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," Louis
XVIII., he was removed to the prison of Rouen as the son of the Widow
Phillipeaux, calling himself Charles de Navarre. When he entered the
jail he was the possessor of a solitary five franc piece, which he
spent in wine and tobacco, and he then took to the manufacture of
wooden shoes for the other prisoners in order to obtain more. As he
worked he told his story, and his fellow jail-birds were never tired
of listening to his romance. Visitors also heard his tale, and yielded
credence to it, and it was not long before everybody in Rouen knew
that there was a captive in the town who claimed to be the son of the
murdered king.

Among other persons of education and respectability who listened and
believed was a Madame Dumont, the wife of a wealthy merchant. This
lady became an ardent partizan of the pretender, and not only visited
him, but spent her husband's gold lavishly to solace him in his
captivity. She supplied him with the richest food and the rarest
wines that money could buy. A Madame Jacquieres, who resided at Gros
Caillon, near Paris, who was greatly devoted to the Bourbon family,
also came under the influence of Bruneau's agents, and finally fell a
victim to his rascality. This good lady was an ardent Catholic, and
having some lingering doubt as to the honesty of the prisoner of
Rouen, in order to its perfect solution she vi