The clothes-basket of the laundress was brought into requisition for his benefit also, and in it he lay ensconced while devoted friends were carrying him away from the Temple, and from the rascally Simon, who was still in authority.  Like Meves, he asserted that Madame Simon aided the plot, and in the course of his trial placed a certain M. Remusat in the witness-box, who stated that while he was in the hospital at Parma a woman called Semas complained bitterly of the treatment to which she was subjected, and declared loudly that if her children knew it they would soon come to her relief.  Remusat thereupon asked her if she had any children, when she responded, “My children, sir, are the children of France!  I was their gouvernante!” There was no mistaking the allusion, and her astonished hearer replied, “But the dauphin is dead.”  “Not so,” was the answer; “he lives; and, if I mistake not, was removed from the Temple in a basket of linen.”  “Then,” added the witness, “I asked the woman who she was, and she told me that she was the wife of a man called Simon, the former guardian-keeper.  Then I understood her assertion, ’I was their gouvernante!’”

This extraordinary piece of evidence was entirely uncorroborated, and in reality the accused had no case.  But if he was deficient in proof of his assertions, he had abundance of audacity.  At first he declined to answer the interrogatories of the judge, and permitted that functionary to lay bare his past life, without any attempt to dispute his assertions; but when the witnesses were brought against him, he broke his silence, and finally became irrepressibly talkative.  The authorities had traced his career with some care, and showed that his real name was d’Hebert, and that he always used that name in legal documents, such as transfers of property to himself, being shrewd enough to know that a conveyance would be invalid if executed in a false name.  In his proclamations, however, he invariably appeared as “Charles de Bourbon, Duke of Normandy.”  In private life his favourite title was Baron Richemont, although sometimes he condescended to be addressed as Colonel Gustave; and when imperative occasion demanded, passed under the vulgar cognomen of Bernard.

The agents of police tracked him under all these disguises with the greatest facility, by means of a clue which he himself provided.  Having been a man of method, he was in the habit of keeping a memorandum-book or diary, in which he recorded, in cypher, all his proceedings.  This interesting volume fell into the hands of the detectives, who soon discovered the key to it, and thus enabled the judge of the Assize Court to present the sham dauphin with a very vivid portrait of himself drawn by his own hand.  Among other occurrences which were recorded in this diary, was a visit which had been paid by the pretender to a certain Madame de Malabre, at Caen; and it was specially noted that he had granted this lady permission to erect a monument