Frotté did not spend in idleness the few days which preceded the departure of his regiment. Besides the ordinary arrangements--the giving up of his place of abode, the packing of his affairs, the paying of his debts; besides the friends to whom he had to bid farewell; in short, besides the thousand ties that are contracted during a stay of nine years in a town which is not among the smallest in the kingdom, there was, in the Rue Princesse, at a few minutes’ walk from the citadel, a one-storeyed house of unimposing exterior, whose door had often opened to receive the young officer. The prospect of not returning there for a long time filled his heart with distress and regret. For some months this house had been inhabited by a foreigner, an English lady, who had come to Lille with a reputation for grace and beauty which had proved to be not unmerited. At that time there was already in Lille quite a colony of English people, who were attracted there either by the proximity of their own country and the closeness of Paris, or by the commercial prosperity of the place and its numerous industries. In the census returns of the town at the beginning of the Revolution, and also in the taxation assessments, we have come across many names of evident British origin. But the remarkable thing about the new-comers at the Rue Princesse, was that they had not arrived from England, but from Versailles. They were very soon received by the best society of Lille, and questions began to circulate about them, every one trying to penetrate a certain mystery which hung about their past life. Let us, in our turn, attempt to lift the veil, and to find out something about the English lady who is to be the heroine of this work. Charlotte Walpole, who was born probably about 1758,[7] bore a name that in the United Kingdom is illustrious among the illustrious. Was she a direct descendant of Sir Robert Walpole, Earl of Oxford, the celebrated statesman who administered English politics for some years under George I.? It is difficult to ascertain.