"In order that you may fully understand, I will now give you a short account of the real story of the dauphin's rescue. As you know through your researches, after Simon the Cobbler was released from the care of the young king, the dauphin was placed in a small room and completely isolated from the world by bolts and bars. Not even his jailers saw him, only hearing him speak through an aperture in the door. It was the most inhuman treatment of a child that the world has known, and it is a thousand wonders that the boy survived. But he did. At the end of an awful six months, when Robespierre himself was sent to the guillotine and Barras came into power, the boy was removed from this horrible incarceration and brought to a large, clean room, where he was taken care of by two or three guardians chosen for their humanity and kindliness.
"It was at this period that a plot was formed by a league of warmhearted, loyal men,--not only royalists, but republicans, too,--to rescue the dauphin from his long imprisonment and send him somewhere, possibly out of the country, to live out the rest of his life in peace. This league was known as 'The Brotherhood of Liberation,' and the world to-day would stand amazed, did it know the members, the many _famous_ members, who composed it. It has even been whispered that Barras himself and the great Napoleon Bonaparte--then young, poor, and comparatively unknown--were concerned in this plot. All that, however, is as it may be.
"But the main thing is this. The brotherhood was accustomed to meet secretly at the house of my grandfather, another Marquis de Fenouil, in Paris, for he was one of the chief leaders and originators of the scheme. Among them was a young fellow scarcely more than five years older than the dauphin, one Jean Mettot, who was deeply and devotedly interested in the plan. It seems that he and his little foster-sister, Yvonne Clouet, had once become acquainted with the dauphin as he played in happier years in his garden of the Tuileries. Through his intervention, the queen, Marie Antoinette herself, had given the young fellow's foster-mother quite a large sum to defray the overdue taxes on her home and thus enable her to keep it for her children. So grateful was this poor washerwoman, Mère Clouet, and her little daughter Yvonne and her foster-son, Jean Mettot, whom she had adopted from the foundling hospital, that they had vowed to help the poor, ill-used dauphin, even to the extent of risking their lives for him.