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.
But there were new difficulties in the way. Money, for one thing, was lacking now, and she knew only too well how necessary money was. Now, too, she was alone. To whom was she to apply for assistance? Of all her old associates, Peltier alone was accessible, and he was absorbed in his work, as journalist and man of letters.
Why, she asked herself, should she not seek the help of a member of the Royal Family of France? The Comte d’Artois, who had taken in his turn the titles of Monsieur and of Comte de Provence, since his brother’s proclamation as King, was living in England. Why not apply to him? The ingenuous lady did not think of the very weighty reasons why such an appeal must be in vain. Convinced that the Dauphin still lived, she imagined that she could convert the Comte to her way of thinking, and induce him to join her in her search after the truth.
Encouraged by the attitude taken up by the British Government towards her project of inquiring minutely into the matter on the Continent, Lady Atkyns decided before leaving England to approach the Comte, hoping to secure not merely his approval, but also some material assistance. Had she not sacrificed a large portion of her own worldly goods for the benefit of his family? Thus reasoning, she did not conceive the possibility of a refusal. But Monsieur could not regard as anything short of fantastic the supposition upon which her project was based—the supposition that his nephew still survived. To present this hypothesis either to him or to his brother the King was to put one’s self out of court at once.
We can imagine how her application was received. She chose as her intermediary with the Prince the Baron de Suzannet, who had facilitated the purchase of the ships and equipages which were procured in readiness for the rescue of the Queen and the Dauphin.
Having the entrée to the Court, and being one of the most notable of the émigrés in London, he consented to submit his friend’s request to Monsieur. Did he foresee the issue? Apparently not. Here is what he writes to her on August 19, 1797:—
“After the decision M[onsieur] has come to, my dear lady, not to give his countenance to your affair until it has been taken up by others, and after speaking to him so often on the subject, I cannot carry the matter any further, and could not ask him for money. But I see no reason why you should not yourself write to him more or less what you have told me, viz. that you were about to return to France with the consent of the Government, that you ought to be provided with the same amount for returning as you have been for going, but that fifty louis is very scant provision for that—especially considering that you have had to hide yourself away here so long—and that you are afraid you will not have sufficient to enable you to remain long enough in Paris to get together all the particulars required by the Government, and to pay the messenger for bringing them here; and you might point out that you have acted throughout entirely in the interests of the Royal Family, that you do not regret the £1000[76] which your attachment has cost you, or regret them only because you no longer have the money to devote to the cause; and that if M[onsieur] for his part could give you £50, it would free you from anxiety as to ways and means....
“I shall tell M[onsieur] that I am aware you have written to him, and that I shall convey his answer to you. He has been taking medicine to-day and can see no one. To-morrow he is to see some people at the Duc d’Harcourt’s, if well enough. He will not be going away before Wednesday. His address is 55, Welbeck Street. I think you would do well to send your letter to him by hand, sealed and addressed ‘À Monsieur Seul,’ enclosed in an outer envelope with his ordinary address: ‘Son Altesse Royale Monsieur, frère du Roi.’ Send me a line to tell me what you have done. Adieu.”
It was not till after a long delay that Lady Atkyns at last succeeded in meeting the Prince at an inn, only to meet with a point-blank refusal. But she was not to be discouraged. The very next day she wrote again to the Comte asking for an audience. This time it was another member of his suite, the Bishop of Saint-Pol de Léon, who replied to her communication—
“The moment I saw M[onsieur] yesterday, my dear lady, he told me about your letter, which gave him great pleasure, though it is a matter for great regret to him that he is quite unable to do as you wish, and as he himself would wish. Since his recent attack he has been unable to dress or go out; he has not been able to receive any ladies, anxious though he is to welcome those who are here and who were attached to the Princess. He could not receive one without its being known, and then he would be expected to receive a number of others. You know how things get about and what a close watch is kept on Princes, and how careful our Prince must be to do nothing that would lay him open to criticism or even to suspicion. If his stay here were prolonged, and he found he could see other ladies also, the thing might be managed; but there would be difficulties even then, in view of your secret being perhaps of a compromising nature. I am but expressing to you the Prince’s own views. I hope to see you to-morrow between midday and three o’clock.”
The great of this world are never at a loss for pretexts for refusing requests. Monsieur was particularly anxious to evade an interview which he felt to be undesirable, and therefore confined himself to sending her these amiable phrases.
About the same time M. de Thauvenay, one of the King’s most devoted courtiers, who happened to be in London, seems to have promised to use his good offices with his master on her behalf, telling him of her record and perhaps of her hopes.
Having exhausted all the means at her disposal in England, Lady Atkyns saw that she must manage her journey as best she could from her own resources, and resolved to make yet another sacrifice to this end. She had obtained a considerable loan already once upon a mortgage on her beautiful estate of Ketteringham. As this was her only source of revenue, there was no alternative to raising a further mortgage on it, and this she managed, though with greater difficulty than before. (The property was not, in fact, her own at this time, being entailed on her son Edward.)
She seems to have raised in all about £3000 in this way in 1799 and the three following years.
Some weeks before the “18th Brumaire” and Bonaparte’s coup d’état, she set out for the Continent. What exactly was her purpose? What use was she going to make of her money? It is impossible to say. To clothe her errand in the greater mystery, she decided to land in France under an assumed name, and to veil her personality under the designation of the “Little Sailor” (le petit matelot).
“I feel I must again send my good wishes for a pleasant journey to the charming ‘Little Sailor,’” some unidentified friend writes to her on September 7, “and I cannot too often beg him to bear in mind that he leaves behind him in England friends who take a deep interest in his welfare, and who will learn with pleasure that he has arrived safely at his destination, and, above all, that after fulfilling his mission he has escaped all the unpleasantness and dangers to which his truly admirable devotion and zeal will expose him. I hope one day to prove to the ‘Little Sailor’ how he has long filled me with the most genuine sentiments—sentiments which I have refrained from expressing for reasons of which the ‘Little Sailor’ will approve. I cannot say too often to the amiable ‘Little Sailor’ what pleasure I shall have in repeating to him in France—and in France preferably to elsewhere—the assurance of eternal and tender attachment that I have vowed him for ever and ever.”
It is difficult to know what the “Petit Matelot” did on arriving in Paris. It was a moment of crisis, for the Consulate was being established. Most of those who had been mixed up in the Temple affair were inaccessible, and yet it was important to get into touch with them if anything was to be ascertained about the Dauphin. It would not have done, however, to provoke suspicion, or Fouché would have been on her track.
Certain only it is that for several months she seems to have disappeared from sight. At last she was run to earth and hunted out by Fouché’s agents, and was obliged to make away to the Loire, where she had devoted friends.
The Verrière family lived in the country six miles from Saumur, in Anjou, where many nobles, fleeing from the storm, had found a safe refuge. The vicinity of the forest of Fontevrault enabled them to gain the Vendée, and thus escape the fury of the Revolutionists. Mme. Verrière had met Lady Atkyns in Paris years before, perhaps during the golden days of Versailles. Recalling their former friendliness, Lady Atkyns went to them in her trouble. The welcome they extended to her justified her hopes, and she dwelt with them for some time, until the police had lost all trace of her.
About this period, vague reports began to be spread about with reference to the imprisonment of the children of Louis XVI. in the Temple. The obscurity which had cloaked the last hours of the Dauphin was still keeping certain brains at work. And a book which was published in 1800 helped to reawaken public curiosity. In Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, a romance written by an author until then little known, Regnault-Warin deliberately questioned the alleged death of the Dauphin, and, in fact, based a story of adventure upon the supposition of his being still alive. Written in the fashion of the time, full of surprising episodes, and bristling with more or less untrustworthy anecdotes touching on the captivity of the Royal Family in the Temple, this novel had an immense success. If it came before Lady Atkyns it must have served to stimulate her anxiety to solve the problem she had so much at heart.
In the summer of 1801 Lady Atkyns appears to have addressed herself to Louis XVIII., unwarned by her failure with Monsieur. In this case also failure was to be her portion.
“Your letter,” ran the reply, signed by M. de Thauvenay (whom she had met some years before), and addressed, as a precaution, to Monsieur James Brown, dated October 2, “would have been enigmatic to me had I not placed it before my master, who, by a curious series of accidents, had received only a few days before the communication you sent him on the 12th of July. In requesting me to reply to you, monsieur, he charges me to express to you his recognition of your constant interest and indefatigable zeal for his welfare, and his regret that he is prevented by his present position from learning the particulars of the speculation that your heart has formed, and that he cannot have any share in it.”
Six weeks later Lady Atkyns received a second letter, despatched, like the first, from Varsovie, reinforcing the above:—
“I wish,” writes M. de Thauvenay, “that I could convey to you the deep and tender feeling with which my dear and venerated master has read these new and touching testimonies of your interest and friendship, and his deep regret at being unable to enjoy the consolations that your sympathetic and generous nature has proffered him! No, monsieur, I swear to you, no other house has offered him any kind of interest in the speculation you have proposed to him. I should add that there is no one with whom he would rather have shared the chances than with you; but his position is such that, for the moment at least, he can only display passive courage in the face of misfortune. I need not remind you, monsieur, that the most appreciative and most generous of hearts has eternal claim upon a heart such as yours. Never, I feel convinced, will your noble and moving sentiment be modified by time or place. This conviction is sweet to me, and it is with the utmost sincerity that I render you once again my tender (if I may use the word) and admiring respect.”
It is not easy at first to understand what M. de Thauvenay means by this “speculation,” in which the King refuses to take part. On reflection it seems probable that Lady Atkyns’s proposal, thus described, had reference to the affair of the Temple, for it seems impossible that she should have flattered herself that she could see a way to the return of the exiled King.
However that may be, these two letters convinced her that it would be useless to prolong her stay in France, and she returned to Ketteringham, after an absence of three years, without having effected her purpose.
Two tragic events occurred in the year 1804 to startle the French who were still taking refuge in England. The first was the arrest and shooting of the Duc d’Enghien at Vincennes. If Bonaparte had punished one of the many schemers who had plotted against him on English soil, his action would have found defenders. But this execution of a Prince, who was absolutely innocent and who had held apart from all political intrigues, aroused the same kind of horror that had been evoked eleven years earlier by the death of Louis XVI. and Marie-Antoinette.
The Prince de Condé, the Duc d’Enghien’s grandfather, was staying in England at this time, like Monsieur, the King’s brother, and their residences were naturally the centre of the excitement over this event. The Baron de Suzannet describes the state of things in their entourage in a letter to Lady Atkyns:—
“It would seem, madame,” he writes to her on April 14, “that the murder of the Duc d’Enghien has horrified not merely all true Frenchmen, as was to be expected, but also Englishmen of every class, the perfidy as well as the cruelty of it is so revolting to all in whom the sentiment of justice and honour is not extinct. I shall not speak of the courageous and heroic death of this ill-fated Prince, but of the condition of his unhappy relatives. Since the day when Monsieur carried him the terrible news, the Prince de Condé (save for two journeys to London necessitated by his anxiety) has not left his room or been down to dinner. Plunged in grief, he sees no one, and it is much feared that his death may follow that of the Duc d’Enghien. He loved the Duc as his grandson and his pupil, and perhaps even more as one qualified by Providence to add still further to the glory of his illustrious name. The sorrow of the Duc de Bourbon is not less deep and intense.”
At the same moment, the news of the arrest of Cadoudal in Paris, the discovery of his plot, the sensational trial of his twelve accomplices, together with a number of insurgents—forty-seven prisoners in all—and finally the execution of the famous brigand on the morning of June 25, came to intensify the agitation of the French in England.
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.
When at last the monarchy is restored once more, she finds that her aspirations are destined to be disappointed, despite all the kind words with which she was soothed in England, and we find her uttering the word “ingratitude,” which is henceforth to be so often on her tongue. There were so many who held themselves entitled to gratitude and recognition at the hands of Louis XVIII.—émigrés returned to France after twenty years of sorrow and indignities, and now counting upon the recovery of their possessions or on being reimbursed in some way by the act of the Sovereign. What an awakening they met with when the time came to formulate their applications and they found themselves obliged to condescend to the drafting of innumerable documents, and to put up with interminable delays!
On September 27, 1816, Lady Atkyns writes to her friend Mme. de Verrière an account of her disappointing experiences. She had been well received at Court, but that was all.
“The kind of ingratitude I have been meeting with is not very consoling. They give me plenty of kind words, but nothing more. I have written a long letter to the man of business, begging of him to get the employer to reimburse me a little for the moment, but I have received nothing yet, and this puts me out greatly. Perhaps something will turn up between now and the end of the week. If not I must go and see my poor mother and beg to get my affairs into order.”
The state of her affairs, for long precarious, was now giving the poor lady very serious anxiety. By recourse to various expedients she had managed to hold out until the return of the Bourbons, and to stave off her creditors. But she was now at her last gasp. If the King refused to help her, to “reimburse” her, she was ruined. The Comte de la Châtre had assured her that her application was under favourable consideration, that the King regarded it approvingly, that the Comte de Pradel, the head of the King’s household, had it in hand; but, in spite of this, there was a series of delays.
At last, worn out with waiting, she writes in her naïve style to the Comte on October 10, 1816—
“I beg of you to be good enough to get the King to decide this matter as soon as ever possible. I must get away to England in three weeks to see my mother, who is ill, and I can’t possibly do this until I know the King’s decision in regard to me. I know his Majesty is too good to injure one who has given so many proofs of boundless devotion to the Royalist cause and to the entire Royal Family. Although I have a splendid estate in England, I am now in great difficulties by reason of this devotion. I tell you all this, Monsieur le Comte, so that, like the good Frenchman you are, you may do me this kindness of getting the King to give you his orders. I have run every conceivable kind of evils during these twenty-four years. I beg of you to excuse all the trouble I am giving you, and I have the honour to be, Monsieur le Comte,
“Your very obedient servant,
“Charlotte Atkyns.”
This appeal seems to have been no more successful than the preceding ones, for three months later we find Lady Atkyns still awaiting the promised audience. To distract her thoughts from the subject, she goes about Paris—a new city now to her—is present at sittings of the Chamber of Deputies, and hears the speech from the Throne. On All Souls’ Day she joins in the solemn pilgrimage to the Conciergerie. Who could have been more in place on such an occasion? But with the sad thoughts evoked by the sight of the Queen’s prison were mingled regrets that the sanctuary had not been left as it was. The place had been enlarged, and a massive, heavy-looking tomb stood now where the bed had been.
“I knelt before this tomb,” she writes to Mme. de Verrière, “but I should have preferred to have seen the prison room unaltered, and the tomb placed where the Queen used to kneel down to pray. The place has been made to look too nice, and a simple elegance has been imparted to it which takes away all idea of the misfortunes of that time. I would have left the bed, the table, and the chair. There is a portrait of the Queen seated on the bed, her eyes raised heavenwards with the resignation of a martyr. This portrait is very like, especially the eyes, with that look of angelic sweetness which she had. There is another tomb with a crucifix on it, as on hers, upon which are inscribed the words: ‘Que mon fils n’oublie jamais les derniers mot de son père, que je lui répète expressément; qu’il ne cherche jamais à venger notre mort.’ You go in by the chapel, and behind the altar, to get to where the Queen used to be.... I repeated on the tomb what I vowed to the Queen—never to abandon the cause of her children. It is true that only Madame remains now, but she one day will be Queen of France, and if she has need of a faithful friend she will find one in me.”
These last lines seem a strange avowal. Lady Atkyns seems to be renouncing her faith. What is the explanation? It is simple enough. She has realized that as long as she puts forward her inopportune plea regarding the child in the Temple she must expect to find nothing but closed doors. Yet she has by her proofs of what she alleges, and she is prepared in substantiation of her memorials to hand over a selection of the precious letters from her friends which she has received in the course of her enterprise. These, doubtless, would be accepted, but would never be given back. What, then, is she to do? Threatened on the one side by the distress which is at her heels; a prey, on the other hand, to her inalterable conviction, the luckless lady comes for a moment to have doubts about her entire past. However, this disavowal, as it seems, is but momentary; a calmer mood supervenes, and she returns to her former point of view, unable ever to free her mind from doubts as to the real fate of the Dauphin.
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.
She continues, however, to make her way every year to France, buoyed up by the assurances of interest in her which she has received from officials of the Royal Household. At first she stays with friends, the Comte and Comtesse de Loban. Then in 1826, when her mother dies, aged eighty-six, she establishes herself definitively in Paris, taking up her abode in a house in the Rue de Lille, No. 65, where she rents a small appartement on the first floor. Here she gets together the few souvenirs she has saved from Ketteringham—some mahogany furniture covered with blue cloth, a sofa covered with light blue silk, and portraits on the walls of the Dauphin, his father, his uncle, and the Duc de Berry.
It was while residing here that Lady Atkyns lived through the revolution of Italy, after witnessing in turn the reign of Louis XVI., the Terror, the Empire, the Restoration, and the reign of Charles X. What an eventful progress from the careless, happy days when she played her part in the dizzying gaieties of Versailles!
Some weeks before the fall of Charles X., Lady Atkyns drew up yet another petition for presentation to the chief of the King’s household. She did not mince her words in this document.
“I little thought that lack of funds would be advanced as a reason for delaying the execution of the King’s orders. I will not enlarge upon the strangeness of such an avowal, especially as a reimbursement of so sacred a character is in question, sanctioned by the Royal will. I would merely point out to you, Monsieur le Marquis, that I have contrived to find considerable sums (thereby incurring great losses) when it was to the interest of France, and of her King, and of her august family. Failing a sufficiency of money to liquidate this debt, I have the honour to propose to your Excellency that you should make out an order for the payment, and I shall find means of getting it discounted. In your capacity as a Minister to the King, your Excellency will be able, without delay, to obtain the amount necessary, minus a discount, from the Court bankers. Will you not deign, monseigneur, to ask them to do this, and I shall willingly forego the discount that may be stipulated for.... Finally, monseigneur, I beg of you to tell me immediately the day and the hour when I may present myself at the Ministry to terminate this matter. I must venture to remind you that the least delay will involve my ruin, and therefore I cannot consent to it.”
Lady Atkyns’s persistence and the King’s procrastination seem intelligible enough when one learns that the sums expended by her, from the time when Louis XVI.’s reign was projected down to the last year of the Consulate, amounted to more than £80,000. The Englishwoman might well speak of the sacrifices she had made and the loss of her fortune at the dictates of her heart.
One other letter we find amongst Lady Atkyns’s papers—a letter notable for its fine, regular penmanship. It evidently reached her about this date. The writer was yet another soi-disant Dauphin, the third serious pretendant. The Baron de Richemont—his real name was Hebert—had published in 1831 his Mémoires du Duc de Normandie, fils de Louis XVI. écrits et publiés par lui-même, and he was not long in convincing a number of people as to his identity. He probably owed most of his particulars as to his alleged escape from the Temple to the wife of Simon, whom he had visited at the Hospital for Incurables in the Rue de Sèvres. Possibly it was through her also that he heard of Lady Atkyns. At all events, he thought it worth while to approach her.
“Revered lady,” he writes to her, “I am touched by your kind remembrance.... The idea that I have found again in you the friend who was so devoted to my unhappy family consoles me, and enables me the better to bear up under the ills that Providence has sent me. I shall never forget your good deeds; ever present to my memory, they make me cherish an existence which I owe to you. I cannot tell what the future may have in store for me, but whatever my fate you may count upon all my gratitude. May the Lord be with you and send prosperity to all your enterprises! He will surely do so, for to whatever country you may take your steps, you will set an example of all the virtues.
“We shall see you, I hope, in a better world. Then and in the company of the august and ill-fated author of my sad days, you will be in enjoyment of all the good you have done, and will receive your due recompense from the Sovereign Dispenser of all things.
“There being no other end to look for, I beg of God, most noble lady, to take you under His protection.
“Louis Charles.”
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.
[76] This is far below the actual figure.