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.