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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

deliverance she arranged for with Madame de Beauharnais and the Comte de Frotté, and then left for England. The Dauphin's escape is said to have been effected, but he was not brought to her by Frotté and she did not see him till 1818, when he (the alleged Bruneau) was in prison as an impostor, she herself then living in Paris on a small pension allowed her by Louis XVIII. She is said to have died in Paris shortly before 1830. All this has the air of a romance, more especially as Mrs. Atkyns is dubbed Duchess of Ketteringham—Ketteringham, Norfolk, had been in the Atkyns family since its purchase by the son of Chief Baron Sir Robert Atkyns—but absurd as the Bruneau legend is, it seems clear that a Mrs. Atkyns really endeavoured to effect Marie Antoinette's escape.

Catherine Hyde's story is still less credible. In her "Memoirs respecting the French Royal Family during the Revolution"—professedly a translation from the English, but I can find no English original—she represents herself as the illicit offspring of the Duke of Norfolk and a Lady Mary Duncan. She says she was brought up in an Irish convent in Paris—no such convent existed—was long kept in ignorance of her parentage, learned to speak German and Italian, in addition to her English and French, was taught music by Sacchini, and was so accomplished a musician that the childless Princesse de Lamballe virtually adopted her.