The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA

Read The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA Online

Authors: Deborah Cadbury

For my mother and Martin,
the first readers,
with love
THE HEART OF STONE
On April 19, 2000, the
New York Times
reported that:
GENETICS OFFERS DENOUEMENT TO MYSTERY OF PRINCE’S DEATH
The question has intrigued historians for 200 years. Was the disease-riddled little boy who died in 1795 after years alone in a prison cell really the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette? Or had royalists managed at the height of the French Revolution to spirit the young heir from harm after his parents were sent to the guillotine … . Through the years, more than 500 books had been written about the young Dauphin, and many theories emerged about his possible escape and presumed exile … .
Today, two scientists, after examining all that remains [of the supposed prince]—a dried heart—said they had been able to extract three samples of mitochondrial DNA from the heart and compare them with samples from locks of hair taken from Marie
Antoinette, two of her sisters and two living maternal relatives … .
The scientists, Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the University of Leuven in Belgium and Bernard Brinkmann of the University of Munster in Germany, are both specialists in human genetics … . Professor Cassiman was at first unsure that any DNA testing could be accomplished because the heart was in such bad shape. The story of how it survived is a crazy saga that can hardly be a scientist’s dream …
Behind the headline in the
New York Times
is the true account of a young boy who inherited the hostility and hatred of a nation during the French Revolution. From his portrait, Louis-Charles, Due de Normandie, looks out confidently on the world with large blue eyes in a sensitive face framed by fair hair; the perfect storybook prince happily unaware that destiny had marked him out for a rather different story. His life had begun in 1785, four years before the revolution and his early years had been spent safely cocooned in the gilded palace of Versailles near Paris. At the age of four, on the death of his older brother, he had become the royal heir, the dauphin, in whose small frame was centered all the hopes of the continuing Bourbon dynasty that had sat on the French throne since the sixteenth century. With his good looks and sunny nature he was a much-loved child, Marie-Antoinette’s treasured little
“chou d’amour.”
However, this charmed childhood, played out in the beguiling walkways of Versailles, led only to a life of mounting terror, as he was, all too soon, encompassed by the fierce extremes of the revolution. When his father, Louis XVI, and his mother, Marie-Antoinette, were taken from him and executed at the guillotine in 1793, the “wolf cub” or “son of a tyrant” as he was now known, was isolated in solitary confinement, taught to forget his royal past and punished for the errors and extravagances of his ancestors. Forbidden to see his sister, Marie-Thérèse, the only other surviving member of his immediate family, the boy king became the victim of brutal physical and emotional abuse in his filthy, rat-infested cell. He was thought to have died
in the Temple prison in Paris at the age of ten, unrecognizable as the royal prince, his body covered with scabies and ulcers.
In 1795, when leaders of the French Revolution announced that Louis-Charles, the boy king, had mysteriously died in the Temple prison, rumors immediately began to circulate that he was still alive. Many were convinced that he had been spirited out of the prison by royalist supporters and escaped to safety abroad, ready to reclaim the throne. After all, there was no tomb to mark his official burial site; his death certificate drawn up by revolutionary officials was widely believed to be a forgery; one official’s wife even admitted that she had helped to smuggle him from the prison in a laundry basket, leaving a dying substitute child in his place.
As in a fairytale, after the revolution, the young prince sprang to life. He was sighted in Brittany, Normandy, Alsace and the Auvergne. Was he the charming and dignified “Jean-Marie Hervagault” who held court so convincingly and attracted a large and faithful following intent on seeing him attain the throne? Could he have been the rough diamond, “Charles de Navarre,” generous-natured, confident, whose love of parties usually ended in drunken bad manners, accounts of which tallied so neatly with the brutalizing treatment meted out to the “son of Capet” in prison? Or was he the suave and smooth talking “Baron de Richemont,” who could tell of his childhood in Versailles and the Temple prison in compelling detail and whose epitaph in Gleizé in France acknowledged him as “Louis-Charles of France, son of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette”?
In time, more than a hundred young dauphins stepped forward to claim their inheritance, the constant uncertainty adding to the anguish of Marie-Thérèse, the lost king’s sister, who thought her brother was dead. Many an adventurer or vagrant suddenly recalled their blue-blooded descent, and potential princes hopefully presented themselves at the gates of the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris. The missing “little boy the dolphin”—as he was disparagingly called by Mark Twain—appeared in London, America, Russia, even in the Seychelles. In time, dauphins—not necessarily of French origin or even French-speaking-surfaced in all corners of the globe; one
was an American Indian half-caste. Some claimants seemed genuine, gaining supporters willing to sponsor their cause, and lived out their days in lavish surroundings, holding court with devoted admirers. Others were thrown in prison or swiftly exposed as frauds.
To the astonishment of Europe, nearly forty years after his official death, a certain Prussian, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, returned to France and announced that he was the lost king and wished to claim the throne on the restoration of the monarchy. Unlike many other claimants, “Prince” Naundorff could remember his childhood in Versailles with chilling accuracy and vividly describe his escape from the Temple prison. A succession of former courtiers at Versailles, even the dauphin’s governess and nursemaid, joyfully confirmed he was telling the truth and begged “his sister” to acknowledge him. Yet Marie-Thérèse refused to meet with him; the French authorities seized his identity documents, rejected his claims and he lived out his years in exile. He founded a parallel dynasty; to this day, Naundorff’s descendents resolutely seek to prove that he was the rightful king of France.
There is one remaining clue to the mysterious life of the young prince—a grisly relic inside the great gothic Basilica at Saint-Denis, in a northerly suburb of Paris. By the high altar, almost hidden by the tall pillars, there is a dark passageway leading down to an even darker underground world: “the City of the Dead.” Stretching almost the entire length of the Basilica is the vast crypt, with vaulted ceiling and thick shadowy arches, where by tradition the kings and queens of France now rest. At the bottom of the dark passageway, barred from the main crypt by a heavy iron grille bearing the Bourbon coat of arms, there is a side chapel known as
La Chapelle des Princes.
Unlit, except for an ornamental brass ceiling light which casts strange, spiky shapes across the deep shadows of the room, the floor is crammed with wooden coffins.
Beyond these coffins, thin shafts of light direct the eye to a crucifix and stone shelving behind, displaying various brass caskets. These contain the preserved organs, hearts and entrails of various Bourbon kings of France, removed, according to tradition, prior to embalming the bodies. Hard to
discern in the dim light, on the bottom shelf behind the crucifix, there is a small, plain crystal urn, marked with the Bourbon
fleur de lys.
It contains a round object that, on first inspection, resembles a stone, shrivelled and dried hard as rock, hanging on a thread. Yet this is no ordinary stone. This is thought to be the actual heart of the ill-fated boy who died in the Temple prison, stolen from his dead body at the height of the revolution.
Now over two hundred years old, this child’s heart has had a remarkable journey through time. Cut hurriedly from the supposed dauphin’s body during his autopsy in the Temple prison in 1795 and smuggled out in a handkerchief, the heart which once raced and quickened to the Terror of the revolution, even in death became a symbol to be treasured or despised. Preserved merely to be stolen once more, hidden in grand palaces and lost again during the revolution of 1830, only with the passage of time, as the years slowly buried all painful memories, was the child’s heart quietly forgotten, eventually coming to rest by the coffins in
La Chapelle des Princes.
With recent developments in forensic science it has become possible to uncover one of the most enduring secrets of the French Revolution: what actually happened to the dauphin. With improvements in the restoration of ancient DNA and the analysis of special genes inherited from the maternal line, known as mitochondrial DNA, the mummified heart of the child offers a possible end to two hundred years of speculation.
On December 15, 1999, at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, the crystal urn which held the heart was veiled in a purple cloth and brought out from its shadowy tomb in the crypt for scientific testing. A small crowd had gathered in the Basilica, leading scientists such as the geneticist Professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman from Belgium, historians with an interest in the case, notaries to witness the proceedings, the inevitable TV crews and the various pretenders to the French throne: the Naundorff and Bourbon princes. The heart was placed on a small table in front of the high altar. Here, bathed in a fine tracery of stained-glass light, it could be clearly seen: an unprepossessing object, not unlike a garden stone. It was blessed by the priest who led a short ceremony. “I do not know whose heart this is,” he said, “but it
is certainly symbolic of children anywhere in the world who have suffered. This represents the suffering of all little children caught up in war and revolution.”
With great solemnity, the crystal urn was taken in a hearse to the nearby Thierry Coté Medical Analysis Laboratory in Paris. The two-hundred-year-old heart was hard as rock. Anticipating this, Professor Cassiman and his colleague, Dr. Els Jehaes, had brought a sterile handsaw with which they could cut along the bottom tip of the child’s heart. It took some time to saw a small strip, barely a centimeter wide; this was then split in two and escorted to two specialist laboratories in Germany and Belgium for genetic testing.
Invisible to the naked eye for over two centuries, the secrets locked within the tissues of this heart could now be revealed to modern science. Did the young son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette die a brutal death during the French Revolution? Or did he escape this fate and survive only to be ridiculed later as an impostor when he returned to claim the throne of France. In the gloved hands of the geneticists, the centuries of time which had slowly buried the terrible story of the owner of the heart could now be rolled back to solve one of the great enigmas in the history of the Revolution.
This is a royal detective story of mystery, fraud and revenge that spans two centuries. From the lavish chambers of Versailles to the grim prisons of Paris at the height of the Terror, it plummets the depths of human nature and reveals the worst that man can bestow on his enemies. Extraordinary feats of heroism, stoic endurance and almost foolhardy courage entwine with hatred, vengeance and cruelty masquerading under the flag of justice. At the center of it all is a family utterly destroyed; a weak but compassionate father, and a headstrong and courageous mother whose terrifying end, at the people’s will, ensured that fate would mark her young son for a special retribution. For the first time, the true story of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s son and heir can be told and his memory can finally be laid to rest.

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