At seventy-five, Voisin was now an inmate of the Hospice de Bicêtre, and apparently had become an ardent royalist. With great emotion as he recalled the boy’s burial, he contradicted the evidence of the gravedigger’s widow and claimed that he himself had dug the grave. According to Voisin, “The grave was at least six feet deep and the coffin about five feet long; the young king was tall for his age.” The frail old man spoke tearfully with such conviction that a carriage was duly arranged and he returned with Petit and Simon to the cemetery. He was able to identify the very space of ground, between the church and the common pit, below which the young king would be found. The baffled investigators now faced three possible burial sites at Sainte-Marguerite for the orphan of the Temple.
It was not long, however, before other witnesses came forward who confirmed the testimony of the gravedigger’s wife. It seemed that the gravedigger,
Bertrancourt, had unburdened his secret to the parish priest at Sainte-Marguerite, one Abbé Dubois, and to his good friend, Découflet, who was now a beadle in another parish. Découflet could vividly remember a day in 1802 when he had been with Bertrancourt in the cemetery, digging a grave close to the church wall. Their excavations had revealed a large stone in the foundations, which was marked with a cross. “You see this place?” Bertrancourt had said to his friend. “One day there will be a monument here, for beneath lies the coffin of the dauphin!”
In spite of Voisin’s contradictory evidence, the police commissaries Petit and Simon wrote up their conclusions for the minister of police in March 1816, recommending that they should start excavations “in the place pointed out by Decouflet and the widow Bertrancourt.” An announcement was made in the local press and a date was duly set for the exhumation on June 12, the anniversary of Louis-Charles’s alleged burial.
On that day, a large crowd gathered at the cemetery to witness the opening of the grave, led by a number of clergy with incense and candles. They made a solemn gathering, some holding crucifixes, others with prayer books to bless the child. “We were all there at the appointed hour, with alb, and stole and surplice, and the cross at our head, waiting for the representative of the minister of police who should have presided over the exhumation,” recalled Abbot Raynaud, who worked at the parish of Sainte-Marguerite. “He never came. After several hours of waiting we received a message that the exhumation had been postponed.” Eventually, the police arrived and told them to disperse. There would be no exhumation.
Unknown to the crowd, there had been an unexpected last-minute testimony. Louis Antoine Charpentier, head gardener of the Luxembourg Palace, hearing that there was to be an exhumation, went to the police on the June 11 with a strange story that was to cast doubt on all their evidence. Charpentier claimed that five days after Louis-Charles’s alleged death in 1795, revolutionary officials from the Luxembourg section had approached him with a most unusual request. He was to return “that same night at ten o’clock and bring two of my workmen with me, with a pick axe and shovel.” When it was dark, they were taken by hackney coach to the end of the Rue
du Jardin des Plantes. Without any explanation, they were led to the cemetery of Clamart and ordered to dig a grave a few paces from the main gate. “When we had reached a depth of about six or eight feet, we heard the sound of a carriage approaching,” recalled Charpentier. Three members of the revolutionary committee unloaded a small coffin and lowered it into the grave. Charpentier and his men had to refill the grave and stamp down the earth “with all our might”—evidently there was to be no trace of the child’s burial. Charpentier understood that the coffin they had buried had been secretly removed from the Sainte-Marguerite cemetery. They were sworn to secrecy and his assistants were given ten francs each. He too was promised a reward, but he did not claim it when he heard one of the officials say with a laugh, “Little Capet will have to go a long way to find his family again!”
In the light of this conflicting testimony, the authorities were faced with a dilemma. They now had four possible burial sites: the common grave, by the chapel wall, the site indicated by Voisin, or some new location in the cemetery of Clamart. If the exhumation revealed an empty grave or another person’s body, this was bound to fuel fresh rumors about the fate of Louis XVII. Yet news that the exhumation had been cancelled at the last minute served to kindle the very kind of speculation that the authorities had been determined to suppress. It was said that Louis XVIII had suddenly discovered that the grave was empty and an exhumation would be an embarrassment to the government.
In an attempt to try to draw a line under the affair, the king decided that at the very least there should be a Requiem Mass at. Saint-Denis for the soul of his nephew. Arrangements were under way when the king received unwelcome news from the clergy of Saint-Denis. A Requiem Mass could be held in the Basilica
only
for royalty who were buried in the vaults below. With no body, there could be no Mass.
Louis XVIII and his minister of the interior were becoming increasingly frustrated. Far from resolving the matter as they had hoped, their investigation had merely served to highlight a whole series of contradictions and unanswered questions lending weight to the view that Louis XVII was still alive. The king’s advisors recommended that the inquiry should be stopped
as quickly as possible. They argued, with some reason, that it was, at best, leading nowhere, but at worst could potentially raise serious doubts of the legitimacy of the current king and lead to a political and constitutional crisis. In the period immediately after the Restoration, the monarchy still had many enemies; anything that might undermine it could be disastrous. Quite suddenly, an order was given to bring the inquiry to an end. The authorities closed rank around the official line: Louis XVII was dead and he had died in the Temple prison on June 8, 1795.
However, questions about the fate of Louis XVII simply would not die down. There were still obvious gaps in the official report and important witnesses had not been called—such as the boy’s guardians, Lasne and Gomin, the Commissioner Damont, or Dr. Pellatan himself. All these men were alive, so why did they not give evidence? Why was there no Mass in Saint-Denis? Above all, where was Louis-Charles’s body? The authorities were forced to concede that the precise spot where he had been buried was still a mystery. And without a body, there was no proof that Louis XVII was really dead. People increasingly suspected a cover-up. A possible motive for this seemed only too clear. The current king, and all those who depended for their position on his patronage and favor, had too much to lose if the truth came out.
Soon after the battle of Waterloo, in September 1815, a distinctly scruffy gentleman of about thirty years of age disembarked at Saint-Male claiming to have travelled from New Orleans. His interesting face, which had a certain rugged charm, was heavily scarred and had missing teeth, suggesting an eventful life, but not one in which refinement and education had figured , heavily. In spite of this, and other small misfortunes such as no luggage, no shoes, no money, he was more than redeemed by a spirit of enterprise and confidence that made small troubles disappear. He made friends easily and soon fell in love with a local widow, named Phélippeaux; but if he thought that he had landed on his feet, he was mistaken.
One day he was arrested in Saint-Malo for drunkenness and vagrancy and, as he had no passport or papers to identify himself, the police detained
him. When he was brought before a magistrate he declared, casually, that he had burnt his passport. Faced with the growing hostility of officials, he eventually revealed that he was a baker: “Charles de Navarre of New Orleans.” The magistrate was not impressed. The coarse vagrant before him had no papers to prove this and he was pressed to explain why. Yet still he could give no proper account of himself. The magistrate grew irritable and demanded a full answer.
Changing his tone, the stranger declared that he was about to make an extremely important announcement. He had the court’s full attention as he asked everyone to remain calm until he had finished his statement. There were very good reasons why he had no papers, he said, imploring them to understand his very delicate situation: he was none other than the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
In a generous gesture, he went on to emphasize that he would renounce his claim to the throne as long as his beloved uncle, Louis XVIII, was alive; he wished to “serve him faithfully,” and wanted nothing more than recognition. The bemused magistrate, convinced the man was nothing more than a drunken tramp making a fool out of him, began to express his doubts in no uncertain terms. At this point, “Louis-Charles” flew into a rage. In a forceful scene, he insisted that he should be taken to the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris where the truth of his claim would be obvious. The magistrate was dumbfounded. He ordered that the man should be held in prison, pending further investigations.
News of the extraordinary proceedings in the Breton courtroom spread quickly, and, within days, crowds gathered outside the prison clamoring for his release. Brittany was suddenly on fire with the news that the dauphin had indeed returned. For many, the timing of “Louis XVII’s” return seemed right and entirely appropriate. Napoleon had just been defeated and the monarchy had only recently been restored. Royalists who were convinced that Louis had escaped from the Temple prison were elated that the “lost dauphin” had finally been found. His agony could now be put to an end and France would prostrate itself before him. The romance and poignancy of the story proved utterly irresistible. “Charles de Navarre” was soon to
find that his supporters grew almost overnight from a handful of people in Saint-Malo to a well-organized movement across France.
From prison, “Louis-Charles” seized his moment to correspond with the great and the good. Since he himself was illiterate, he appointed secretaries from his supporters in prison to draft the letters for him, starting with the king of France. “Your Majesty, I beg to inform you that the dauphin, son of Louis XVI, is imprisoned in Saint-Malo and begs your Majesty to enable him to reach you … . I have had the honor to write to you fourteen times without having received any reply … . If you bring me before you, you will see whether I am deceiving you, and thenceforth I abandon myself to the severity of the law.” This letter, sent in December 1815, was signed, “Daufin Bourbon.” He also wrote to his “sister,” Marie-Thérèse, signing himself as “her brother, the king.” The governor of Guernsey was soon to receive a letter urging him “to bring this matter to the notice of the king of England.” Concerned at developments, the police thought it best to move him on. “Louis-Charles” was transferred first to Rennes and then, in January 1816, to the prison workhouse at Rouen in Normandy.
Despite the authorities’ increasingly desperate attempts to deny that their prisoner was Louis XVII, he became even more widely acknowledged than Hervagault. The success of the “Daufin Bourbon” was all the more extraordinary when so much about him lacked credibility. Unlike Hervagault’s polished charm and aristocratic demeanor, this man was definitely from the lower orders and usually the worse for drink, encouraged by the prison keeper, Libois, who made money from sales of alcohol to visitors coming to see the famous prisoner. Yet among his increasingly large following, this did not appear to undermine his claims to be the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette—quite the contrary. There was a simple explanation. His tutor, Simon, had deliberately trained Louis-Charles as a boy to behave in this way, swearing and drinking to excess like a good
sans-culotte.
The process of erasing any last vestiges of royalty had been completed in America, where he had lived among cutthroats and beggars.
The hysteria surrounding the Hervagault case, over fifteen years before, soon repeated itself on an even larger scale. Fine gifts, clothes, linens and
money made their way to his prison cell and the once scruffy vagrant began to appear suitably royal. “Courtiers” were appointed and the obsequious bowing, scraping and kissing of hands started up all over again in the prison setting.
The claims of the famous prisoner in Rouen inevitably gained credence from the testimony of Marie-Jeanne Simon in the Hôpital des Incurables. The widow’s insistence that she had helped her prince to escape from the Tower in a laundry basket was a key piece of evidence for those who believed that Louis-Charles was still alive. Sceptics suggested that she had deliberately rewritten history to avoid the shame of the Simons’ terrible treatment of the young prince; this she vehemently denied. Although now old and frail, she was an entirely credible witness and her account could not be readily dismissed. People began to ask, why not take the old widow to Rouen to identify the prisoner and settle the matter once and for all? Consequently, on November 16, 1816, the police took the matter in hand.
Madame Simon was taken by carriage to the ministry of police. She found herself in such a large and lavishly furnished room that she imagined she was in the Tuileries Palace. According to a report in the National Archives, as before, she embarked on her account of Louis-Charles’s escape in a dirty linen basket. However, when the police interrogated her, pressing her on details of her story, she felt threatened and became frightened. How could she be spreading so subversive a tale, asked the police, completely at odds with the official account, “the whole circumstances of which had been so minutely ascertained?” Under pressure, she became flustered and eventually did concede in her signed declaration that she had not actually
seen
the dauphin being placed in a laundry basket and removed from the Temple with her own eyes. Nonetheless, “her conviction [that the dauphin did not die in the Tower] was so innate that nothing could dissuade her of it.” She also claimed that the dauphin had visited her some twelve years ago and she had recognized him immediately by his mannerisms and features. Madame Simon was prepared to go to Rouen to identify the prisoner. The police decided that this could be too risky.