“The Dauphin is not to be got out by main force or in a balloon,” Cormier had once written. Any attempt at carrying him off under the very nose of his warders and of the delegates of the Commune would have been madness. All idea of such a rescue had long been put aside. How, then, was the matter to be dealt with? By such means as circumstances might dictate--by finding a substitute for the young prisoner, a mute who should play the _rôle_ until an occasion should offer for smuggling away the real Dauphin, concealed meanwhile somewhere in the upper chambers of the Tower. Mme. Atkyns did not herself approve of this plan. “I was strongly opposed to it,” she notes at the foot of a letter from Cormier dated June 3, 1795, “as I pointed out to my friends that it might have an undesirable result, and that those who were being entrusted with the carrying off of the Dauphin, after getting the money, might declare afterwards that he had not been got out of the Temple.” She saw reason to fear that at the last moment she would be done out of the recompense of all her efforts, and that the Royal child would not be entrusted to her care. However, it was clear that once the plan was agreed upon it was necessary in order to carry it out to secure the help of the gaoler Laurent, who had had the Dauphin under his charge during the last four months. Laurent’s complicity may be traced through the documents bearing upon the whole episode. Let us examine first of all Laurent’s own famous letters, the first of which, dated November 7, 1794, synchronizes with the events we have been following. It is well known that only copies of these letters are in existence--the originals have never been discovered. They were published first in a book which appeared in 1835, _Le Véritable Duc de Normandie_, the work of an adherent of the pretender, Nauendorff, Bourbon-Leblanc, whose real name was Gabriel de Bourbon-Russet, dit Leblanc. From the fact of the originals being missing, the authenticity of these letters has long been a matter for debate. A close examination of them, side by side with all the other documents upon which we have come in the course of our researches, results, we think, in justifying our belief in their genuineness. Cormier, then, was not mistaken in supposing that his agents had modified their plan. The letter in which he confided his suspicion to Lady Atkyns was dated October 8, 1794. On the last day of the same month he wrote to her again:--