certain number of people that he really was the Prince. Public curiosity was aroused. Many people went to visit the youth in prison. To put a stop to this movement, the Vitry Tribunal condemned the adventurer to four years’ imprisonment. His trial disclosed the fact that amongst his dupes were many persons of distinction, including M. Lafont de Savines. Some weeks later the Vitry sentence was ratified at Rouen, and Hervagault was incarcerated in the prison of Bicêtre in Paris. But the feelings of sympathy and pity that had been called forth, Hervagault’s assertions and his circumstantial accounts of the way in which he had been carried off from the Temple—all these things attracted the more attention by reason of the appearance a short time before of Beauchamp’s work, Le faux Dauphin actuellement en France.
Lady Atkyns was quick to secure details as to the story of the prisoner at Bicêtre. There were many contradictions in it that must have come home to her. And Hervagault mentions the name of the General Louis de Frotté as that of one of his liberators, whereas, in his letters to her, the Chevalier had made it quite clear that this could not be so. However, it seemed worth her while to write to the old Comte de Frotté on the subject.
“I have just received your letter,” he replies, August 16, 1804, “and I hasten to send you a line. I have spent a whole week rummaging among papers. I can assure you that what is stated in the book you have sent me is all fiction. Louis and Duchale are mentioned in 1802 because they were both dead. I am almost certain that in 1795 (in the month in question) Louis was fighting in Normandy, and that he did not leave his companions once all that year. But we shall go into all this on your return, and no doubt will be left in your mind. If you arrive towards the end of the month, tell me at once. I shall call on you and tell you all I can, and make you see why I am convinced that this fellow is a puppet in some one else’s hands.”
Lady Atkyns was reluctant to give up the faint hope that there might be something in this Hervagault narrative, but after some conversations with the Comte de Frotté, and after comparing the pretender’s statement with documents left by the Chevalier, she was at last convinced that the whole thing was a fraud.
We hear of her again in October, 1809, taking a prominent part in the celebrations being held in her neighbourhood in honour of the jubilee of George III. Then we lose sight of her until 1814, and the triumphant return to Paris of Louis XVIII. Lady Atkyns hastens now to secure the good offices of the Duc de Bourbon, with a view to drawing attention to all her sacrifices and the sums of money she has expended.
She is delayed, however, over her contemplated journey to France for this purpose, and Napoleon’s escape postpones for two years more all hope of accomplishing her return to Paris.