Marie Antoinettes Confidante

Author : Frédéric Barbey
Publisher : BEYOND BOOKS HUB
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 80 pages
Book Rating : 4./5 ( download)

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Download or read book A friend of Marie-Antoinette (Lady Atkyns) written by Frédéric Barbey and published by BEYOND BOOKS HUB. This book was released on 2023-09-24 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When I brought out at the Vaudeville in 1896 my play, entitled Paméla, Marchande de Frivolités, in which I had grouped together dramatically, with what verisimilitude I could, all the various Royalist attempts at rescuing the son of Louis XVI., the Dauphin, from the prison of the Temple, there were certain scholars who found fault with me for representing an Englishwoman, Lady Atkyns, as the protagonist, or at least the prime mover in the matter of his escape. Some of them went so far as to accuse me of having invented this character for the purpose of my piece. Lady Atkyns, certainly, has left but few traces of her existence; she was a Drury Lane actress, pretty, witty, impressionable, and good—it seems there were many such among the English actresses of the time. Married (we shall see presently how it came about) to a peer, who gave her wealth at least, if not happiness, and who does not appear to have counted for much in her life, Lady Atkyns became a passionate admirer of Marie-Antoinette; she was presented to the Queen at Versailles, and when the latter was taken to the Temple, the responsive Englishwoman made every effort to find her way into the prison. She succeeded by the use of guineas, which, in spite of the hatred professed for Pitt and Coburg, were more to the taste of certain patriots than the paper-money of the Republic. Lady Atkyns suggested that the Queen should escape dressed in her costume, but the Royal prisoner would not forsake her children. There is a tradition that in refusing the offer of her enthusiastic friend, Marie-Antoinette besought her good offices for the young Dauphin, while putting her on her guard against the intrigues of the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois. However, most of these facts were still in doubt, resting only on somewhat vague statements, elliptical allusions, and intangible bits of gossip, picked up here and there, when, one day, my friend Lenôtre, who is great at ferreting out old papers, came to me, all excitement, with a document which he had come upon the evening before in a portfolio among the Archives of the Police. It was a letter, dated May, 1821, and addressed to the Minister by the director of the penitential establishment of Gaillon. This official was disturbed over the proceedings of a certain “Madame Hakins or Aquins.” Since the false Dauphin, Mathurin Bruneau, sentenced by the Court of Rouen to five years’ imprisonment, had become an inmate of that institution, this foreigner had installed herself at Gaillon, and had been seeking to get into communication with the prisoner. She seemed even to be bent upon supplying him with the means of making his escape. I drew from this the obvious conclusion that if in 1821, Lady Atkyns could bring herself to believe in the possibility of Mathurin Bruneau being the son of Louis XVI., it must be because she had good reasons for being convinced that the Dauphin had escaped from the Temple. And this conviction of hers became of considerable importance because of the rôle she herself had played (however little one knew of it) in the story of the Royal captivity. It was quite clear that after her promise to the Queen, the faithful Englishwoman, who, as we have seen, was not afraid to compromise herself, and who was generous with her money, must have kept in touch at least with all the facts relating to the Dauphin’s imprisonment, learning all that was to be learnt about the Temple, questioning everybody who could have had any contact with the young captive—warders, messengers, doctors, and servants. If after such investigations, and in spite of the official records and of the announcement of his death on June 9, 1798, she could still believe twenty-six years later that the prince might be alive, it can only be because she was satisfied that the dead youth was not the Dauphin. Had she herself got the Dauphin out of prison? Or had she merely had a hand in the rescue? By what process of reasoning had she been able to persuade herself that an adventurer such as this Bruneau, whose imposture was manifest, could be the Dauphin? Why, if she believed that the Prince had been carried away from the Temple, had she kept silence so long? If this was not her belief, why did she interest herself in one of those who had failed most pitifully in the impersonation of the prince? Lenôtre and I could find no answer to all these questions. To throw light upon them, it would have been necessary to undertake minute researches into the whole life of Lady Atkyns, following her about from place to place, learning where she lived during the Revolution, ascertaining the dates of all her sojourns in Paris, studying all the facts of her existence after 1795, together with the place and date of her death, the names of her heirs, the fate of her correspondence and other papers—a very laborious piece of work, still further complicated by the certainty that it would be necessary to start out upon one’s investigations in England. We did not abandon all idea of the task, however; but time lacked—time always lacks!—and we talked of it as a task that must wait for a year of leisure, knowing only too well that the year of leisure would never come. Chance, upon which we should always count, settled the matter for us. Chance brought about a meeting between Lenôtre and a young writer, just out of the École des Chartes, M. Frédéric Barbey, very well informed, both through his earlier studies and through family connections, concerning what it is customary to designate “la Question Louis XVII.” M. Barbey had the necessary leisure, and he was ready to undertake any kind of journey that might be entailed; he revelled in the idea of the difficulties to be coped with in what would be to him an absorbing task. Lenôtre introduced him to me, and I felt certain from the first that the matter was in good hands. M. Barbey, in truth, is endowed with all the very rare qualities essential to this kind of research—a boundless patience, the flair of a collector, the aplomb of an interviewer, complete freedom from prejudice, and the indomitable industry and ardent zeal of an apostle. M. Barbey set out for England at once, and came back a fortnight later, already possessed of a mass of valuable information regarding the early life of our English Royalist, including this specific item: Lady Atkyns died in Paris, in the Rue de Lille, in 1836. An application to the greffe de paix of the arrondissement resulted in M. Barbey’s obtaining the name of the notary who had the drawing up of the deeds of succession. At the offices of the present courteous possessor of the documents, after any amount of formalities and delays and difficulties, over which his untiring pertinacity enabled him to triumph, he was at last placed in possession of an immense pile of dusty papers, which had not been touched for nearly seventy years: the entire correspondence addressed to Lady Atkyns from 1792 down to the time of her death. That was a red-letter day! From the very first letters that were looked at, it seemed that henceforth all doubts would be at an end: the Royal youth had assuredly been carried away from the Temple! Between the lines, beneath all the studiously vague and discreet wording of the correspondence, we were able to follow, in one letter after another, all the plotting and planning of the escape, the anxieties of the conspirators, the precautions they had to take, the disappointments, the treacheries, the hopes.... At last, we were on the threshold of the actual day of the escape! Another week would find us face to face with the Dauphin! Three days more...! To-morrow...! Alas! our disappointment was great—almost as great as that of Lady Atkyns’s fellow-workers. The boy never came into their hands. Did he escape? Everything points to his having done so, but everything points also to his having been spirited away out of their hands just as he was being embarked for England, where Lady Atkyns awaited feverishly the coming of the child she called her King—her King to whose cause she made her vows, but on whose face she was destined probably never to set eyes, and whose fate was for ever to remain to her unknown. Such is the story we are told in this book of Frédéric Barbey’s—a painful, saddening, exasperating story, extracted (is it necessary to add?) from documents of incontestable authenticity, now made use of for the first time. But can it be said to satisfy fully our curiosity? Is it the last word on this baffling “Question Louis XVII.,” the bibliography of which runs already to several hundreds of volumes? Of course not! The record of Lady Atkyns’s attempts at rescuing the Prince is a singularly important contribution to the study of the problem, but does not solve it. What became of the boy after he was released? Was this boy that they released the real Prince, or is there question of a substitute already at this stage? Did Marie-Antoinette’s devoted adherent succeed merely in being the dupe of the people in her pay? At the period of her very first efforts, may not the Dauphin have been already far from the Temple—hidden away somewhere, perhaps gone obscurely to his death, in the house of some disreputable person to whom his identity was unknown? For must we not place some reliance upon the assertions of the wife of Simon the shoemaker, who declared she had carried off the Prince at a date seven months earlier than the first steps taken by Lady Atkyns? It is all a still insoluble problem, the most complex, the most difficult problem that the perspicacity of historians has ever been called upon to solve. The most important result of this new study is that it relegates to the field of fiction the books of Beauchesne, Chantelauze, La Sicotière, and Eckart among others; that it disproves absolutely the assertions of the official history of these events—the assertion that there is no room for doubt that the Dauphin never left his cell, that he lived and suffered and died there. Henceforward, it is an established fact, absolutely irrefutable, that during nearly five months, from November, 1794, to March, 1795, the child in the jailer’s hands was not the son of Louis XVI., but a substitute, and mute. How did this deception end? Was the issue what was expected? The matter is not cleared up; but that this substitution of the Prince was effected is now beyond dispute, and this revelation, instead of throwing light upon the impenetrable obscurity of the drama, renders it still more dense. This mute boy substituted for the boy in prison, who was himself possibly but a substitute; these sly and foolish guardians who succeed to each other, muddling their own brains and mystifying each other; these doctors who are called to the bedside of the dying Prince, and who, like Pelletan, long afterwards invent stories about his death-bed sufferings—though at the actual time of his death they were either so careless or so cunning as to draw up an unmeaning procès-verbal, as to the bearing of which commentators for more than a century have been unable to agree;—all these official statements which establish nothing; the interment recorded in three separate ways by the three functionaries who were witnesses; the obvious, manifest, admitted doubt, which survived in the minds of Louis XVIII. and the Duchesse d’Angoulême; the manœuvres of the Restoration Government, which could so easily have elucidated the question, and which, by maladresse or by guilefulness, made it impenetrable, by removing the most important documents from the national archives; finally, the foolish performances of the fifteen or so lying adventurers who attempted to pass themselves off as so many dauphins escaped from the Temple, and each of whom had his devoted adherents, absolutely convinced of his being the real prince, and whose absurd effusions, when not venal, combine to produce the effect of an inextricable maze; these were the factors of the “Question Louis XVII.” The worst of it all is that one must overlook no detail: it is only by disproving and eliminating that we can succeed in bringing out isolated facts—solid, indisputable facts that shall serve as stepping-stones to future revelations. It is necessary to study, scrutinize, and reflect. One opinion alone is to be condemned as indubitably wrong: that of the historians who see nothing in all this worthy of investigation and of discussion, to whom the story of the Dauphin is all quite clear and intelligible, and who go floundering about over the whole ground with the calm serenity of the blind, assured of the freedom of their road from obstruction, and that they cannot see the obstacles in their way. Frédéric Barbey’s work unveils too many incontestable facts of history for it to be possible henceforth for any one to see in this marvellous enigma nothing but fantasies and inventions....FROM THE BOOKS.