In her mansion Maturin Bruneau was treated as an adopted son, and lived in great splendour until, in 1796, a letter arrived from Charles de Vezin, the brother of the baron, who had just returned to France, and who informed the viscountess that she had been imposed upon, for the only nephew he ever possessed was at that time an emigrant refugee in England.  The result was that Bruneau was thrust out of doors, and, sent back to his native village and the manufacture of wooden shoes.  The jibes of his fellow-villagers, however, rendered his life so miserable that the viscountess consented to receive him as a servant, and he remained with her for a year; but his conduct was so unbearable that she was at last compelled to dismiss him.

After a brief sojourn with his relatives he announced his intention of making the tour of France, and left his home for that purpose at the age of fifteen.  He seems, in the course of his wanderings, to have fought in the Chouan insurrection in 1799 and 1800, and having been press-ganged, deserted from his ship in an American port, and roamed up and down in the United States for some years.  When the news of Napoleon’s downfall reached that country in 1815, he returned to France, arriving with a passport which bore the name of Charles de Navarre.  He reached the village of Vallebasseir in great destitution, and there, having been mistaken for a young soldier named Phillipeaux, who was supposed to have perished in the war in Spain, he picked up all available intelligence respecting the family, and forthwith presented himself at the house of the Widow Phillipeaux as her son.  He was received with every demonstration of affection, and made the worst possible use of his advantages.  After spending all the ready money which the poor woman had, he proceeded to Vezin, where he was recognised by his family, although he pretended to be a stranger.  Thence he repaired to Pont de Ce, where lived a certain Sieur Leclerc, an innkeeper, who had formerly been a cook in the household of Louis XVI.  To this man he paid a visit, and demanded if he recognised him.  The innkeeper said he did not, whereupon he remarked on the strangeness of being forgotten, seeing, said he, “that I am Louis XVII., and that you have often pulled my ears in the kitchen of Versailles.”

Leclerc, whose recollections of the dauphin were of quite a different character, ordered him out of his house as an impostor.  But it does not fall to everybody to be familiar with the ways of a court, or even of a royal kitchen, and a few persons were found at St. Malo who credited his assertion that he was the Prince of France.  The government, already warned by the temporary success of Hervagault’s imposture, immediately pounced upon him, and submitted him to examination.  His story was found to be a confused tissue of falsehoods; and after being repeatedly interrogated, and attempting to escape, and to forward letters surreptitiously to his “uncle,”