Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/145

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IMMIGRANTS AND EMIGRANTS.
125

passing the winter in Paris to perfect his knowledge of the language. It would have been interesting to know what he saw and did, but unfortunately he tells us nothing. We only know that in America he sharply attacked the sympathisers with the Revolution.

Two Englishwomen who left before the Terror figured long afterwards as partisans of the sham dauphins, Bruneau and Naundorff. Mrs. Atkyns—probably Charlotte Walpole, wife of Edward Atkyns of Ketteringham, or possibly the wife of his brother John, M.P. for Oxford, for she is described as the widow of an M.P—had been presented to Marie Antoinette before the Revolution, and on the Queen becoming a prisoner resolved to save her. A municipal commissary promised her admission to the Temple in the disguise of a National Guard, on condition of nothing secret being said or given to the Queen. Mrs. Atkyns offered the latter a bouquet, and her emotion made her drop the note accompanying it. The commissary was about to seize the document when Mrs. Atykns snatched it up and swallowed it, whereupon the man angrily drove her out. She procured a second and this time a private interview, when she expounded a plan of escape, but the Queen refused to abandon her children, professed resignation to her fate, and begged Mrs. Atkyns to devote all her efforts to the deliverance of the Dauphin. This