There are few witnesses to this period of Louis-Charles’s captivity, and apart from information gleaned from official documents, records, and the
anecdotes of guards, no one can prove precisely what happened behind the locked doors of the Tower. The first detailed investigation came from the historian Alcide de Beauchesne, who spent twenty years after the Restoration gathering information and was able to interview some of those who had worked at the Temple during the revolution. Although undoubtedly seen from a royalist perspective, the picture that emerges from the records gathered by Beauchesne and others is that, inspired by men like Hébert, the boy was abused, and this abuse became progressively worse over time. To many of the guards in the Temple, including Simon, Louis-Charles was a legitimate target. He was the son of the hated tyrant and his depraved wife who, in their eyes, had selfishly brought famine, poverty and misery to their people and ruthlessly imposed an autocratic, oppressive and unjust rule on France. Their revenge would be simple, local and direct. According to Beauchesne, soon pure sadism prevailed.
There are official documents to back up this view. According to a report written after the revolution by Jean-Baptiste Harmand, an agent of the Committee for General Security, Simon subjected the boy to “atrocious cruelty.” Harmand interviewed the guards at the Temple and learned that Simon would waken his prisoner several times a night, shouting out: “Capet! Capet!” Louis-Charles would answer, “Here I am, citizen.” “Come near me so I might touch you,” Simon would reply. According to Harmand, as the boy approached the shoemaker’s bed, “Simon would put one leg out of bed, and with a kick, directed as far as he could reach, he would hurl his victim to the ground, crying, ‘Go to bed, wolf cub!’” Harmand added to his report, “The commissaries gave us an account which makes me still shudder.” While there is evidence that such scenes were interspersed with more kindly interludes where Simon might coax the child with games of drafts, billiards or new toys, nonetheless, his drinking, brutishness and his unpredictability all served to undermine Louis-Charles. Gradually, the child became increasingly nervous around other adults. Prison staff noticed that Louis-Charles could be frozen with terror at the sight of anyone he did not recognize and would not utter a word to them unless they showed him some act of kindness.
Evidence from minutes of the General Council of the Commune also
reveal that those few guards who disliked what they saw became afraid to complain. Sympathy for a member of the royal family might be repaid at the guillotine. On August 19, 1793, a schoolteacher, magistrate and municipal representative known as Commissionaire Leboeuf happened to witness Simon’s treatment of the child when he visited the Tower. The young prince was serving Simon, as usual, at the table; Simon was the worse for drink. When Louis-Charles accidentally spilled part of the meal, Simon swung round and struck him forcefully with his napkin, “almost taking out one of his eyes with the blow.” Before Leboeuf could protest, Simon was scolding the child. “See here, citizen! How awkward the d—d wolf cub is in waiting at table! They want to make a king of him and he is not fit for a servant!” Simon could never have imagined before the revolution that one day he would be served dinner by the king of France. Like many ordinary men who had advanced under the revolution, he revelled in his elevated status; this was his chance to spit at the system.
However, Leboeuf protested at Simon’s brutality. The minutes for the General Council of the Paris Commune reveal that on August 28 Leboeuf was denounced “because he had complained of the too republican kind of education given to little Capet.” Leboeuf, who attended the meeting, tried to defend himself. He pointed out that as a schoolmaster he did not like to hear “improper songs” and “repeated obscenities” and that “he wished to see the little Capet receive an education more consistent with good morals.” Chaumette was outraged. He accused Leboeuf “of having obtained entrance to the Temple in a manner unworthy of a magistrate, of having found and worshiped an idol there, and of daring to find fault with the educating of the young Capet as a
sans-culotte.”
Leboeuf, in turn, was so appalled at Chaumette’s “reeducation” that he resigned his post at the Commune. It was not long before the police raided Leboeuf’s house and he was imprisoned. Although he was later acquitted, he fled Paris, fearful of his life. After this, no more formal complaints of the boy’s treatment are recorded in the General Council minutes.
Simon’s wife, Marie-Jeanne, who did not have any children of her own, tried to protect the boy from her husband’s roughness and the victimization
of the guards, but with little success. Like her husband, she, too, relished the reversal in their fortunes. “The little fellow is a very amiable and charming child,” she told a friend. “He cleans and polishes my shoes for me and he brings me my foot-stove to my bedside when I get up!” She made sure that their little royal servant was reasonably well fed and kept clean, but she was a timid woman who was obliged to turn a blind eye to her husband’s excesses.
Simon and the guards gradually became bored with their daily routine in the prison. As a result of the perpetual fears that royalists would try to smuggle the boy out of prison, Louis-Charles had to be kept under constant surveillance. They had little to do other than watch over him; with plenty of time on their hands, drinking, bullying and then terrorizing the child became an amusing way of passing the time. One day a doctor was called to treat Madame Simon, who had fallen ill. The doctor, a surgeon from the Hôtel Dieu called Monsieur Naudin, happened to catch Simon trying to make Louis sing a bawdy song. When he refused, Simon lost his temper, punched him and pulled him “off the ground by the hair of his head.” “Damned viper!” Simon is reputed to have said. “I have a mind to crush you against the wall.” The doctor took in the scene, the abusive tutor, the crying child, looking pale and weak, and was full of indignation. He scolded Simon, who was indifferent and just shrugged his shoulders, but no formal complaint was made. Simon knew that he would face no reprimand for the abusive way he treated the child.
It is perhaps hardly surprising that eventually Louis-Charles succumbed to the regime. In time, he appeared to any who observed him to have inculcated the beliefs and mannerisms of his captors. One visitor to the Temple, Commissioner Daujon, was shocked at a scene he witnessed. “I was playing
boules
with him,” Daujon explained. “The room we were in was below his family’s apartment and we could hear the sound of chairs being dragged across the floor which created quite a lot of noise. The child then cried out with an impatient gesture, ‘Haven’t those bloody women been guillotined yet?’” Whether he was echoing his captors to win approval, whether he had no idea of the significance of what he was saying, or whether
he really had become confused to a point where he would readily condemn his family is not known. What is known is that Hébert, aware how easily the child was manipulated against his family, seized his opportunity. In late September and early October, in his desire to gather more evidence against Marie-Antoinette, he hatched an outrageous plan to make Louis-Charles testify against his mother.
Hébert knew that whenever her son had been terrified, Marie-Antoinette had protected and comforted the boy in her bed. He himself had repeatedly stoked the belief in
Le Père Duchesne
that Marie-Antoinette was a sexual deviant, promiscuous and immoral. Now he aimed to put these two things together and go one step further.
Historians cannot agree on the means whereby Hébert and his men lured the child into the trap. Some believe that apart from physical abuse, the child also suffered some form of sexual abuse. One piece of evidence for this view comes from the letters of an aristocrat, the Comte d’Antraigues, who set up a network of spies in Paris to obtain information about events at the Temple. D’Antraigues informed the Spanish ambassador: “Simon says that he [Louis XVII] is infected with a venereal disease … . Hébert himself used to bring him young prostitutes to spend several hours with the child to pervert his heart and ruin his health.” Other historians have cast doubt on this evidence; the count, it seems, was not beyond fabricating stories for the ambassador or repeating gossip in the papers, if his spies had nothing new to report. Nonetheless, such accounts have prompted much speculation.
According to historian Vincent Cronin, writing in 1974, Simon encouraged the child to practice self-abuse, “probably on Hébert’s orders … . In the course of one of these revolting lessons it seems one of the boy’s testicles was hurt and had to be bandaged.” The injury was passed off as one he sustained playing with a stick. Gradually these sessions became worse as Simon had the child more and more in his power “and began to turn him against his mother.” In order to avoid Simon’s anger, and terrified of further beatings, the boy played along with these fantasies until he was unable to distinguish fact from fiction, right from wrong. Eventually, according to Cronin, Hébert “gave orders to Simon that from time to time a prostitute
was to be brought to Louis’s room. The boy was too young to have intercourse, but the prostitute would sap his strength and eventually perhaps infect him with syphilis.”
Even leaving aside the unknown question of whether or not Louis-Charles was subject to sexual abuse, he was still barely eight years old and only too easily influenced. Marie-Antoinette herself had long been aware of his indiscretion and had warned Madame de Tourzel of how readily “he repeats what he has heard, and often without intending to lie, he embellishes imaginary details.” Trapped in the Tower away from his one surviving parent and at the mercy of a brutish teacher, within three months he had become easy prey to the abusive, brainwashing treatments of his captors. On Sunday October 6, 1793, Hébert was ready to act.
A deputation of senior leaders including Pache de Montguyon, the mayor of Paris; Chaumette, the leader of the Commune; and several other officials arrived at the Temple and went to see the son of Capet. The child had been plied with more than a little liquor for the occasion. The deputation then proceeded with a cross-examination.
Court records show that Hébert had drafted a confession for the boy to sign. Firstly, Louis-Charles was made to swear that his mother had repeatedly taken part in activities designed to thwart and bring down the revolution. Then Hébert embarked on a second, even more twisted section:
Charles Capet declares that Simon and Simon’s wife, who were ordered by the Commune to watch over him, several times found him practising self-abuse in bed, and he told them that he had been taught these pernicious habits by his mother and aunt, and that on several occasions they took pleasure in watching him perform these practices in their sight, and that very often this took place when the women made him sleep between them.
In the highly charged atmosphere, the men manipulated Louis-Charles into providing a written confession that he had had sexual relations with his mother. The child’s embarrassment over his regular, observed masturbation,
the filthy songs he was taught, the constant stories he had heard about his mother’s outrageous behavior, the confusion created by the drink and Hébert’s relentless insinuations, and, above all, his anxious desire to please his captors so as to stop the beatings: all this led the young boy to commit a terrible act. He agreed to sign.
Just to be sure the public was left in no doubt, Chaumette then added a footnote to the document. “However the child explained himself, let us understand that once his mother pulled him close to her, which resulted in copulation and which also resulted in swelling of one of his testicles, observed by citizen Simon, on which he is still wearing a bandage and that his mother told him never to tell anyone; and these acts have been repeated
several times
since then.”
Armed with this signed statement, the next day these men made the child confront his sister and aunt, who were interrogated about the same accusations.
“At midday we were busy doing up our chamber,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “when members of the Convention arrived with several municipal guards.” She was ordered to go down alone with the guards. “My aunt wished to follow me; they refused her.” Marie-Thérèse felt very awkward and frightened. “It was the first time I was ever alone with men,” she wrote. On entering her brother’s room she rushed to embrace him. “I kissed him tenderly; but they snatched him from my arms telling me to pass on into the next room.” She was made to sit down and was interrogated by Chaumette and Hébert.
At first, she was questioned about alleged plots to escape. Who was behind them? She was confused and denied any knowledge of them, persisting in her request to be reunited with her mother. “I can do nothing,” replied Chaumette. Then, to her horror, she was questioned about an alleged sexual relationship between her mother and her brother. “I was so aghast at such horrors, and so indignant that, in spite of the fear I felt, I could not keep myself from saying that it was an infamy,” she wrote. Chaumette persisted for a long time, covering “a great many vile things of which they accused my mother and my aunt.” Marie-Thérèse, still only fifteen years
old, barely understood all the details of the charges, “but what I did understand was so horrible that I wept with indignation.” Louis-Charles was made to repeat what he had said the previous day. She was grilled for three hours and eventually conceded “that it may be possible that her brother had observed things that she had missed as she was busy with her lessons.” Marie-Thérèse was distraught as she returned to her room.
After this, it was the turn of Aunt Élisabeth. “She replied with still greater contempt to the vile things about which they questioned her,” recorded Marie-Thérèse. However, Louis-Charles, utterly brainwashed by his captors, insisted to his aunt that it was all true. Élisabeth was blunt: “Such infamy is too base, and too far beneath me, to permit me to reply.” Her questioning lasted an hour. “The deputies saw they could not intimidate her as they expected to do with one my age,” observed Marie-Thérèse. This wretched session was the last time Louis-Charles would ever see members of his family.