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.