But can it be said to satisfy fully our curiosity? Is it the last word on this baffling “Question Louis XVII.,” the bibliography of which runs already to several hundreds of volumes? Of course not! The record of Lady Atkyns’s attempts at rescuing the Prince is a singularly important contribution to the study of the problem, but does not solve it. What became of the boy after he was released? Was this boy that they released the real Prince, or is there question of a substitute already at this stage? Did Marie-Antoinette’s devoted adherent succeed merely in being the dupe of the people in her pay? At the period of her very first efforts, may not the Dauphin have been already far from the Temple--hidden away somewhere, perhaps gone obscurely to his death, in the house of some disreputable person to whom his identity was unknown? For must we not place some reliance upon the assertions of the wife of Simon the shoemaker, who declared she had carried off the Prince at a date seven months earlier than the first steps taken by Lady Atkyns? It is all a still insoluble problem, the most complex, the most difficult problem that the perspicacity of historians has ever been called upon to solve. The most important result of this new study is that it relegates to the field of fiction the books of Beauchesne, Chantelauze, La Sicotière, and Eckart among others; that it disproves absolutely the assertions of the official history of these events--the assertion that there is no room for doubt that the Dauphin never left his cell, that he lived and suffered and died there. Henceforward, it is an established fact, absolutely irrefutable, that during nearly five months, from November, 1794, to March, 1795, the child in the jailer’s hands was not the son of Louis XVI., but a substitute, and mute. How did this deception end? Was the issue what was expected? The matter is not cleared up; but that this substitution of the Prince was effected is now beyond dispute, and this revelation, instead of throwing light upon the impenetrable obscurity of the drama, renders it still more dense. This mute boy substituted for the boy in prison, who was himself possibly but a substitute; these sly and foolish guardians who succeed to each other, muddling their own brains and mystifying each other; these doctors who are called to the bedside of the dying Prince, and who, like Pelletan, long afterwards invent stories about his death-bed sufferings--though at the actual time of his death they were either so careless or so cunning as to draw up an unmeaning _procès-verbal_, as to the bearing of which commentators for more than a century have been unable to agree;--all these official statements which establish nothing; the interment recorded in three separate ways by the three functionaries who were witnesses; the obvious, manifest, admitted doubt, which survived in the minds of Louis XVIII. and the Duchesse d’Angoulême; the