Richemont shows some aptness and cleverness in the way he touches the note of sensibility, and attains to the diapason appropriate to the rôle he is playing. Had his letter the effect desired? It is hardly likely, but it is the last item in Lady Atkyns’s correspondence, and we have no means of finding an answer to the question.
In the night of February 2, 1836, Lady Atkyns died. By her bedside one person watched—her devoted servant, Victoire Ilh, whose conduct, according to her mistress’s own statement, “had at all times been beyond praise.”
The few friends who could attend gathered together in due course to pay the last honours to the dead. Her remains were conveyed to England for burial at Ketteringham, in accordance with the wish she herself had expressed.
Time passed inexorably over her memory, and twenty years later there was nothing to recall the life of love and devotion of this loyal and unselfish Englishwoman.
FOOTNOTES:
[76] This is far below the actual figure.
EPILOGUE
Not more than two or three generations separate us from the period through which we have seen come and go the various actors involved in the enterprise of which the prisoners in the Temple were the stake. The rôle that was played by Lady Atkyns and her confidants, forming as it did a minor episode in the changeful story of the emigration and of the fortunes of the Royalists during the Revolution, deserved to be set forth. But the interest attached to such narratives becomes greatly intensified the more completely the records of those mentioned in it can be traced to the end. It seems well, therefore, to see what became of the principal performers who have passed before our eyes in this slight study.
Of Cormier’s two sons, Achille, the elder, disappears from the scene completely, and all our efforts to trace him have been in vain. In the case of his brother we have been more fortunate. Having served as an officer in the army of Vendée, Patrice de Cormier, from the moment of the Restoration, sought to return to active service. Being on terms of intimacy with Prince de la Tremoïlle, Frotté’s old friend, who was then presiding over the commission inquiring into the claims of Royalist officers with a view to according recompense to them, Cormier petitioned for employment in the company of light horse. His loyalty was not in doubt, for a memorandum supporting his application recorded that “when the allies entered Paris, he secured a drum of the National Guard by purchase, and beating it in front of a white flag, made his way through the streets of Paris.” The “Hundred Days” interfered with his ambitions, and he was obliged to betake himself to England, whence he made his way back to France in July, 1815. The warmth with which Prince de la Tremoïlle recommended him to the favour of Louis XVIII. showed what value he attached to his friendship.