“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.