The following year, as the inquiry into the dauphin’s “death” had been coming to a close in France, he had written again from Spandau: “Up to this moment I have received no answer to any of the letters that I have addressed to you or the king. My heart excuses you, but the case is different with respect to Louis XVIII.” In this letter he explained “the dishonest intentions and bad faith of his uncle,” and why it was in his interest to make her believe that he had died. “Now I ask you, have they ever placed before your eyes a corpse which they told you was mine?”
From his sickbed, recovering from his attempted murder, he now asked, “Madame, were these letters delivered to you? Did your Royal Highness receive no letters from Spandau? What has become of the bearer of the letters? Where is he now?” He implied that Louis XVIII had kept all this secret from her and went on to explain he had been at pains to reach her again in 1818, to let her know of his forthcoming marriage. On September 4, 1819, he had apparently written to inform her of the birth of his daughter, her niece: “The child is as beautiful as an angel.” He had explained that he could see his sister’s features “in the face of this child.” He could not bring himself to call his daughter Marie-Thérèse: “That would bring to my mind too painful recollections.” He had chosen the name Amélie, the name Marie-Thérèse had been given on their “unhappy journey” to Varennes.
At the beginning of 1824 he claimed to have written twice to Louis XVIII—stating his intention to come to Paris “and make myself acknowledged.” Unaccountably, soon after sending these letters, he said he was imprisoned in Prussia on false grounds of having caused a fire—a charge that was “more ridiculous even than it was unjust.” Finally, he spoke of his “tender, respectful, and unalterable attachment, which I have vowed eternally to my sister.” He considered that she had been deceived by others
regarding him and that she herself “was guiltless of all the ills that I suffered.” It was signed, “your unfortunate but worthy brother, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie.”
Reading and rereading the letters, Marie-Thérèse saw an entire unknown life of a long-lost “brother” unfold before her eyes, complete even with a “niece” who bore some resemblance to herself and numerous “nephews.” Was it possible that all these letters from Prussia had been destroyed by interceptors on behalf of the king? Was she in fact the victim of some unseen, controlling power that had shaped her life and influenced her very thoughts for years? Or were these letters extremely clever recent forgeries? It was entirely possible that they had never been sent; that the man now pretending to be her “brother” was cruelly exploiting some of the worst moments of her life to further his own interests: a skilled manipulator quite happy to torment her for his own ends. And what kind of criminal mind would it take to weave such a complex web of deceit, enmeshing even former staff and friends at her expense? She was more tormented by Naundorff than any of her “brothers,” never knowing what to believe and, in the end, believing nothing.
In her troubled state of mind, Marie-Thérèse took no action. Since there was no reply from the duchess, later that spring Saint-Didier travelled back to Prague with Madame de Rambaud, who undertook the long journey for her “Prince,” despite her considerable age. But the duchess did not want to hear the pleadings of Madame de Rambaud; indeed, she was so confused now, she would not even accept that it was her own dear Madame de Rambaud. It could be almost anyone who was in on the intrigue. She sent a message to Morel stating that “she cannot suppose that a person of her age could have made such a tiring journey; that she had no reason for receiving the person of this name whom you have brought with you.” In addition, she had read all the documents he had given her and had “found nothing in them to alter her opinion.”
After this, Naundorff’s tone changed in his letters to the duchess. “It is sufficiently painful to me to find Frenchmen propagating by
command
[his italics] lies and calumnies against me, but how bitter must be my feelings
when I see my own sister at the head of my oppressors! My own sister, not content with protecting my enemies, assists them to crush my just cause,” he wrote in 1834. “I find myself utterly at a loss, Madam.” He was so determined to see her that finally, in the late summer of 1834, he pursued her to Dresden, where he heard she was staying. His purpose was no doubt to engineer a face-to-face meeting, but true to her previous behavior, as soon as she heard of his intentions, she called the carriages and departed immediately.
Naundorff was so eager to confront her that in June 1836 he summoned the Duc and Duchesse d’Angoulême and the former Charles X to appear before the Court of the Seine. It was a civil case in which he was determined to prove his identity. His efforts backfired and he was arrested, pending investigations.
By now, dubious details of his life in Prussia had come to light. In 1824, his shop in Spandau, near Berlin, had burned down. At the time, the Prussian authorities had suspected that he had caused the fire to claim the insurance. A casting mold had also been found. Naundorff had insisted this was used in making clocks; the Prussian police thought he was counterfeiting money. He had been charged with forgery, which he vehemently denied, claiming these were trumped-up charges against him. At his trial in 1825, in spite of the prosecution being unable to establish his real identity, and with his claims to being an aristocrat dismissed, he had been sentenced to three years in prison.
When the French authorities searched his house in Paris in 1836, they seized numerous documents. There were letters to him as Louis XVII from devoted admirers, copies of letters dating from 1815 that he had apparently sent to Louis XVIII and the Duchesse d’Angoulême, and papers apparently proving his identity as the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Had all these, too, been forged? After extensive inquiries, the authorities decided simply to banish him permanently from France. He was deported to England, much to the relief of the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who, at the time, was in exile in Linz on the Danube in Austria. “Thank God, I will not hear of the Prussian again,” she said. “But I know it is not entirely over … . His
threats do not frighten me a great deal. He is a cunning impostor who is being manipulated by political adventurers.”
In London, perhaps due to the stress of the previous few months, and the years of lack of recognition, Naundorff’s activities became increasingly eccentric. Among other ventures, he founded a spiritual movement based on his mystical experiences. His visions told him the precise location of paradise, which could not be easily proved as it was in the very center of the sun and, although he calculated the distance from earth to paradise, nobody, it seems, was able to make the journey. To supporters who had followed him across the Channel, he remained generous in distributing titles, but as he was no nearer ascending the throne, both he and his titles began to lack credibility. His repeated denouncements of King Louis-Philippe and promises that he would reclaim the throne had led to nothing, and as his courtiers fell away—even, eventually, the loyal Madame de Rambaud, who defected to the Baron de Richemont’s camp—his source of income began to dry up. He tried to make money out of his fascination with pyrotechnics and set about creating the perfect explosive device, the “Bourbon bomb,” which succeeded in burning his house down, again in suspicious circumstances. Naundorff, too, was badly burned. By now, creditors were closing in on him and he was thrown into a debtor’s prison. “The Duke of Normandy: this personage is now among the inmates of the prison in Horsemonger Lane,” reported the London
Penny Satirist
in 1843. “His debts are estimated at 5,000 pounds.”
However, the Dutch Ministry of War bought his design for the “Bourbon bomb,” and Naundorff was invited to develop his research in Holland. In January 1845, when he came out of prison, Naundorff sailed for Rotterdam in search of a new life. He established himself at Delft and his family was preparing to join him when he fell ill. He was in such agonizing pain that poisoning was suspected. Doctors Soutendam and Kloppert, who were appointed to care for him, later recorded that as he lay dying, “the thoughts of the patient lingered mainly on his late unhappy father, Louis XVI, and on the terrible spectacle of the guillotine. He joined his hands to pray and asked, in broken words, for permission to follow his royal father to heaven.”
To their amazement, this pattern continued as he degenerated even “until his last gasp.” Naundorff, the shadow king, died on August 10, 1845, apparently a convincing prince to the end.
Naundorff was to have one final success. His death certificate was drawn up in Delft and stamped by the Dutch Minister of justice. It recorded not the death of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, but that of Louis XVII himself.
The deceased was “Charles-Louis de Bourbon, Duc de Normandie, Louis XVII, who has been known as Charles Wilhelm Naundorff, born at the Château of Versailles, in France, March 27, 1785 … the son of his late Majesty, Louis XVI, king of France, and her Imperial and Royal Highness, Marie-Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, queen of France … husband of Madame la Duchesse de Normandie, born Johanna Einert, resident in Delft.” It is not entirely clear why the Dutch authorities were prepared to issue a death certificate confirming Naundorff to be Louis XVII. There were political tensions between Holland and France, and this would be a small way for the Dutch to ruffle some diplomatic feathers. Alternatively, some historians have hinted that the Dutch may have had evidence supporting Naundorff’s claims.
There were now two death certificates for Louis XVII—one in France and one in Holland. His tombstone, too, was engraved “Here lies Louis XVII, Charles-Louis Duc de Normandie, king of France and Navarre.” In death, Naundorff had, at last, won the recognition he had so craved.
Shortly after Naundorff’s death, with the prospects of two bodies and two death certificates both purporting to be that of the real dauphin, two men came together in 1846 determined to solve the riddle of “the lost dauphin” once and for all. At the cemetery of Sainte-Marguerite in Paris, the priest now in charge, the Abbé Haumet, was only too aware of the inconclusive investigations into the dauphin’s burial site thirty years previously. He discussed the case with a friend of his, Dr. Milcent. Although over fifty years had passed since the orphan of the Temple was buried, Dr. Milcent felt sure that he would be able to obtain vitals clues from an examination of the
skeletal remains. Even if it meant taking the law into their own hands, they believed that if they could exhume the child’s body, the mystery might yet be solved.
Abbé Haumet knew that the gravedigger, Pierre Bertrancourt, claimed he had reburied the dauphin in a private grave to the left of the chapel door. By chance in 1846, the abbé was presented with the ideal opportunity to conduct his own private investigation of this site without being seen, since building repairs were necessary and a temporary hangar was erected near the church. Given the political sensitivity of the case, the abbé envisaged that any formal request to excavate the grave would be refused. Consequently, he and a few loyal friends—two other priests and a colleague of Dr. Milcent—decided to dig up the child’s grave secretly one night, without official permission.
About three feet below the ground, much nearer the surface than they had expected, they came across a five-foot-long lead coffin. This immediately puzzled the abbé. Testimony given to the 1816—1817 inquiry suggested that the dauphin had been buried in a pinewood, rather than a lead, coffin. The abbé reasoned that Bertrancourt had transferred the child to a lead coffin to better preserve the body. At five feet, the coffin was also a little larger than they had expected for a boy of ten. Nonetheless, they carefully carried the coffin inside the church and opened the lid.
Inside was the rotting skeleton of a child; the bones had shifted slightly in the slow movement of decay. The abbé and Dr. Milcent immediately noticed that the skullcap had been sawn, above the eye sockets, as Dr. Pellatan had described at the autopsy. They could also see a few curls of reddish-blond hair clinging to the scalp. Although the lead at the base of the casket had partially given way, and bones were missing, the skeleton was sufficiently intact to examine it in detail.
Dr. Milcent found the bones had certain characteristics that suggested the presence of disease, either from tubercular infection or as a result of living in unhygienic conditions. There were also distinctive markings or rotting on both the thigh and shin bones, probably from tumors. All this
matched the description from the autopsy. However, Dr. Milcent was puzzled by the length of the leg bones. Louis-Charles was only ten when he supposedly died in the Temple prison in June 1795. Yet the leg bones of this skeleton seemed too long for a ten-year-old. There were, of course, reports at the time indicating that Louis-Charles’s limbs had grown disproportionately long—perhaps due to his illness. Even making allowances for this, Dr. Milcent was doubtful that these limbs could have come from a ten-year-old.
The abbé and the doctor were sufficiently concerned that Dr. Milcent summoned another colleague, Dr. Récamier. He too was puzzled, as he wrote to the Abbé Haumet, “Although the ribs … were those of a very young subject, the head, the joins on the skull and bones of the trunk appeared more like those of a child of twelve and the arm and leg bones [and the teeth] appeared to belong to a subject of about fifteen or sixteen or more.” The presence of the sawn skull suggested this was indeed the child on which the autopsy had been carried out. But surely this long-limbed apparently adolescent child could not be the dauphin? Dr. Milcent estimated that this child could have been as old as sixteen to eighteen. It looked as if the autopsy in 1795 had been carried out on a substitute child after all.