In the maze of her plots and plans, necessarily mixed up with the enterprises of the _émigrés_ and of the agents of the counter-revolution--up above the network of all these machinations within France and without--one luminous point shines forth always as the goal of every project: the tower of the Temple. All around the venerable building strain and struggle the would-be rescuers of its prisoners. Its name, now famous, instils into the Royalist world something of the terror that went forth of old from the Bastille. What went on exactly inside the dungeon from 1792 to 1795? The question, so often canvassed by contemporaries, is still where it was, crying out for an answer. However hackneyed may seem the matter of the Dauphin’s imprisonment, we have not felt warranted in deliberately avoiding it. Had we been so minded when embarking upon this study (the voluminous bibliography of the subject is calculated to discourage the historian!), we should in any case have been forced into its investigation by a heap of hitherto unpublished documents which we unearthed. This leads us to the enumeration of the sources whence we have drawn the materials for our work. All that has been hitherto known of Lady Atkyns amounts to very little. M. de la Sicotière, coming upon her name in the course of his study of the life of Louis de Frotté, refers to her merely in a brief note, necessarily incomplete.[1] Four years later, M. V. Delaporte, on the occasion of the centenary of Marie Antoinette, published in his _Études_ a correspondence in which the name of the Queen’s English friend repeatedly appeared. These papers caught our attention. Under the friendly guidance of M. Delaporte we sought to recover the papers which Lady Atkyns left behind her on her death. In the course of systematic researches, into the nature of which we need not enter here, we were enabled by an unlooked-for piece of good luck to lay hands upon the entire collection of Lady Atkyns’s correspondence, covering her whole life. This correspondence, docketed and arranged by the notary entrusted with the regulating of the affairs of the deceased, was found lying in the archives of the notary’s study, where, by the permission of the present owner of the documents, I was able to consult them. The letters are all originals. Some of them, of which copies had been made by some one unidentified, had been destined probably for use in supporting claims put forward by Lady Atkyns. Many letters, unfortunately, are missing, having been confided by the too trustful lady to members of the Royal Household or to Louis XVIII. himself. To know what value to attach to these letters, it was necessary to know something about the writers. Apart from General Louis de Frotté, who has been made the subject of a detailed biography, the characters mixed up with Lady Atkyns’s adventures appear for the first time upon the stage of history.