At this stage, Provence was keen to demonstrate to his niece that he had her best interests at heart since he was most anxious to persuade her to marry his nephew, the Due d’Angoulême. Provence himself had no children, and consequently, the Due d’Angoulême, as the oldest son of Comte d’Artois, was the Bourbon heir in the next generation in the event of a restoration. Provence was only too aware that at the court in Vienna, Emperor Francis II was also considering a match for Marie-Thérèse, to his younger brother, the handsome Archduke Charles. Louis XVIII pressured Marie-Thérèse to accept the Duc d’Angoulême by telling her that this match had been her parents’ wish. Unknown to Marie-Thérèse, his newfound concern for his niece was more than a little tempered by a strong measure of self-interest.
While she saw in Provence a long-lost father figure, he saw in his niece only political advantage, as his letter to Monsieur d’Azara, the Spanish ambassador to the Holy See, makes transparent: “My niece’s prolonged period of suffering, her courage, and her virtues have directed toward her a degree of interest and devotion from the French people which it is essential that I should profit from … by marrying her to my natural heir.” Even though she had not met the Duc d’Angoulême since her childhood in Versailles, with no advisors to help her, Marie-Thérèse fell for her uncle’s warm, persuasive letters and committed herself. “I am much touched by your kindness
in arranging a marriage for me,” she wrote full of optimism to her uncle. “As you have selected Cousin Angoulême for my husband, I joyfully consent with all my heart.” On May 3, 1799, Marie-Thérèse left Vienna to join Provence in exile. Her uncles were not wealthy and were reliant on hospitality from foreign courts. Napoleon’s successes had driven Provence out of Italy to Russia where he was dependent on Czar Paul I, who had provided him with a home in the small provincial town of Mitau, now in Latvia. When Marie-Thérèse arrived a month later, on June 4, she found Provence had conveniently failed to provide her with a full description of her prospective spouse. If she had been expecting a younger version of Artois, a good-looking and agreeable companion, she was soon to be disillusioned. Unlike his father, the Duc d’Angoulême had inherited the weak and sickly health of the Bourbons: “He is small, ugly and awkwardly built,” observed a friend of the royal family, the Costa de Beauregard. “He has very little brains and speaks in an uneducated manner.” Whatever Marie-Thérèse may have felt, she was committed by her own pledge and Provence gave her no time to change her mind. They were married six days later.
Marie-Thérèse was soon deeply unhappy. “Her marriage with the prince was a bitter disappointment to the princess—a hollow fraud,” said one court observer, Monsieur de Vaulabille. She no longer joked about “her lover” as she had occasionally done in lighthearted moments with her ladies in Vienna. There were rumors that the marriage was not even consummated. Facing the chill of the Baltic winters in her dreary existence with the royal exiles, she had few comforts in her small circle, save the presence of some of her father’s most faithful servants—Hanet Cléry and François Hue, his former valets, and his last confessor, Abbé Edgeworth.
Any phantom prospects of a throne were rapidly diminishing. Napoleon was unstoppable. After decisive victories over the Italians and the Austrians, the Corsican general took Malta in June 1798 and moved into Egypt, winning the Battle of the Pyramids. Although the French fleet was almost wiped out by the English under Admiral Horatio Nelson at Aboukir Bay, when he returned to Paris, Napoleon was triumphantly heralded as a savior. Faced with the incompetent government of the Directory, he seized his
opportunity for a successful coup d’état in early November 1799. A Consulate was established and Napoleon soon became First Consul of France, with near-absolute powers. The republic was now in the hands of its most famous young warrior, a legend at thirty, promising glory where there had been chaos. In ten stormy years, France had passed from autocracy to a constitutional monarchy to a constitutional republic and now to military despotism. It was a foretaste of what was to follow.
Despite the Duchesse d’Angoulême’s apparent lack of interest in the man many believed to be her brother, the claims of the “tailor’s son” in the early years of the new century continued to gain momentum. Wherever he went, he elaborated his story in ever more convincing detail: his bold escape, the tragic fate of the real Jean-Marie Hervagault who had died in his place, his meeting with the pope and twenty cardinals in Rome … . His story all seemed most believable and he could now count among his followers leading members of the community, from businessmen to bishops. Even prominent republicans, including the former bishop of Viviers, Charles Lafont-Savine, became converts to his cause. The ex-bishop had been so concerned at the rumors from Vitry that he took the trouble of tracking down some of the doctors who had performed the autopsy on the child who died in the Temple, only to find that “they had not recognized that child to be the son of the former King Louis XVI.” Since the bishop had met the dauphin at Versailles, he travelled to Vitry and recognized his sovereign at once. He urged him, for his own safety, to maintain the bluff of being the tailor’s son: “Monseigneur, you are Hervagault, or you will die!” begged the former bishop. With great solemnity, he undertook to prepare the prospective “king” for ascending the throne, with personal tuition in a wide range of suitable subjects. So convinced was he of the young man’s veracity that he spread the word throughout the churches that Louis XVII was alive and well. People flocked to Vitry to catch a glimpse of their “king.”
In royalist circles it was widely believed that before returning to France, the real dauphin had travelled to Rome to see the pope. After crowning
the royal exile as king, Pope Pius VI had taken action to ensure that, in the future, there would never be any doubt over his identity, and an emblem of France had been branded on his right leg. To test this, at one banquet in the “king’s” honor, some of the more sceptical guests challenged him to show them this mark made by the pope. With great theatrical pomp, “the king” rose and slowly undid his buckle, rolled down his stocking and gently lifted his leg into view. To the delight of the crowd, there on his leg was an imprint of the shield and lilies of France. There were gasps of amazement. This was nothing less than “the holy mark placed by the infallible hand of the Vicar of God!”
By September 1801, Joseph Fouché, Napoleon’s chief of police in Paris, had had enough. Concerned at the increasingly strange reports that he was receiving from Batelier, showing how the affair was growing out of control, he issued a warrant for the arrest of Jean-Marie Hervagault. The police tracked down the “king” one evening dining in style with his following. The guests were shocked, but “Louis XVII” remained calmly dignified and had the officers wait while he ordered his courtiers to fetch his coat, pack his clothes and find his spectacles. Prominent members of the local community could be seen weeping, bowing and kissing his hand. In all the excitement and disarray eventually the arrest was made, but as the police marched the “tailor’s son” through the town, his supporters followed in stately procession, bearing all the glittering paraphernalia of the court. The banquet, with tables and chairs for everyone, continued in prison and the young “king,” by the light of the candles in the silver candelebra, once more held court. The police were baffled by this apparent “epidemic of gullibility” and in frustration they arrested some of the faithful courtiers for complicity. The prefect of police even debated whether all these “eccentric persons” should be “sent to a lunatic asylum.”
It took five months for the prosecution to bring Hervagault’s case to trial in February 1802. The prosecutors had some difficulty in laying a charge on him—after all, none of his supporters had complained about him. In his defense, it was argued that his followers had been informed that he was a “tailor’s son” but nonetheless chose to treat him with great honor and
dignity. The citizens of Vitry and Châlons were perfectly at liberty to treat a tailor’s son in this way: there was no law against it. The judge did not agree. With apparent pressure from Paris, the court decided that Jean-Marie Hervagault should be severely punished. The prosecution maintained he had deliberately misled people into giving money and other gifts under false pretenses. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.
There was uproar. There was no previous case of a person being imprisoned for swindling when there was not one complaint against him! Quite the reverse. The swindled persons begged for permission to bring him more gifts; a collection was immediately organized on his behalf. The situation became so inflamed that some historians have argued that the authorities even considered exploiting Jean-Marie Hervagault’s claims for their political advantage. According to Alphonse de Beauchamp, author of
Histoire des deux faux Dauphins
in 1818, Fouché, the chief of police in Paris, recommended to Napoleon that he should formally recognize the prisoner as the son of Louis XVI, but then force him to renounce his right to the throne as a condition of his release; Napoleon is said to have rejected the plan. Whatever the veracity of this unlikely claim, there is little doubt that the authorities took no chances. The prisoner soon found himself moved well away from his supporters to the grim Paris prison of Bicêtre. In time, interest in the pretender languishing in jail declined as all eyes in France were focused on Napoleon’s meteoric rise.
Appointed consul for life in 1802 and crowned emperor in 1804, Napoleon I provided the dynamic stable leadership that France had lacked as he put an end to the persecutions, reformed local and national government, revitalized France’s education system, and established the Code Napoleon which standardized civil law throughout the country. Abroad, despite his naval defeat at Cape Trafalgar in 1805 by the English under Nelson, the French Revolutionary Army forced its way across Europe in a dazzling series of military campaigns. In 1805, Napoleon defeated the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz; the following year the Prussians at Jena, then the Russians at Friedland—at every turn forcing the great Continental powers to make peace on his terms. By 1810, Napoleon was effectively the emperor
of Europe whose territory extended from the Atlantic Ocean to Rome and northern Germany to the Pyrenees. Paris, the center of this vital new empire, was soon to be suitably arrayed to impress with statues, columns and triumphal arches.
It is hardly surprising that, with the success of the empire, the “King of Vitry” on his release was unable to repeat his earlier recognition. Now older, and in declining health, he was less able to pass himself off as the charming prince. The authorities were on his trail and moved him on whenever he became troublesome; local people seemed disinclined to accept his story; even his “father” the tailor seemed to have lost interest in his errant “son.” Apart from a brief spell in the army, he survived by a life of petty crime and was repeatedly in prison. By early May 1812, he was back at Bicêtre and became gravely ill. The prison chaplain implored the dying man to confess all and renounce his claim to be Louis XVII. Unrepentant, the tailor’s son remained true to his story and insisted to the priest that he was indeed the son of Louis XVI. On May 6, 1812, he died and was buried in a common grave. In the list of deaths in the jail book he is identified simply as “Jean-Marie Hervagault, aged thirty, son of … and of … The rest of the details are left blank.
By 1812, however, Napoleon’s campaign was faltering. He embarked on an invasion of Russia where the country’s terrible winter soon took its toll. Napoleon’s Grande Armée was beaten back by the flames of Moscow or swallowed up in snow; those who could, retreated to Paris. Meanwhile the Russians formed an alliance with the Prussians against France; the Austrians soon joined them. The Duke of Wellington moved north through the Pyrenees to meet the Allies. By January 1814, France was under attack from all directions.
As Napoleon’s grip on political power ebbed away, the prospect that the Bourbon monarchy would be restored in France resurfaced. Rumors about the fate of the lost dauphin during the revolution started up yet again, but the context of all these claims had changed dramatically. Reports about the fate of Louis XVII could no longer be simply dismissed as fanciful tales of little consequence.
“Dauphins” began to surface in several provinces in France; the young prince was sited in Brittany, Normandy, the Auvergne and Alsace. Although the tailor’s son remained the most famous during the Empire, there were others, such as the “boy with tattoos,” one of many unidentifiable young men who emerged with the mark of the pope—in this case the Bourbon
fleur-de-lys,
on his leg. There were also one or two “dauphins” in the army such as “Louis dauphin” whose ancestry turned out to be far from illustrious when his father, a Parisian clockmaker, was traced. While some of these pretenders were utterly bizarre, and they vanished almost as soon as they made their claim, others successfully recruited many followers. These reports now had potentially serious political ramifications. If someone could prove himself to be Louis XVII, he should, by rights, take the place of Provence as the prospective king of France.
The pretenders’ claims were made all the more compelling by testimony from Marie-Jeanne Simon, the wife of Simon, the shoemaker, who had helped her husband as “tutor” to the royal prince. Not long after the death of her husband on the scaffold she had been admitted to the Hôpital des Incurables, in Paris. Years were to elapse before she could bring herself to speak of the orphan of the Temple and the events of the Terror to her carers, the Sisters of St.-Vincent-de-Paul. However, one day, the elderly widow unburdened herself of a terrible secret, confessing for the first time the true story of “her little prince.”