And as this blighted young princess, alone in a foreign court, struggled to adjust to life, she was soon shaken by startling news of her brother.
In 1797, a young man was discovered wandering aimlessly in the countryside near Châlons-sur-Marne in northeast France. In local records he was described as having “long and naturally curly hair, an artless smile, a persuasive tone of voice, and in addition, an air of great dignity and candor.” He attracted attention since he was well dressed, had “more than an ordinary education” and possessed the confident air and manner of a young gentleman from an aristocratic family. This was puzzling. Why was such a charming young man, looking as though he had just stepped out of a chateau with self-evidently blue-blooded credentials, scrounging about the countryside like a vagrant? Eventually, in May 1798, he was brought before the local magistrate at Cernon, near Châlons, and ordered to explain who he was. The young man politely declined to answer any questions and so the magistrate ordered that he be held in custody pending further inquiries.
News that the son of an aristocrat was imprisoned in Châlons soon spread around the neighborhood. People had heard stories before of children from noble families orphaned during the revolution and left to wander the land in search of food and shelter. As speculation grew as to which great house he must belong to, many people came to see the apparently high-born prisoner to try to resolve the mystery. Although he stubbornly refused to reveal his identity, it was obvious to one and all that for some mysterious reason, he was merely visiting them from the sublime and lofty heights of the aristocracy. Deeply touched by his misfortune, the local community organized collections to help him. He was permitted out around the town with visitors. Fine clothes and gifts were brought for him, even a handsome silver service on which to dine; soon his cell was exquisitely furnished.
Local police had placed notices in the papers about their unusual prisoner, hoping to obtain more information, but to no avail. Apart from revealing his age—thirteen years—the authorities had no other clues. Yet the more he impressed his visitors with his charming modesty, gentility and refinement, the more the conviction grew that he was no ordinary aristocrat: this
was the young son of a truly great line. As word spread around the entire region, quite suddenly, under mounting pressure, the prisoner declared dramatically that he was ready to reveal all.
He was none other than Louis-Antoine-Joseph-Frédéric de Longueville, son of the late Marquis de Longueville. His mother’s name was Sainte-Emilie and the family seat was in Normandy, at Beuzeville. Local people were overjoyed, doubtless convinced their friend would be heir to a fortune, and wrote to inform the mayor of Beuzeville of the wonderful news. To their amazement they received an unexpected reply. The authorities in Normandy regretted that they had no knowledge of the House of Longueville, or for that matter, the family of Sainte-Emilie or the town of Beuzeville. However, this information did not deter the good people of Châlons. Clearly, he must be hiding an even more illustrious name. Indeed, it did not take the fascinated locals long to work out who he was when they pondered the names he had given—Louis, Antoine, Joseph—all names from the late royal family: this had to be the lost dauphin. Villagers rushed to see the young man and put it to him that he was Louis XVII. Summoning an air of great modesty, the stranger finally admitted that he was indeed none other than the lost boy king.
For a country that had been ruled for generations by royal Bourbon kings, the romance of finding that the prisoner was none other than the prospective king of France proved irresistible. This tallied neatly with the widespread belief that the prince had indeed escaped from the Tower. It was known that at the height of the Terror, Louis-Charles had been detained in solitary confinement in a darkened cell. Other than the handful of guards who checked on the boy by peering through the grille, few prison staff saw him at all during this period. Those who did validate the ledger only had to see a small figure of a boy lying down inside. It would have been only too easy to make a switch with a sickly boy of the same size as Louis-Charles during this period. Later, as the child’s conditions slowly improved, it was noticeable that those appointed as his guardians, such as Laurent and Gomin, had not met the dauphin earlier, and would not have realized if the boy was an impostor. Even if any guard had realized the truth, surely they would have
been handsomely bribed by wealthy royalists to keep the secret? To many, the escape of the royal prince seemed only too plausible.
Now that the “prince” had finally resurfaced in Châlons-sur-Marne, there was cause for celebration. Although still in prison, he was treated as a king, his cell luxuriously reappointed as a “little palace” and a small “court” organized with due pomp and ceremony. His “courtiers” expressed their deepest sympathies for the terrible traumas he had. had to suffer as a child; presents and money were lavished on him. Local people were immensely proud that “Louis XVII” had surfaced in their district, and he attracted many visitors, some even who had known him as a child. It was quite amazing how much he remembered of those days, how overcome he was at the mention of his mother’s death, how heartbreakingly sensitive he was at any reference to his father. All were agreed: he was the lost dauphin.
It was not long before a former Temple guard who had met the “son of Capet” in the Tower heard the news that he had reappeared in Châlons and decided to go there to see him for himself. He was shown into the royal lodgings, where the young “prince” was surrounded by his admirers. “Here is a gentleman who knows me,” declared the prisoner at once, “and who will say so if he has the courage.” The guard, at first unsure, was then reminded by the “prince” of an incident at the Temple. He immediately bowed before him. “You are indeed the son of the unfortunate king,” he declared.
By late 1798, rumors that Louis XVII was alive were spreading across France. The minister of police in Paris, alarmed that this might lead to royalist disturbances, decided it was time to act. “I should have thought,” he wrote ominously to the local authorities, “that it ought not to have been difficult to make a young boy speak.” The minister began his own detailed investigation and, according to some historical reports, Napoleon Bonaparte himself was informed. By now, Napoleon wielded tremendous power in France. His prestige had grown in line with the triumphant movement of his armies abroad as he had achieved decisive victories over the Italians, Austrians and Sardinians. When he returned to Paris, the twenty-eight-year-old general was triumphantly heralded as the new savior of France and he now set his sights on total power.
Curiously, soon after the Paris authorities became involved, a tailor called René Hervagault, from Saint-Lô in Normandy, came forward and declared that the royal “prince” was none other than his runaway son. Under questioning, the “prince” finally admitted that he was indeed Jean-Marie Hervagault, the missing son of the tailor.
However, the “court” at Châlons greeted this new evidence with disbelief. No one could accept that the young man would have such aristocratic credentials and so positively ooze charm if he were merely the son of a tailor. There were rumors that the tailor’s wife, formerly Nicole Bigot, a lacemaker at Versailles, had been seduced by an aristocrat, the Due de Valentinois, who, it appeared, when nature took its usual course in these matters and Nicole Bigot’s delightful figure displayed unwanted bulk, had conveniently married her to his valet, Hervagault. Yet people were still not satisfied. The birth certificate provided by the tailor showed that his son, the real Jean-Marie Hervagault, was now eighteen, but the prisoner appeared no more than thirteen—the same age as the dauphin. At a time when conspiracies abounded, people became convinced that the police, on instructions from higher authorities in Paris, had deliberately sought to conceal the truth in order to crush the rumors that Louis XVII was alive. Why, for example, had it taken so long for the tailor, Hervagault, to identify his son? And why did he step forward so conveniently just at the moment required by the Paris police?
The bemused police now found that his followers were more sure than ever that the prisoner was Louis XVII. They could quite understand, after everything that his family had been through, that he did not want to face further persecution from the authorities and consequently he had fallen in with their claim that he was a tailor’s son. Some even speculated that the tailor from Saint-Lô may indeed have known the prisoner; he could have been the very man selected to look after Louis-Charles when he had escaped from the Tower. In a delightful twist, his courtiers now respected their “king’s” wishes to
pretend
to be the son of the tailor. Presents of food, clothes and money were showered with even more generosity than before.
When the prisoner was finally released from jail, the police gave instructions
that he must move away from the area. The young “prince” made his farewells to his distraught subjects in Châlons and, having no definite plan or destination, he was soon involved yet again with the police, and this culminated in the summer of 1799 in a two-year prison sentence. By chance, while in prison a book was published which appeared to lend some plausibility to his claims: The
Cemetery of the Madeleine.
This was a popular fictionalized account of the escape of Louis XVII from the Tower. According to the author, Regnault-Warin, a substitute child was brought into the Tower in a wooden horse, heavily drugged with opium, while Louis-Charles was smuggled out in a dirty laundry basket. Later, the substitute child was poisoned and passed off as the dead “son of Capet.” Although the police tried to suppress the book—the author was even temporarily imprisoned—secret editions were widespread and many people believed it was true.
When the “prince” was due for release once more, he was met by his devoted supporters who escorted him back to Châlons. His “court” was soon reestablished and now he was prepared to recount his extraordinary adventures in full. As in
The Cemetery of the Madeleine,
he claimed he had indeed escaped from the Tower in May 1795, in a wicker basket. And he could reveal to his astonished subjects that the unfortunate substitute child who had taken his place in the cell was none other than the
real
Jean-Marie Hervagault. The unscrupulous tailor had consented to sell his own dying son for a large sum. Once he was free, royalist supporters had eventually smuggled him out of France to England where his uncles, who evidently thought his escape would thwart their plans to reascend the throne, were far from welcoming—he claimed the Comte d’Artois even tried to poison him. However, George III provided him with a ship and he fled to Europe, finally returning to France in 1797.
Amazed by his compelling odyssey, one of his followers generously put his mansion at Vitry at the disposal of the young prince, where he convincingly held court in a most royal manner with lavish banquets and charming guests: a Versailles in miniature. Naturally, to avoid further harassment from the police, he made use of his false name, Jean-Marie Hervagault,
when necessary. His followers thought it a good protection against the inhumanity that the authorities had shown to the royal family.
Inevitably, all this was greeted with dismay by the authorities. By chance, one of the officials in Vitry, Commissioner Batelier, was a zealous revolutionary who had voted for the king’s death in 1793. Now a leading member of the Criminal Tribunal at Vitry, he disliked this outpouring of royalist sentimentality. He undertook to make a full report to the notorious new chief of police in Paris, Joseph Fouché. This “king” in his little “Versailles” would be exposed, once and for all.
As rumors of Louis XVII’s miraculous survival spread beyond France, Marie-Thérèse was shaken. She believed that her brother had died in the Temple prison, as the authorities had claimed. Even though she had not been able to see him in the Tower, she had learned of his illness, as well as the conditions in which he was held, and guardians she trusted, such as Gomin, had eventually confirmed his death. At the time, she seemed to be under no illusion as to the cause of his death. His life was shortened, she wrote in her memoirs, by “uncleanness, joined to the horrible treatment, the unexampled harshness and cruelty exercised on him.” Yet in 1798, while in exile in Vienna, she learned from a priest, the Abbot of La Trappe known as Père de Lestrange, that a man claiming to be her brother had been found in France. From the evidence of her memoirs, it had not crossed her mind that the authorities might have been lying to her about his death. This would make sense of the numerous occasions when she had begged to see her brother and was denied.
Even if the claimant was fraudulent, the rumors reopened other harrowing wounds. The last time she had seen her brother alive was when, as a terrified fourteen-year-old, she had been interrogated by officials in the Tower about the claim that their mother and aunt had sexually abused him. She was only too aware how vehement Louis-Charles had seemed in his damning accusations. Marie-Thérèse had had plenty of time to replay the disbelieving horror of that scene many times. In her eyes he had been a
significant witness to their condemnation and deaths. How was she to feel about him now? Despite these feelings of antagonism, she had promised her mother that she would always look after her little brother.
Faced with this dilemma, she declined to meet the pretender. The memories of the past were too painful and, in any case, her advisors convinced her that “the tailor’s son” was almost certainly a fraud. She wrote in 1778 to inform her uncle, Provence, who, as Louis XVIII, was in exile in Russia, stating her opinion that the story was “an idle fancy” which “according to everything I know thereon, is in no way probable.” Provence wrote to reassure her from Mitau, “If, against all probability, the statement were true, the person who was most interested in it [that is himself} would experience sincere joy and believe that he had found his son again.”