Far from solving the mystery, as he had hoped, the abbé realized that his efforts had compounded it. Madame Simon, the wife of Louis-Charles’s “tutor,” had consistently maintained that her “little Capet” had escaped. Their evidence now seemed to support her testimony: the body buried by Bertrancourt in the private grave did not seem to be that of Louis XVII. So if Louis-Charles had survived, which of the hundred or more men claiming to be the real dauphin was, in fact, telling the truth? Who had been the man to suffer the agony of not being recognized for who he was, spurned even by his sister? So many of the “lost dauphins” seemed cranks, eccentrics, even madmen. Yet even the sanest and strongest of men might have found the lack of recognition difficult to deal with. The mystery seemed beyond resolution. Abbé Haumet quietly reburied the remains and, fearing a rebuke for undertaking an unauthorized exhumation, decided to keep his results secret.
The Duchesse d’Angoulême was to be spared these latest revelations. She
had, at last, found some form of peace. When the Duc d’Angoulême died in 1844, a friend, the Comte Stanislas de Blacas, had helped her to find her a permanent home in Austria. He came across the Château de Frohsdorf—meaning “village of joy”—some thirty-five miles south of Vienna. Gradually, she settled into a quiet routine in her own country home. She was close to her niece and nephew, Henri, the Comte de Chambord, the children of her husband’s younger brother, and escorted them sometimes on trips to Venice. To friends such as Madame de La Ferronnays, whom she met occasionally in Italy, she seemed “greatly changed.” Her legendary coldness and official ice had softened and she was “kind … and anxious to please.” The writer Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve observed that “even amid the habit of pain,” occasionally now “there rose to the surface a sort of joy.”
She still kept around her forceful reminders of all she had lost. In the chapel at Frohsdorf she placed treasured mementos of her mother and father that Cléry had finally managed to obtain for her. There was a simple wooden stool that Louis XVI had used in prison, which she now used as a prayer stool, his wedding ring, and a lace cap, yellowed with age, that her mother had once made in the Temple. Sainte-Beuve continues, “She never spoke of the painful and bleeding things of her youth … but on January 21 and October 16, the death days of her father and mother, she shut herself up alone.” Madame de La Ferronnays, too, was well aware that “the horrible scenes that had marred her childhood” were far from forgotten. “Once, I happened to remark that I hoped someday to have the satisfaction of seeing her nephew, the Comte de Chambord, enter Paris as king, by the Champs-Élysées. ‘Oh no, not by the Champs-Élysées, not by there!’ she cried in horror.” Madame de La Ferronnays, realizing what unbearable memories of her parents’ death this place conjured up for Marie-Thérèse, felt so “embarrassed by my lack of tact, I wanted to throw myself in the Grand Canal.”
The duchess was never able to put her mind completely at rest about her brother. She did not accept the child’s heart from Dr. Pellatan, nor would she meet any of the pretenders. By now she had received letters from twenty-seven men purporting to be her brother. Of these, she told friends,
Naundorff, had caused her the greatest uncertainty and distress. With his passing, it seemed that she would no longer be persecuted by his claims; but she was wrong.
Naundorff had left a widow and children, including five boys, for whom “Jeanne Einert, Duchess of Normandy” wanted recognition in France, as she had received in Holland. However, the advantages of pursuing any claim were rapidly diminishing as political events moved on in France. Republican opposition to King Louis-Philippe had increased during his reign and, in 1848, revolution broke out once more. King Louis-Philippe was forced to abdicate, fleeing to England. In the political upheaval that followed, Napoleon’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, seized power, initially as president of the Second Republic. In these turbulent years, the duchess had to face two sets of legal proceedings from would-be brothers. In 1849, Baron de Richemont, who was still living as “Louis XVII” in France, and had the temerity to proclaim his official “recognition” of the Second Republic, launched a legal case against her demanding his inheritance. In September, the following year, Naundorff’s widow, “Duchess” Jeanne Einert, asked the French courts formally to invalidate the earlier death certificate of the orphan of the Temple in 1795, legitimize her claim to be the widow of Louis XVII, and restore to her children, the rightful “princes” and “princesses” of the Duc de Normandie, the civil rights and privileges “to which they were entitled.”
In May 1851, the duchesse d’Angoulême was summoned to appear before the Court of the Seine to deal with the claims of Naundorff’s widow. For most of her life, she had been pursued by “brothers,” whose claims she had doubted and preferred to ignore. Now at seventy-two, no longer robust, she had to face yet another threat. It was too much. She refused to attend. “The Duchess of Normandy,” Naundorff’s widow, produced a number of witnesses who were prepared to identify Naundorff as the missing prince, but the court was not impressed. The public prosecutor dismissed the case on September 5, 1851, saying that on the evidence they had before them, Naundorff’s claim to be Louis XVII was not credible. Naundorff’s widow
was ordered to pay costs. But the Naundorffists were far from defeated. Since the French government would not release Naundorff’s original documents, many felt this lent weight to their contention.
All this had taken a toll on the duchess. She was now increasingly confined in her rooms at Frohsdorf. “Madame La Dauphine was, if I may so express it, pathos in person,” writes the Comte de Falloux, who met her at Frohsdorf that autumn of 1851. Left standing alone, “amid so many ruins, a ruin herself,” she clung to her faith taught her by Aunt Élisabeth. She used to spend nearly the whole day seated at a particular window upstairs. “She had chosen this window because of its outlook on the copses which reminded her of the garden of the Tuileries,” continued the count. Even with the passage of fifty years, true solace and peace was only to be found in that distant, perfect world of her childhood when her family was still alive.
On October 16, barely a month since the verdict on the Naundorff case, she was struggling against pneumonia, but she insisted on getting up to observe the death day of her mother. Two days later, as she lay dying, it is said that she asked for her father’s watch and wedding ring so she might kiss them. She was still holding the wedding ring when she died. Her epitaph was to read, “Oh, all those that pass by, come and see whether any sorrow is like unto my sorrow!”
Two months after her death, the Second Republic was overthrown and Napoleon III became prince-president of a Second Empire. As the years passed, the remaining pretenders who had made life so difficult for Marie-Thérèse also died, their various claims forgotten, the various graves of these “brothers” bearing sole witness to their story as the world moved on. The Baron de Richemont died in the chateau of one of his supporters in 1853 near Lyon, his case against the duchess never settled. Like Naundorff, his followers arranged a suitable inscription: “Here lies Louis-Charles de France, son of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette. Born at Versailles on March 27, 1785. Died at Gleizé on August 10, 1853.”
Even with the death of the duchess, the Naundorff “princes and princesses”
would not relinquish their claims. After the fall of Napoleon III, during the Third Republic in 1872, they sought an appeal to the 1851 judgment. They did not ask the court to recognize Naundorff as Louis XVII. Instead, they pleaded that the wealth of evidence to support their claim should be taken into account and an inquiry set up. The testimony of former servants and distinguished members of the former royal court warranted a full investigation. The judges were again unimpressed and threw out the case, passing a posthumous sentence on Naundorff as a calculating impostor. Naundorff’s children would not be deterred. Convinced their father was indeed the dauphin, they were determined to return to court and win.
Across the span of years that Marie-Thérèse had been plagued with letters from her living “brothers,” her dead “brother’s” heart continued its own extraordinary journey through history. Alternately a symbol of a martyred child, a despot’s son, a hero or a fraud, this strange relic did not escape the political turmoil in France in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Despite the large number of pretenders who came forward, Dr. Philippe-Jean Pellatan did not lose his conviction that he possessed the heart of the real Louis-Charles. His stolen memento preyed on his conscience and he was determined to return it to the royal family. Since neither the Duchesse d’Angoulême nor Louis XVIII would accept it, when Louis XVIII died in 1824, Pellatan tried once more. He went to see ministers of Charles X to explain what had happened, but Artois, too, seemed to be in no hurry to take his “nephew’s” heart.
By May 1828, records show that Pelletan was seriously ill. Now eighty-one years old, he felt more anxious than ever to find a safe place to store the stolen heart. Toward the end of Charles X’s reign, unrest was growing in Paris. Pellatan decided to hand over the heart to the archbishop of Paris, Monsieur de Quélin, since he “had never doubted my probity and the truth of everything I had said.” At Archbishop de Quélin’s request, he wrote out a full statement of the history of the heart, and the archbishop signed an official receipt for the relic on May 23, 1828. Less than four months later, Dr. Pellatan was dead. The heart that he had tried so hard to preserve for
posterity was now safely hidden behind books in the library of the archbishop’s palace by Notre Dame.
However, when the second revolution—
les trois glorieuses
—broke out in July 1830, the archbishop’s palace was invaded. More than two thousand people broke through the Great Gate and looted with ferocity or abandon. It was a night of carnage: everything that it was possible to remove or destroy was attacked. The timelessly beautiful palace with its priceless antiques looked as though a whirlwind had visited, while the morning light showed some of the antique treasures half-burned and piled on fires in the courtyard.
A printer by the name of Lescroart who worked at the archbishop’s palace realized the looters were making their way to the library to destroy the books, and he tried to save the precious crystal urn. He made his escape from the palace and was crossing the gardens when he ran into some of the rioters. The crystal urn that he was so desperate to preserve was struck with a saber. The urn shattered into a thousand sharp fragments and the child’s heart fell to the ground to be trampled by the unmindful in the darkness.
Lescroart still had the documents that were with the urn and from these he realized that Dr. Pellatan had given the archbishop the sacred relic. He traced the doctor’s house in Paris and soon found that although Pellatan was dead, his son, Philippe-Gabriel Pellatan, was keen to help him try to save the heart.
They waited for two days until the streets were quiet and it was safe to return to the archbishop’s palace. As luck would have it, there was a storm that night and they were forced to search in the driving rain. Nonetheless, they covered the ground around the palace inch by inch; the garden had turned to mud. “Lescroart showed me the place where he was standing when the vase was broken, and with the help of people who were guarding the entrance door of the archbishop’s palace, and the verger, we searched for the remains,” Pellatan wrote years later. The heart was nowhere to be seen. “Finally, just as we were about to leave, disappointed, we discovered the
heart completely intact
, in a pile of sand between the boundary gate and the Church. It still smelled of ethyl alcohol” [his italics]. It was damp and surrounded by shards of glass from the crystal urn.
Philippe-Gabriel Pellatan carefully gathered up the heart, and took it home. He knew his father had had no doubts as to its authenticity and that he was obliged to preserve it. He restored the child’s heart in a new urn and kept it locked away for years, secret, almost forgotten.
THE ROYAL CHARADE
In the history of this sovereign without subjects, an enigmatic history even beyond the tomb, everything totters and collapses as soon as we flatter ourselves that we have laid a course, or erected the frail scaffolding of an argument …
—HISTORIAN GEORGES LENÔTRE. 1922
T
oward the close of the nineteenth century, the enigma remained unsolved. All possible princes were now characters from history; their strident claims and the testimony from long-dead witnesses gathered dust in police files. The incomplete inquiry during the Restoration, secret exhumations and reburials, and reports of over one hundred pretenders; all these had only served to compound the mystery. However, in 1894, one man took it upon himself to resolve the puzzle, a lawyer, Georges Laguerre. He was well aware of the inconclusive results of Abbé Haumet’s secret exhumation of the orphan of the Temple at Sainte-Marguerite cemetery nearly fifty years previously and applied for official permission to investigate the grave again. The previous exhumation, he argued, had been carried out by a priest and a doctor, neither of whom had sufficient forensic expertise to make an informed judgment.
In the fifty years since the last exhumation, forensic analysis was beginning to be applied more systematically to criminal investigation. As early as 1880, the missionary doctor Henry Faulds had published a letter in the
British scientific journal
Nature
suggesting that fingerprints could be used as a basis for identifying criminals. Meanwhile, in France, at the Prefecture of Police in Paris, a clerk, Alphonse Bertillon, had invented an alternative system for identifying individuals, using specific body measurements—of the head, the ear, the trunk, arm length and so on. By keeping accurate records of prisoners, he successfully caught his first repeat offender in 1883 using this method. And at the University of Lyon, Jean Alexandre Lacassagne, a professor of pathology, was also pioneering a scientific approach to police work. In a high-profile case in 1889, he solved a brutal murder by studying the victim’s body. Advances such as these highlighted the possibility that forensic analysis might bring some bearing on the case of the lost dauphin.
By the 1890s, although there was still great interest in the fate of Louis-Charles, the political sensitivities of his case had subsided and the authorities gave permission for an official investigation around the chapel door in Sainte-Marguerite cemetery. This was the same site as the 1846 exhumation, but Georges Laguerre was better prepared than his predecessor. He drew together a large team of distinguished specialists, including Dr. Bilhaut, children’s surgeon at the International Hospital, Professor Amoedo of the Paris School of Odontology, and Dr. Felix de Backer, director of the
Revue Antiseptique.
As Georges Laguerre’s team dug down by the chapel wall on June 5, 1894, they found an oak box inscribed “L … . XVII” in which Abbé Haumet had replaced the child’s remains. It was very fragile, having almost rotted away, but the bones Haumet had described in 1846 were revealed yet again for the curious: journalists, priests, even members of Naundorff’s family who had gathered to witness this historic event. The oddly shaped skeleton took form once more. The sawn skullcap with its wisps of reddish-blond hair, the long limbs, the underdeveloped ribs, fragments of spine: the bizarre shape slowly emerged. A photograph was taken of the skullcap as a record.
From the jaw alone, it was possible to estimate the age of a child. The odontologist, Professor Amoedo, could see that the boy had had no milk
teeth when he died, suggesting he was over twelve years old; in fact, the eruption of the wisdom teeth indicated that he could have been as old as eighteen. There was also the question of the overall size of the skeleton. Dr. de Backer had found that the average stature of a sixteen-year-old Parisian boy was 158 centimeters. Their calculations of the height of this child showed he had been no less than 153 and possibly as much as 165 centimeters. From this they reasoned that he had been at least fourteen when he had died. Finally, they considered the development of the skull. During childhood, the size of the cranium, which encloses the brain, is large compared with the bones of the face. These proportions gradually change until, by adult life, the cranium and facial bones are of equal proportions. Dr. de Backer and Dr. Bilhaut again estimated that this was the skull of a child of fourteen or older. Yet the skull was “sawn in two by a very expert hand,” just as Dr. Pellatan had described at the autopsy. A baffling result.
The forensic team could not be sure that the bones they had recovered from the box were all from the same skeleton. The cemetery had been a dumping ground for a large number of bodies over this period. As early as 1804, the mayor of Paris had complained that too many bodies had been buried at Sainte-Marguerite, which was in danger of running out of space. The problem had been compounded by Paris hospitals dumping—without much ceremony—dissected cadavers used in anatomical research. Many of these bodies were not even wrapped but were piled in pits and barely covered with earth. “The edges of the pits are dripping with blood,” the mayor had complained. “It is the most disgusting picture that can be seen.” This overuse of the cemetery meant that it was difficult to guarantee the integrity of any particular skeleton.
Yet as the doctors scrutinized the child’s skeleton, they concluded it was unlikely to be a mixture of bones from several people. Apart from one humerus, or upper arm bone, the remainder of the decaying bones were an identical brown color and showed the same amount of ossification, or bone formation. In addition, measurements of the arm and leg bones revealed that they were perfectly in proportion, as if they had originated from one person. All this pointed to a disturbing conclusion. The body they had
exhumed matched the description of Pellatan’s 1795 autopsy and the 1846 exhumation and yet could not be that of a ten-year-old boy. Since this could not be the real dauphin, was it an ill-fated substitute? Could the real Louis-Charles have escaped after all?
At this time in the late nineteenth century, historical documents continued to surface that lent weight to the idea that Louis-Charles had miraculously survived. The publication in 1893 of some of the correspondence of an English aristocrat, Charlotte Lady Atkyns, provided fine fuel for conspiracy theorists. During the French Revolution, Lady Atkyns, who was an ardent royalist, had watched the unfolding misfortune of the royal family with horror and had become committed to helping them. In the autumn of 1793 it is thought she had even travelled to Paris and managed to enter the queen’s cell in the
Conciergerie
disguised as a guard, where she swore to the queen she would do everything in her power to rescue her son. She had enlisted the help of Comte Louis de Frotté, a royalist who was behind the insurrection in Normandy, and a lawyer, the Baron de Cormier.
At first, she thought she had succeeded. By October 1794, Cormier had written to her with extraordinary news: “I must write you a few words in haste … . I believe I am able to assure you, declare to you most positively, that the
Master
and his
property
are saved … . I can give no details; it is only full in the face that I can open my heart to you” [his italics]. This news also appeared to be confirmed in a letter from Comte Louis de Frotté: “Everything is arranged; in short, I give you my word that the king and France are saved … and we ought to be happy.” Later it emerged that she had been duped by Cormier, who had been only too happy to take her money in return for his false assurances. Lady Atkyns came to believe that the dauphin had escaped, “but a higher power than mine took possession of him.” Her correspondence suggested the prince had indeed been rescued from the Tower sometime before the autumn of 1794.
A few years later, further intriguing documents were produced that also appeared to show that the dauphin had escaped. A manuscript of a secret meeting of leading members of the Directory, held on April 28, 1796, was printed in the
Revue Historique
in Paris in 1918. The text appeared to be the
minutes of a discussion between General Barras and the four other Directors in which they implied that Louis XVII had been abducted from the Temple in 1794.
The conversation set out in this curious document revealed that the prisoner of the Temple had been entrusted to the care of a banker named Petitval. However, on April 20, 1796, his chateau had been attacked and Petitval and members of his household had been most brutally murdered as they tried to flee. The most likely motive for the attack was that he had discovered that the child he was guarding was not the real dauphin and he had to be silenced. Whatever the reason, General Barras and his colleagues spoke as though confidently assured that the dauphin was not among the murdered victims, since he had escaped earlier. This manuscript published by
Revue Historique
has not been authenticated, nor have its origins been established. Whether a forgery or not, this fantastic tale also served to perpetuate the belief that the dauphin had been saved.
The failure of the 1846 and 1894 exhumations to find the body of the dauphin, the testimony of old Madame Simon, the persistent rumors of an escape at the time of his alleged death, the letters from Cormier and Frotté, the document in the
Revue Historique:
all this lent weight to the idea that a switch had been made and that Louis-Charles had been rescued. In 1922, the popular French historian Georges Lenôtre tried to draw these threads together in a definitive study of the lost dauphin:
Louis XVII, The Riddle of the Temple.
Sifting through the vast body of records and archives on the case, he reached the controversial conclusion the dauphin had indeed escaped at a date prior to August 1794. He argued that when Jean-Jacques Laurent was appointed by General Barras as guardian after the death of Robespierre, he soon realized the boy in his care was an impostor. He informed Barras, who panicked, fearing this would precipitate a political crisis. Barras made Laurent swear to secrecy and ordered the substitute who was held in the Great Tower to be kept completely out of sight.
In reaching his conclusions, Georges Lenôtre took account of the large body of circumstantial evidence lending support to the idea that a substitute was held in the Tower: the obstinately mute child seen by Jean-Baptiste
Harmand early in 1795, the suspicious death of the kindly Dr. Desault who had been treating the orphan of the Temple, the hurriedly produced death certificate which many believed was a forgery. Above all, Lenôtre was influenced by the compelling evidence that Laurent had persistently refused permission for Marie-Thérèse to see her brother. The only credible reason for this, he claimed, is that she would have instantly recognized that the boy prisoner was a substitute. After all, Laurent appeared to be genuinely sympathetic to both Louis-Charles and his sister and had been instructed to improve the conditions under which the boy was held. Yet despite her repeated pleading and the pitiful isolation of the boy, he would not allow them the comfort of even a brief meeting, although this would hardly have undermined prison security. He concluded that the only explanation for this quite unnecessary cruelty toward them was to conceal the substitution.
However, in 1924, shortly after Georges Lenôtre’s publication, René Leconte, in his book
Louis XVII et les Faux Dauphins,
noticed a crucial detail that had been overlooked by other researchers. As he pored over the photograph of the skull that had been taken during the 1894 exhumation, he realized it did not match Pellatan’s original description. Dr. Pellatan had described his sawn section of the skull as being “level with the eyebrows.” When René Leconte scrutinized the picture of the skull, he realized that this skull had been sawn at a much higher point, well above the eyebrows, across the top of the forehead, almost at the hairline. The body that had been exhumed in 1894 and 1846, he reasoned, could not have been the one on which Dr. Pellatan had undertaken his autopsy. Since so many bodies used in anatomical research had been buried at Sainte-Marguerite, Leconte reasoned that it was at least plausible that another unfortunate child whose skull had been sawn had come to rest on the same site. He concluded that the nineteenth-century exhumations could no longer be taken to support the claim that a substitute child had been buried. The exhumations had simply failed to find the right body that Pellatan had dissected, which was almost certainly lying undiscovered, deeper underground.
By the beginning of World War II, the seemingly unsolvable puzzle continued to attract experts. Hundreds of books had been written as
historians, forensic specialists, royalists and cranks all pored over the evidence, producing one “definitive” book after another. With so many claims and counterclaims, agents and double agents, substitutes for the substitutes, not to mention the pretenders themselves, there seemed no limit to the possible fates for the prince. The matter seemed impossible to resolve conclusively on the historical evidence alone. And while the courts of France had dismissed the claims of Hervagault, Bruneau, Richemont, Naundorff and others, many still believed it was at least plausible that one of the pretenders was telling the truth. But which one?
As forensic techniques improved, there was still the possibility of solving the puzzle scientifically. In the first half of the twentieth century, Professor Edmond Locard, an eminent French criminologist who had studied under the two great masters, Alphonse Bertillon and Jean Alexandre Lacassagne, was pioneering the use of trace evidence—such as hair, fibers, flakes of skin, even grit and dirt—in forensic cases. He showed that when a person comes into contact with another person or place there is invariably a transfer of evidence. “Every contact leaves a trace,” he famously declared.