When the minister for police heard of this he concluded, somewhat conveniently,
that Madame Simon was mad. He wanted to have her certified; after all, who would listen to the ramblings of an old woman in a lunatic asylum? His colleagues advised against this. The nuns who were caring for Madame Simon had consistently maintained that she was of sound mind and might contest any move to certify her. Whatever transpired that day in the police office, Madame Simon became terrified to relate her story of the little prince. “My life is at stake,” she told the sisters. They noticed that she now seemed distressed and thought that the police “had sought to intimidate her.” Some believed that she was silenced, under threat of the “severest punishment.”
All this was an insoluble puzzle to Marie-Thérèse, who was shocked by the claims that her “brother” had appeared in Saint-Malo, and she followed the prisoner’s case with interest. After the second restoration, the failure of her uncle’s inquiry to determine the exact fate of her brother had almost certainly helped to cast doubt on her conviction that he was really dead. She had always been aware that she had no grounds to place any particular trust in the statements by the revolutionary government in 1795 about Louis-Charles’s death. In her eyes, they had murdered her father and mother. Why should she believe their account of what had happened to her brother?
The endless question of her brother’s fate had become a backdrop to her life. Marie-Thérèse had always been able to keep her emotions under control and was not inclined to reach overhasty conclusions. Nonetheless, the evidence suggests that she had agonizing doubts over this continuing problem. Worse still, she was obliged to hide these nagging uncertainties, especially from her uncle, who had specifically closed the matter and called an end to the inquiry. Could this new claimant really be her brother? It was impossible to go to Rouen to see the prisoner without appearing to mistrust her uncle, and add still more credibility to the prisoner’s claims. Yet if it
was
her brother languishing in jail, she might be cruelly spurning him at the very time he needed her support. Finally, on the advice of her courtiers, she refused to meet the prisoner in Rouen. Some now began openly to condemn Marie-Thérèse for having “disowned her own brother who she knew was
living.” Rather cruelly, this earned her the name among his royalist supporters as “Duchess Cain.”
However, “Duchess Cain” did send her trusted friend the Marquis de Montmaur to meet discreetly with the prisoner in Rouen. The marquis had accompanied Marie-Thérèse when she had heard Madame Simon’s testimony and was only too aware of her concerns. He agreed to find out what he could about the prisoner. According to testimony from the concierge, Libois, on March 15, 1817, “two gentlemen in plain clothes and without decorations” asked if they could visit the “supposed Dauphin of France,” on behalf of the Duchesse d’Angoulême. He saw from their passports that one was the Comte de Montmaur, the other his friend the Duc de Medini. Libois took them to the prisoner’s room. Charles de Navarre immediately asked if they had a letter from his “sister.” To his evident disappointment, the gentlemen merely produced the letter he had sent her as proof of their authority. Libois brought a bottle of Madeira, and the count and his friend talked to the prisoner for an hour and a half. Later that day, the gentlemen returned for a further three hours. According to Libois, at some stage he overheard the Comte de Montmaur reveal that the Duchesse d’Angoulême had a “secret presentiment of her brother’s existence.” Indeed, the count himself apparently did not dismiss the prisoner’s claims, for when he reported back to Marie-Thérèse in Paris, she continued to have anxieties over the prisoner’s identity and began to formulate a secret plan for taking her own inquiries a stage further.
Needless to say, news of such important visitors soon spread among the prisoner’s followers and appeared to lend credence to his case. In spite of repeated attempts by the authorities to scotch the idea that the man in prison in Rouen was Louis XVII, soon the whole country was talking about the dauphin. There were even rumors of dethroning the usurper Louis XVIII. To add still more weight to his claims, the prisoner allegedly received another eminent and unexpected visitor. It was none other than his former governess: the Duchesse de Tourzel.
The Duchesse de Tourzel had not seen Louis-Charles for over twenty
years. The last occasion was on the night of August 19, 1792, when she had left her affectionate seven-year-old charge as she and the Princesse de Lamballe were ordered to leave the Tower. The duchess had deep feelings of loyalty toward the royal family and had never ceased to serve their interests during the trauma of the revolution. She had been present at key moments: their eviction from Versailles, the Tuileries, and their incarceration in the Tower. She and her daughter had even risked death for them, and the king and Marie-Antoinette had always held her in high regard. However, there in the cell in Rouen in March 1817, according to Libois and another witness, Branzon, something extraordinary happened.
As the Duchesse de Tourzel spoke with the prisoner she became more and more convinced that he was indeed Louis-Charles. She spent some time with him and when Libois came into the room he found her in tears, embracing the prisoner. The duchess was apparently convinced that in the features of this man she could see the young boy she had nurtured at Versailles and the Tuileries. For the prisoner, this was a memorable experience. He had apparently been identified by his own former governess as Louis XVII, the legitimate king of France.
Libois was making money as visitors flocked from all over France to have an audience with the “supposed Dauphin” and it was in his interests to build up the prisoner’s status. With no other evidence it is difficult to confirm the veracity of his story, and certainly the whole scene seems entirely out of character for the restrained and cautious Duchesse de Tourzel. Nonetheless, soon after this improbable occurrence, documents in the National Archives do reveal that Marie-Thérèse was still worried about the true identity of the prisoner and tried, yet again, to resolve the matter. This time she enlisted the help of her first valet de chambre, the Chevalier de Turgy. It was Turgy who had once served as a waiter for the royal family and had loyally followed Marie-Thérèse in many of her exiles. She advised Turgy of a specific list of questions for the prisoner in Rouen about their life in the Tower. Only her true brother could possibly know the right answers to all of them:
1.
What happened on January 21st when the firing of cannon was heard? What did your aunt say then and what did they do for you out of the ordinary?
2.
Where did you gather together my correspondence? In what room?
3.
What did you do to me on New Year’s Day and how, in what room?
There were seven very specific questions in all. Turgy dispatched the correspondence and Marie-Thérèse waited eagerly for a reply. Unknown to her, the letter was intercepted and classified by the police. This lends weight to the view that Louis XVIII’s government was keen to suppress any inquiries that could add to the status of the prisoner, or lead to his identification as Louis XVII.
Meanwhile, the “dauphin” was busy forming his own inimitable alternative government in prison and living in some style. Plans for a return to Paris, preferably in triumph, were discussed with his “ministers” who were chosen from his admirers; his portrait, as a gallant cavalry officer, looked down on the proceedings, which were always kept lighthearted with the right amount of Libois’s wine. With the help of his secretaries, he produced his definitive memoirs:
Historical Account of the Life of Louis XVII,
Much of his story, like Hervagault’s before him, bore striking similarities to Regnault-Warin’s fictionalized account of the escape of Louis XVII. He too had been branded by the pope and was prepared to show this mark to anyone who showed the slightest interest. There was information which he insisted only the real dauphin could possibly know, for example, secret hiding places in the Tuileries where his father placed his private papers. He also provided a colorful description of life in the Tower, his escape, and his heroic exploits in the American army. Encouraged by their “sovereign’s” persuasive memoirs, his eager supporters planned to abduct him, and arrange his restoration.
By April 1817, the authorities were forced to act. Enemies of Louis XVIII were now openly using the situation against him, and politically the case
of the “martyr king” had become very sensitive. There were almost daily reports from the police in Rouen to the ministry of police in Paris. On April 29, under cover of darkness, the prisoner was escorted by a heavily armed guard to the prison of the Palais de Justice. “Daufin Bourbon” was to face trial.
There was just the outstanding problem of proving exactly who the unknown prisoner might be, and this was becoming a matter of some urgency. A number of witnesses came forward, all equally convincing. The widow Phélippeaux, who had provided generous hospitality when he had first arrived in Saint-Malo, tearfully identified him as her long lost son. Another witness, the respected Vicomtesse de Turpin, declared she had met the prisoner years previously, as one “Mathurin Bruneau,” the son of a village cobbler from Vezins in Brittany. Bruneau had been orphaned and since his sister could not keep him he had turned to a life of vagrancy. The sister was duly summoned and she, too, made a positive identification. However, another witness was quite sure the man in question was not Bruneau as his ears were not pierced; she knew beyond doubt that Bruneau’s ears were pierced. Just to add to the confusion, there were others who maintained that the prisoner was none other than Hervagault. Far from dying in prison, he had made a brilliant escape, leaving the inevitable substitute “on point of death” in his place.
Desperate for a conviction, the police brought the case to court in Rouen on February 11, 1818. The trial was a sensation. For months, investigators had done their utmost to refute the prisoner’s claims and cast him as a fraud. In a matter of days, with no help from anyone, the man the authorities now referred to as “Mathurin Bruneau” totally destroyed his own credibility.
From the beginning of his trial, he burst into the courtroom like some caged animal. Ignoring the ladies, and without any pretence at maintaining the due dignity of a “dauphin,” he swore like a trooper, ranted and raved and was for the most part completely incoherent. The trial quickly degenerated into farce. According to one report, “He insulted the presiding judge, the government minister, his guards, the witnesses and the whole court, sneering, feverish, agitated and brutal with intentional vulgarity and deliberate
audacity.” Although many in the court were initially sympathetic to his claims, his coarse and drunken performance was so unconvincing that the king’s advisors were laughing. His supporters were dumbfounded. In prison, “the hope of the lilies” had been only too believable. Some claimed that he had been deliberately drugged with narcotics or was dangerously drunk. Others clung to the belief that Simon was responsible for making him so uncouth. Alternatively it was argued he had suffered some kind of nervous breakdown locked up in solitary confinement with the strain of the past nine months, or even perhaps that he, too, had been swapped for an “imbecile.” Whatever the excuse, his case visibly collapsed.
His rapidly dwindling band of supporters all but disappeared as he was found guilty of swindling and impersonating Louis XVII. On February 19, 1818, he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment and a fine of three thousand francs. In 1822, after serving four years, he died, alone and quite mad, in a dungeon at Mont-Saint-Michel, his royal pretentions a distant memory.
The conviction and imprisonment of “Daufin Bourbon” dealt a severe blow to all those who believed that Louis-Charles was still alive. Yet it was difficult to stamp out the continuing conviction that the dauphin lived; new “evidence” of his death always lacked certainty. Intriguingly, around the time of his trial, another key witness was discovered. A former cook at the Temple prison, a man called Gagnié, was still alive and could vividly recall his life in the Great Tower. Although he was unable to shed any light on where Louis XVII was buried, he claimed he had seen Louis-Charles at the Temple in the year of his death. Since Gagnié had also been employed by the royal family at the Tuileries Palace, he had known the dauphin for some time and was convinced that he could recognize him correctly. He firmly believed that Louis XVII had not escaped from the Temple but had died there.
In his badly written document, Gagnié conjured up a pitiful scene that he witnessed early in 1795: “I declare that on entering [the cell] I saw the young prince doubled up and crouching down, with his arms wrapped around him. He had a tumor on his knee and his arm; his neck was covered
with scabies.” The child was in pain and wanted to die. In his statement, the former royal cook confirmed that this unfortunate child “really was the child of Louis XVI who I had served at the Tuileries; the same child that I had seen brought to the Temple with the king and walking in the garden in the presence of all his family … . I swear that my declaration is indeed the truth and I would swear this again before God.”
There was, however, a crucial flaw in his testimony. Gagnié claimed that he saw the sick prince at the beginning of 1795, but the Temple records revealed that he had in fact stopped working at the prison the previous September. When questioned, Gagnié conceded that he may be confused about dates. It was, after all, over twenty years since these events had occurred. Yet if he was confused about dates, could he also be confused about the boy he saw? Did he not simply presume that the sick, curled-up child was the prince? Since the cell was so dark, how could he be sure? And even if he had seen the prince, could the child have been substituted after Gagnié had left the Temple?