Aware of the child’s gratitude, Dr. Desault tried to prolong his morning visits as long as the officers of the municipality would allow. When the guards announced the end of the visit, the child, not daring to ask for a longer time, “held back Monsieur Desault by the skirt of his coat,” hardly able to bear the departure of this man who showed genuine concern. “Twice when he had left the Temple, the good and kindhearted Desault was obliged to retire to his own house, so much was he hurt by the affecting sight of the deserted child, whom he could not tend, whom he could not cure, and yet who seemed, as it were, crying to
him
for help!”
On one visit, as Desault was leaving the Tower, one of the guards asked
the doctor whether the boy was dying. “I am afraid so,” Desault replied. “But perhaps there are people in the world who hope so.” However, in an unexpected twist, it was the doctor who died before the child.
Having submitted his first report on the condition of the child, Desault was invited to a public dinner on May 29 as a guest of the Convention. After this, he suddenly fell ill, suffering from severe abdominal pain and vomiting. His condition became worse and he died in agony three days later. Many suspected poisoning was a likely cause. To add to the mystery, within a few days, Choppart and Doublet, two of Desault’s assistants, also died suddenly. Did Desault discover something about the boy that had to be kept secret and for which he was murdered? On inspecting the boy, did he believe that this was not the son of Louis XVI but some impostor placed there by royalists? Was he too outspoken in his criticism of the Convention? His premature death at the age of forty-nine was formally announced in the
Moniteur:
“France and all of Europe have just lost citizen Desault … . Such was the superiority of this great surgeon that posterity will certainly call him a great man … . He had been persecuted by our former tyrants and his death was caused by their last accomplices.”
Not knowing of his death, at the Temple the child waited eagerly for his arrival at nine o’clock every morning. When he failed to come for a second time, “the little invalid was much distressed by it.” On the second of June, he was finally told, “You must not expect to see him anymore. He died yesterday.” A week was to elapse in which the dying child received no medical attention at all before the Committee for General Security found a suitable doctor. On June 6, 1795, the new surgeon in chief of the Hôpital d’Humanité, Dr. Philippe-Jean Pellatan, was told his presence at the child’s bed “was urgently needed.”
Philippe-Jean Pellatan visited the child immediately and saw a boy covered in scabies and ulcers. His head drooped, his face and limbs were wasted, his stomach was enlarged and he was suffering chronic diarrhea. Shocked at his condition, Pellatan treated the boy as best he could. Observing that the child seemed very sensitive to noise, he gave instructions that “the sound of bolts and locks that seems to afflict the child … be muffled.” He even
went so far as to blame the officers “for not having removed the blind, which obstructed the light, and the numerous bolts … that caused him to shudder. The prisoner, he advised, should to be taken to the keeper’s lodge overlooking the garden where he could at least breathe fresh air in the hope”that he would find more consolation there.”
For the first time in over a year the prisoner found himself in an airy room, with a large window free from bars and obstructions, “decorated with large white curtains beyond which he could see the sun and the sky.” According to his guardians, the child responded immediately to these unexpected delights. When he returned later that day, Pellatan found that the patient “seemed a little better and took more interest in the care that was being taken of him.” He realized, however, that Louis-Charles was in a poor state and that he could do very little for him. Pellatan was later to report that “unfortunately, all assistance was too late … . No hope was to be entertained.”
By now, Laurent had left the Temple, having been posted elsewhere some weeks previously, understandably relieved to be out of the oppressive atmosphere of the Tower prison. Gomin had taken over responsibility for the boy’s immediate care, assisted by a man called Étienne Lasne. According to interviews carried out twenty years later, after the restoration of the monarchy, Gomin and Lasne claimed they were genuinely distressed by the boy’s final suffering. Lasne says he tried to divert the invalid by playing cards and singing songs while Gomin accompanied them on the violin. These scenes are not entirely credible, as Lasne also admits that three weeks into his appointment, “he was not able to extract a single word from the dauphin” and the child, who was always “grave and sad in his presence, inspired a mixture of pity and disgust.”
Dr. Pellatan visited the prisoner again on June 7 and found “the child’s weakness was excessive and he had had a fainting fit.” Later that evening the boy’s condition suddenly deteriorated and an urgent message was sent to Pellatan recalling him to the Temple. Pellatan sent instructions to give him some medicine and visited the boy again the next day. Louis-Charles was sitting up but still very weak. Pellatan “expressed astonishment at the
solitary state in which the child was left during the night and part of the day … and strongly insisted on giving the poor little Capet a nurse.” He wrote to the Committee for General Security, “We found Capet’s son with a weak pulse, and an abdomen distended and painful. During the night and again in the morning he had several green and bilious evacuations. His condition appearing to us to be very serious, we have decided to see the child again this evening … . It is essential to have an intelligent female nurse by his side.”
When interviewed by Beauchesne years later, Gomin claims that when he went to see the invalid that evening, the boy was crying. Gomin “asked him kindly what was the matter.” Louis-Charles replied that he was “always alone,” and that “his mother was not here to help him.” He believed his mother was in one of the other towers and desperately wanted to see her, unable to understand why she could not come.
Once more he passed a night in solitude. On June 8, 1795, Lasne was alone with Louis-Charles while Gomin went to the committee to ask for a nurse; but it was too late. During the afternoon, the child began to slip into unconsciousness. He was given a spoonful of the potion that Dr. Pellatan has prescribed. To no avail; he began to sweat profusely. There was the sound of a rattle “followed by the most violent crisis.” At around three o’clock, Lasne found the child was having great difficulty breathing. To try to ease this problem he lifted him up and placed the frail arms around his neck, but the enormous problem of breathing that the boy was having soon ended in a long-drawn-out sigh. His arms, his whole body, went limp. There was no more help required. The orphan of the Temple was dead.
Such was the sensitivity of this news that it was not immediately publicly announced. While a sheet was placed over the little corpse, his guardians continued to behave as though all were well. They asked for medicines and soup and maintained the usual routine. Gomin hurried to the Committee for General Security to let key officials know the news. The following day, arrangements were made for an autopsy to establish the cause of death. Dr. Pellatan arrived shortly after eleven with three other doctors: Jean Baptiste
Dumangin, head physician of the Grand Hôpital de l’Unité, and professors Pierre Lassus and Nicolas Jeanroy.
Stretched out on a table, the child who had been so neglected in life, as a corpse was anatomized in meticulous detail for over five hours. “Before proceeding to open the body, we noted that there was general emaciation due to wasting,” Pellatan observed. “The stomach was very distended and swollen. On the inner side of the right knee, we found a tumor … and another small tumor on the radial bone, near the left wrist. The tumor on the knee contained nearly two ounces of greyish matter which was full of pus and lymphatic … the one on the wrist contained the same type of matter, but thicker.”
His hair was shaved, and the skin removed from his scalp. Then Pellatan proceeded to saw through the boy’s skull “on a level with the sockets.” Professor Jeanroy observed “that in more than forty years’ exercise of his art, he had never seen the brain so well developed in a child that age.” The child’s brain, considered the learned gentlemen, “was in most perfect completeness.” However, when they cut open the body to examine the internal organs, there were abnormalities. “When the stomach was opened there escaped more than a pint of turbulent serum, yellowish and very fetid. The intestines were also swollen and adhering to each other and the abdominal cavity.” Bit by bit, part by part, his liver, spleen, pancreas, gall bladder, every inch of his body was subjected to the close scrutiny of the four men.
Although they concluded that, for the most part, the child’s organs were “very healthy,” they did find a number of tumors and growths of various sizes throughout the intestines and near the lungs. These, they thought, were the result of a “scrofulous tendency [tuberculosis], which had been in existence for some time, and to which we should attribute the death of this child.” At the time, Pellatan did not speculate on the cause of this disease, but in a statement written nearly twenty years later, he said that it was almost certainly due “to the terrible treatment, body and soul, that the infant had endured for so long.”
On completing the autopsy, Pellatan replaced the scalp on the skull and, turning back the strips of loose skin, sewed his face back together. The head
was then wrapped in a cloth which was firmly fixed beneath the nape of the neck. The boy’s light brown curls, once so much admired, lay on the floor. Damont, the commissioner on duty, was permitted to gather them up and keep them.
Pellatan then began to draft a report. With due scientific caution, he could not positively assert that this was the son of Louis XVI and had no proof that the boy he had been treating for the past few days was indeed the dauphin. Lasne and Gomin assured him that he was, even though they had not known Louis-Charles before his solitary confinement in the Tower. If the royal prince had escaped during the Terror and a substitute had been put in his place, they would not have been able to detect the fraud themselves. A cautious, intelligent doctor, Pellatan did not want to be sucked into the political aftermath of the boy’s death and clearly balked at the idea of personally verifying the identity of the dead boy. Instead, he wrote, “We found in the bed the dead body of a child who appeared to us to be about ten, which the commissaries told us was that of the deceased Capet and which two of us have recognized as being the child they had been taking care of for a few days.”
It was indeed a baffling task for the authorities to secretly confirm the identity of the dead child. He had been locked away in such seclusion for so long that, even after the Terror, few of the guards had seen him. On the day of his death, one of the secretaries of the Committee for General Security, a man named Bourguignon, came to the Tower to see the dead child for himself. Early the next morning, four more officials from the committee arrived. Later that night, when the autopsy had been completed and some thirty hours after the child had died, the president of the Committee for General Security, known as Bergoeing, finally arrived. Anxious to ensure that there could be no doubt about the child’s identity, he ordered twelve people on duty at the Temple to sign a declaration confirming that this was the son of Louis XVI. Yet, like Gomin and Lasne, it is unlikely that any of these officials knew the dauphin before his imprisonment. Even those who had known the dauphin earlier would have been hard pressed to identify
the boy, since the trauma of his maltreatment and illness had greatly altered his appearance. One commissary, a man called Guérin, claimed he had seen the dauphin at the Tuileries palace. He had not seen the boy for at least four years, but as he peered in the candlelight at the face, now swollen, mutilated by a scalpel, darkened by putrefaction and wrapped in a bandage, he thought he could recognize the once-royal features.
The only person who could have reliably confirmed the death of the dauphin was just a few feet away in the room above. Yet Marie-Thérèse had no idea her brother was dead and remained in ignorance of this for many weeks. No one came to tell her that the last little member of her immediate family had died. No one asked her to identify his body. The officials at the Temple had no authority to override the Committee’s order that the children be kept apart at all times—even in death. Locked in her room on the third floor, she was unaware of the gruesome scene under way in the room below.
Preparations were being made to dispose quietly of her brother’s body in a common grave. Officials at the Committee for General Security gave permission for the decomposing son of the tyrant to be buried. The caretaker at Sainte-Marguerite cemetery provided a child’s pinewood coffin, five feet long. Étienne Voisin, the funeral director, transferred the body into the coffin. He did not nail down the lid right away, since he said later, “That would have moved the bowels of the august princess.” Instead, the coffin was taken down the stone steps to the ground floor out of earshot. Civil commissaries arrived from the town hall to sign the death certificate:
Register of the decease of Louis-Charles Capet, on the 20 Prairial at three o’clock P.M. aged ten years and two months, native of Versailles, residing at Paris in the Temple tower, son of Louis Capet, last king of the French, and of Marie-Antoinette-Josèphe-Jeanne of Austria.
As darkness fell late in the evening of June 10, 1795, the child finally left the Temple prison in a coffin held by four bearers. It was a modest procession that progressed uneventfully along the Parisian streets across the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine and into the cemetery. There was no family to mourn him, just a few officials, including Lasne and Gomin, and two detachments of soldiers to serve as an escort. At Sainte-Marguerite the gravedigger, Pierre Bertrancourt, was waiting and, without the delay of a blessing or a simple prayer, the cheap coffin was lowered unceremoniously into a common grave for the poor. The gravedigger’s wife, Gabrielle Bertrancourt, who described the scene years later, said, “There were very few people. He was put into the common grave, which was the grave for everyone, children and adults, the rich and the poor. Everybody went into it, because, so to speak, everybody was
equal
.” Afterward, two sentinels were posted at the cemetery to prevent anyone from trying to steal the body.