She was friendless. Her brother, to whom she at once applied, repudiated her as an impostor; an uncle was equally cruel; she asked for her mother, and was told she had none. Then she ran to Versailles, where many friends resided, found refuge with the Duchess of Polignac, and was speedily recognised by numbers of people, princes, dukes, and the rest, all members of that French aristocracy which was so soon to be dispersed in exile or to suffer by the guillotine. They urged her not to create a scandal by suing her brother, but to trust to the king for redress. Soon the king himself was a prisoner, and presently died on the scaffold. Her case was taken up, however, by certain lawyers, who advanced her funds at usurious rates, and planned an attack on her brother, under which, however, they contemplated certain frauds of their own. When she hesitated to entrust them with full powers one of these lawyers denounced her to the Committee of Public Safety, and she narrowly escaped execution. Bailly, the mayor of Paris, was a friend of hers, but could not save her from imprisonment in La Force, where she remained a month, then escaping into the country. Here she learnt that her mother was not dead, and returned to Paris to see her at her last gasp. After that she wandered to and fro in hiding and in poverty till, in 1791, she reappeared at Champignelles. Such was the case the claimant presented to the courts. A story is good till the other side is heard, and her brother, M. de Champignelles, clever, unscrupulous, and a friend of the Republican Government, had a very strong defence. His first answer was to accuse his sister, or the person claiming to be his sister, of having tried to seize his château by force of arms, declaring that she had come backed by three hundred men to claim her so-called rights, and that he had appealed to the municipality for protection. This plea failed, and his second was to accuse the claimant of being someone else. He asserted that she was a certain Anne Buirette, who had been an inmate of the Salpêtrière from the 3rd of January, 1786. This date was a crucial point in the case. The claimant had adopted it as the date of her entry into the Salpêtrière, yet it was clearly shown that at that time the Marquise de Douhault was alive, and that she resided on her property of Chazelet through 1786 and 1787. On other points the claimant showed remarkable knowledge, remembered names, faces of people, circumstances in the past; and all this tended to prove that she was the Marquise. But [Illustration: RELEASING PRISONERS AT LA SALPÊTRIÈRE, PARIS. DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. _Photo by permission of Messrs. Goupil et Cie_. (_From the Painting by Tony Robert-Fleury._)] this error in dates was serious, and it was strengthened by a mistake in the Christian names of the deceased Marquis de Douhault. [Illustration: CHAPEL OF LA SALPÊTRIÈRE.]