There seems, in fact, to be no room for doubt that, as has been well said, “in this prison, in which there has been a constant procession of comtes and abbés, and a whole pack of women, there has been enacted in the years 1816-1818 a farce of which his Excellence Decazes is the author.” The object of this mystification was simply to baffle the Duchesse d’Angoulême in the first instance, and to prevent public opinion from being led astray in another direction. Bruneau did not stand alone. Six months earlier another pretendant, Nauendorff, a clockmaker at Spandau, had written to the Duchesse d’Angoulême to solicit an interview. It was all important to put a stop to this dangerous movement. Therefore when on February 9, 1818, the proceedings were opened at Rouen, no pains had been spared to give the affair the appearance of a frivolous vaudeville. On February 19 Mathurin was condemned to five years’ imprisonment. The court was crowded with all kinds of loafers and queer characters, many of them from Paris, drawn by the rumours so industriously spread about. Lady Atkyns would seem to have given some attention to this new alleged Dauphin without being carried off her feet. She lost no opportunity of endeavouring to get at the truth, it is clear, and this, as we learn from a police report, involved a number of visits to the house in which Gaillon was imprisoned, and to which Bruneau was transferred after his condemnation. It was even stated that she had offered sums of money to enable Bruneau to escape. She soon had her eyes opened, however, to this new fraud. The accession of _Monsieur_ to the throne, in 1824, does not seem to have had any favourable result for Lady Atkyns, for we find her at last reduced in this year to taking a step, long contemplated but dreaded--the handing over of Ketteringham to her sister-in-law, Mary Atkyns, in consideration of a life annuity. She continues, however, to make her way every year to France, buoyed up by the assurances of interest in her which she has received from officials of the Royal Household. At first she stays with friends, the Comte and Comtesse de Loban. Then in 1826, when her mother dies, aged eighty-six, she establishes herself definitively in Paris, taking up her abode in a house in the Rue de Lille, No. 65, where she rents a small _appartement_ on the first floor. Here she gets together the few souvenirs she has saved from Ketteringham--some mahogany furniture covered with blue cloth, a sofa covered with light blue silk, and portraits on the walls of the Dauphin, his father, his uncle, and the Duc de Berry. It was while residing here that Lady Atkyns lived through the revolution of Italy, after witnessing in turn the reign of Louis XVI., the Terror, the Empire, the Restoration, and the reign of Charles X. What an eventful progress from the careless, happy days when she played her part in the dizzying gaieties of Versailles!