Strangely, the account of the substitution in the Temple deceived royalists and republicans alike. Lady Atkyns was trying by every possible means to get the dauphin out of his prison when he may already have been in safe hands. A child was in fact delivered to her agents, but he was a deaf mute. That there was a complicated fraud on the guardians of the dauphin was considered by a succession of writers from 1850 onwards, and more recently by Frédéric Barbey, who wisely attempts no ultimate solution. When the partisans of Richemont or Naundorff come to recount details of the post-Temple careers of their heroes, there assertions become in most cases so uncritical as to be unconvincing.