Spring had passed and June had arrived before Lady Atkyns was again to see the familiar handwriting, rounded and minute, of her friend the Breton magistrate. The letter bore the postmark of Hamburg. What was Cormier doing on the banks of the Elbe? He would seem to have had some perilous adventures. Probably he had been arrested as an _émigré_ and had escaped the guillotine by some happy chance. However that may be, the news he had to tell of events in France came as a great relief to his correspondent. “We have been better served, my dear friend, than we ourselves arranged. Our agents have not kept to our plan, but they have done wisely.... But we must have patience. Things are in such a condition at present that they can be neither hastened nor delayed. A false move might have very bad results.” Within a week of the arrival of this letter, an announcement, that came to many as a surprise, found its way round London. It was officially reported that the Dauphin had died in prison on June 8, 1795. Had not Cormier’s assurances come in time to buoy her up, so categorical a statement might well have given Lady Atkyns a severe shock. She knew now, however, that it could not be of _her_ boy that there was question. Some weeks pass in silence, and Lady Atkyns, impatient for news, urges the “little baron” to set out for Hamburg. He starts in the first week of July, but is delayed at Ocfordnese, whence he writes to her on the 16th. At last he reaches his destination, but means of communication are so uncertain that several more weeks elapse before she hears anything further. September finds d’Auerweck returning to London with a letter from Cormier to Lady Atkyns. In October, again unable to curb her anxiety, she had just decided to send d’Auerweck to Paris, when, to her deep grief and dismay, she learnt suddenly from Cormier that everything had gone wrong--that “they had all been deceived, shamefully deceived.” The child that had died on June 8 was, indeed, the second substitute, and the Dauphin had undoubtedly escaped, but others had got possession of him, and the boy handed over to Lady Atkyns’ agents was the young mute. “Yes,” he writes, “we have been taken in totally and completely. That is quite certain. But how have they managed to do it? And did we take every step that could be taken to make this impossible? These are matters you will want me to go into in detail, and I shall not fail to do so; but I must wait until I have time to trace the sequence of events from a diary day by day for a year past. The entries for the first two months are missing for the present--the least interesting period certainly, since down to that time, and for several months afterwards, only the project of carrying off the Dauphin was being kept in view, the project which had to be abandoned afterwards in favour of another which seemed simpler and more feasible, as well as less perilous.”