From a sample of hair alone, gathered near the crime, Locard could analyze external features such as the length, color, degree of curliness, texture, diameter of shaft, even the shape and condition of the root. In addition, under the microscope in his laboratory, he could also compare three main internal features of the hair shaft. The outer layer, or cuticle, comprises external scales, which overlap like tiles on a roof. The chief part of the fibrous stem is made up of spindle-shaped cells that contain the color pigment. Apart from the color itself, the distribution of the pigment can show differences between individuals. Finally, running down the center of the shaft there can be a spongy, air-filled core, known as the medullary canal. Comparisons of hair samples could be used to exclude a subject, or if there was a match to a crime scene, as contributing evidence.
By the early 1940s, it occurred to the French historian André Castelot that this technique could be applied to the case of the lost dauphin. He approached the famous criminologist, now established as the director of the Scientific Police Laboratory at Lyon. Locard agreed that if Castelot could
trace authentic hairs from Louis-Charles and others claiming to be the dauphin, then he was prepared to compare them under the microscope.
Following a detailed investigation, Castelot did find samples of Louis-Charles’s hair that Marie-Antoinette had taken from her son while they were imprisoned in the Temple. Incredibly, these locks of hair had been found in Robespierre’s rooms. After his death at the guillotine in 1794, a deputy called Courtois had been ordered to search his rooms and draw up an inventory of his belongings. Among the objects that he had found were items that had formerly belonged to Marie-Antoinette, which had been confiscated at the
Conciergerie.
Robespierre had abhorred the queen and all she stood for and now, like grisly charms and tokens of his power, symbols of the dead queen were found under his mattress: a lock of the queen’s hair, some curls that she had treasured of Louis-Charles’s hair, and her last letter to her sister-in-law, written a few hours before her death. Castelot was able to trace the history of these hairs as they were handed down over the years until by the 1940s they had ended up in the care of a priest, the Abbé Ruiz.
In addition to these hairs taken from the dauphin by his mother, Castelot was also able to trace the hairs that were cut from the orphan of the Temple in 1795 during his autopsy by Dr. Pellatan. These were the hairs that commissioner Damont had been permitted to keep, and which he had tried to give to Marie-Thérèse after the Restoration; she had rejected them because she thought they were a slightly different color to her brother’s hair. These hairs had been passed down in the Damont family and had eventually been entrusted to a close family friend.
Castelot took the hairs to the laboratory in Lyon where Dr. Locard’s team examined them under the microscope. He soon found that the sample of Louis-Charles’s hair that had been found under Robespierre’s bed displayed a very rare feature. The medullary canal did not run centrally down the shaft, but was slightly displaced to one side, or “ex-centered.” When he compared this to the hair sample taken during the autopsy on the orphan of the Temple, the results were astonishing. In this hair, the medullary canal ran centrally down the shaft. The hair samples simply did not match. This
appeared to provide strong corroborative evidence that the young boy who died in the Temple prison in 1795 was not the dauphin, but a substitute.
Inevitably, skeptics queried the authenticity of the hair samples. However, André Castelot was able to trace another sample of Louis-Charles’s hair, taken before his imprisonment in the Temple. It was in the collection of the Marquis de Tinguy, whose forebears had been friends of the royal family and had been given a lock of the dauphin’s hair in the early 1790s. When examined in Dr. Locard’s laboratory, this hair, too, like the sample found under Robespierre’s mattress, showed the distinctive anomaly: an ex-centered medullary canal.
By chance, the historian Castelot was able to take his investigations a stage further. He was contacted by a representative of the Naundorff family called Baron de Geniebvre. The baron had hair samples from Naundorff, which had been cut as a memento by his oldest son shortly before his death in Delft in 1845. Some of these locks of hair had been given to a staunch Naundorff supporter, Mlle. de La Tour du Pin, and these were later passed down to the Baron de Geniebvre.
Castelot asked Dr. Locard to compare these hair samples with those from the dauphin that he had already analyzed. As he looked down the microscope, to his amazement, Dr. Locard could see at once that these hairs from Naundorff showed the same rare displacement of the medullary canal that he had observed in the two samples from Louis-Charles. The hair samples were identical. It seemed that Castelot and Locard had solved the puzzle at last. The real dauphin appeared to be none other than Naundorff himself.
These tests, carried out by one of the leading forensic experts in the field, produced a clear-cut result and caused a stir when it was published in 1943 in the journal
La Gerbe.
The man dismissed as a crank by his contemporaries, by his “sister,” and by the French courts in 1851 and 1872 now apparently had scientific evidence to back up his claim to be the rightful dauphin. André Castelot was forced to concede that the latest research, the finest objective analysis available at the time pointed to the inescapable conclusion that a huge injustice may have been done.
After World War II, the case of the lost dauphin was no longer simply a piece of idle historical controversy. The war had changed the political landscape in France. General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, had pledged himself to the reestablishment of democracy in France and firmly declared that the French people alone should determine the future constitution of the country. There were some in France who felt the French monarchy should be restored to bring stability, continuity and strong government in the aftermath of a traumatic war. Newspaper articles began to appear debating the issue; there were even rumors that General de Gaulle might be sympathetic to the restoration of the monarchy. As France began to make its first tentative step toward making peace with its royal past, the nineteenth-century law banishing the heads of the former French ruling houses and their descendents from residing in France was repealed in 1950. There was, however, a crucial unresolved issue. If the monarchy were ever to be restored in France, who would have the legitimate claim to be king? The royalist battle lines were being drawn.
One of the first to return from his exile in Lisbon was the glamorous Comte de Paris, a direct descendent of the Orléanist Louis-Philippe, the last king of France who had been forced to abdicate in 1848. The count returned to France in 1950 in the bright spotlight of public interest and quickly claimed for himself the title of the head of the Bourbon family and pretender-in-chief of the French throne. He had inherited a considerable fortune and settled into a large country house near Versailles, determined to reestablish the prestige of the Bourbon dynasty. His book,
Entre Français,
published in 1947, argued strongly in favor of the restoration of the monarchy in the postwar reconstruction of France. The count assiduously courted De Gaulle, and their cordial relations created a great deal of press speculation. At one point, De Gaulle caused a stir by writing personally to the count on the eve of the wedding of his son, Prince Henri de France. “Is De Gaulle a royalist?” asked the
Daily Telegraph
in London the next day, summing up the excitement in the Paris papers.
However, there were other Bourbon princes who openly challenged the dashing Orléanist Comte de Paris as pretender-in-chief Centuries-old wounds between different branches of the family had not yet healed. While some French royalists rallied to the Orléanist line, others could not accept the “theft” of the throne from Charles X by Louis-Philippe in 1830. In their eyes, this treachery had been compounded by the actions of his father, Philippe Égalité, who had shamefully voted for the death penalty in the trial of Louis XVI. Since the Duc and Duchesse d’Angoulême had died without issue, as had their nephew, Henri, comte de Chambord, the title of head of the Bourbon family had passed to the Spanish Bourbons. Their descendents did not accept the Orléanist count as the senior Bourbon and revived the bitter family feud that had lasted for generations.
During the 1950s, the Comte de Paris and his rival princes, these dazzling figures imbued with centuries of prestige and charm, fought out their claims and counterclaims as pretenders to the throne with the world’s press in enraptured admiration. On the Cote d’Azur, in the fashionable resorts of St. Tropez and elsewhere, would-be kings of France mingled with film stars, glitterati and European high society. They were courted by press and society magazines eager to satisfy the insatiable public interest in the lifestyles of members of European royalty and in the long-running disputes between the various pretenders. The ordered perfection of many a royal event, a wedding, gala or public ceremony was all too often spoiled by petty disputes as to which prince should take precedence over the others. To add to the intrigue, the sparring Orléanists and Bourbonites were opposed by the Bonapartists, who maintained that the great-great-grandnephew of Napoleon was in fact the rightful heir: Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte had supported the resistance movement during the war and had been living unofficially in France since the liberation. And while the Orléans, Spanish Bourbons, and Bonapartes fought over their claims to the throne in the unlikely event of any restoration, the finishing touch came when all these pretenders received an unwelcome challenge from yet another unexpected source: the Naundorffs.
Nearly two hundred years had elapsed since the death of the orphan of
the Temple. Yet Naundorff’s descendents still legitimately bore the name of the Bourbons and were determined to obtain recognition in France that they were the true descendents of Louis XVII. Once again, they resorted to legal action. On May 5, 1954, the Paris appeals court was asked to hear a case against the decision of the French court in 1874 not to recognize Karl Wilhelm Naundorff as the rightful heir of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Naundorff’s descendents wanted to overturn the earlier verdicts and prove their claim.
The press was delighted with this new dimension to the question of succession. In contrast to the well-heeled and aristocratic Comte de Paris and other equally plausible Bourbon princes, some of Naundorff’s descendents, their pedigree notwithstanding, had hit hard times. One had died in a French poorhouse in 1944, and it soon emerged that the senior surviving member of the Naundorff family and would-be heir to the throne was currently employed as a Parisian circus manager: René Charles de Bourbon. “Circus manager who wants to be king” blasted the headlines of the
Manchester Guardian
in May 1954. In “Royalist outrage in Paris,” the
Times
reported on the circus manager who had the temerity to stand up in a French court and claim any prospective royal prize for himself.
On May 20, 1954, the
Times
in London summarized the arguments of the distinguished barrister Maître Chresteil, leading counsel for the Naundorff family in the Paris courts. Chresteil drew attention to the death certificate, issued in Delft in 1845, recognizing Naundorff as Louis XVII, and asked the court to invalidate the earlier death certificate drawn up in 1795 at the Temple. He cast suspicion on the mysterious disappearance of “202 of Naundorff’s documents confiscated by the Paris Police in 1836.” These documents could still be produced, Chresteil argued, with a “little goodwill” from the archives of the Ministry of Justice, and would surely prove the validity of his claims. Inevitably, the numerous members of the old court who recognized Naundorff as Louis XVII were presented as evidence: Madame de Rambaud, Monsieur Saint-Hilaire, even the duchess’s own envoy, the Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld. Naundorff’s repeated efforts to secure a meeting with the Duchesse d’Angoulême were also cited in his favor. His
“sister’s” persistent refusal to receive him was explicable, according to Chresteil, “only by her reluctance to call into question the legitimacy of the reigning family.”
Finally, the latest forensic evidence on Naundorff’s hair was also presented to the court. Events had moved on rapidly since André Castelot and Edmond Locard’s studies in the early 1940s, which had appeared to show that Naundorff’s hairs displayed the same rare anomaly as that of the real dauphin. At the time, skeptics had questioned the accuracy of the tests and the genuineness of the hair samples. Castelot himself had been eager to check his results, and consequently had approached the Dutch authorities for permission to exhume Naundorff’s remains. On September 27, 1950, over a hundred years after his death, Naundorff’s body was exhumed from its burial site at Delft in Holland.
The remains were analyzed by a Dutch anatomist, Dr. Hulst, who hoped to obtain evidence that, one way or the other, would prove Naundorff’s claim. First, he tried to ascertain the exact cause of death, since it was widely rumored that Naundorff had been poisoned. Naundorff’s humerus, or upper arm bone, was removed and tested for the presence of arsenic. Although trace amounts were found, these were too low to have been the cause of death. Hulst reasoned that the arsenic had been absorbed into the bone from the lead coffin after his death. Dismissing any conspiracy theories, he said Naundorff was more likely to have died from typhus than from anything else. From his analysis of the teeth and jaw, Hulst could show that Naundorff was around sixty when he died; this tallied neatly with the correct age for the dauphin had he survived until 1845. He took hair samples to send on to Dr. Locard in Lyon, and Naundorff’s body was returned once more to its grave by his tombstone as Louis XVII.