The King’s generosity in this year, 1816, does not appear to have given her much satisfaction.
“At last I have received a little money,” she writes to Mme. de Verrière just before Christmas, when preparing to return to England, “but so little that it is really shameful.”
The following spring she is back again in France, still carrying on her campaign. From 1817 to 1821 her letters pour in upon the Ministry of the Royal Household. Did they contain indiscreet allusions to the affair of the Temple? Perhaps. In any case, with a single exception, all these letters have disappeared.
We find a curious reference to Lady Atkyns in a letter dated January 11, 1818, preserved in the archives of the Comte de Lair—
“She is still in Paris,” says the writer. “For the last two months she has been going every week! She declares now she will start without fail on Tuesday morning, but the Lord knows whether she will keep her word.... She is still taken up with the affair in question, and passes all her time in the company of those who are mixed up in it. I assure you I don’t know what to make of it all myself, but it is certain that a number of people believe it.”
The “affair in question” was the detention at Bicêtre of an individual about whom the most sensational stories were current. A maker of sabots, come over—no one quite knew how—from America, Mathurin Bruneau, playing anew the Hervagault comedy, had been passing himself off as the Dauphin. Arrested and imprisoned on January 21, by order of Decazes, the Minister of Police, Bruneau had for two years been leading a very extraordinary life for a prisoner.
He was by way of being in solitary confinement, but there was in reality a never-ending succession of visitors to him in his prison. A certain Branzon, formerly a customs-house officer at Rouen, who had been condemned to five years’ imprisonment with hard labour, had become his inseparable companion. With the support of a woman named Sacques and a lady named Dumont, Branzon got together a species of little court round the adventurer, issuing proclamations, carrying on a regular correspondence with friends outside, and playing cards until three o’clock in the morning—finally composing, with the help of large slices out of Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, a work entitled Mémoires du Prince. Some unknown painter executed a portrait of the prisoner as “a lieutenant-colonel or colonel-general of dragoons,” and a mysterious baron, come from Rouen to set eyes upon his Sovereign, took the oath of fidelity to him on the Holy Scriptures in the jailer’s own room! On April 29, 1817, the walls of Maromme, Darnétal, and Boudeville, near Rouen, were covered with placards calling upon France to proclaim its legitimate King. And all this happened under the nose of Libois, the Governor of Bicêtre.
There seems, in fact, to be no room for doubt that, as has been well said, “in this prison, in which there has been a constant procession of comtes and abbés, and a whole pack of women, there has been enacted in the years 1816-1818 a farce of which his Excellence Decazes is the author.” The object of this mystification was simply to baffle the Duchesse d’Angoulême in the first instance, and to prevent public opinion from being led astray in another direction. Bruneau did not stand alone. Six months earlier another pretendant, Nauendorff, a clockmaker at Spandau, had written to the Duchesse d’Angoulême to solicit an interview. It was all important to put a stop to this dangerous movement. Therefore when on February 9, 1818, the proceedings were opened at Rouen, no pains had been spared to give the affair the appearance of a frivolous vaudeville. On February 19 Mathurin was condemned to five years’ imprisonment. The court was crowded with all kinds of loafers and queer characters, many of them from Paris, drawn by the rumours so industriously spread about.
Lady Atkyns would seem to have given some attention to this new alleged Dauphin without being carried off her feet. She lost no opportunity of endeavouring to get at the truth, it is clear, and this, as we learn from a police report, involved a number of visits to the house in which Gaillon was imprisoned, and to which Bruneau was transferred after his condemnation. It was even stated that she had offered sums of money to enable Bruneau to escape. She soon had her eyes opened, however, to this new fraud.
The accession of Monsieur to the throne, in 1824, does not seem to have had any favourable result for Lady Atkyns, for we find her at last reduced in this year to taking a step, long contemplated but dreaded—the handing over of Ketteringham to her sister-in-law, Mary Atkyns, in consideration of a life annuity.