A Telltale Heart Ends a Royal Mystery in France

On June 8, 1795, as France was in the throes of revolution, a 10-year-old boy succumbed to tuberculosis in the drafty tower of the Temple prison and one of the great mysteries of French history began.

Was this unfortunate child the dauphin, sole surviving son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, both of whom had been executed by republicans on the guillotine? Or was he a stand-in, with the heir to the throne of France having been spirited away to safety?

On Wednesday, modern DNA analysis in laboratories in Belgium and Germany provided what should be the decisive answer to this enigma: The unfortunate little prisoner, the researchers concurred, was in fact the dauphin. For before the boy was buried in a common grave in eastern Paris two days after his death, the surgeon who performed the autopsy removed and kept the heart, wrapping it in a handkerchief and carrying it away in his pocket.

More than two centuries later, tissue from that withered organ has solved the riddle, in what Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the dean of French historians, called a “magnificent conquest” for both science and history.

For 29 months, after his father, Louis XVI, was beheaded on the present-day Place de la Concorde, young Louis Charles of France was recognized by his mother--until her own execution Oct. 16, 1793--and by such European powers as Britain, Russia, Austria and Prussia as Louis XVII, rightful ruler of France. And during the 19th century, no fewer than 43 people surfaced who claimed to be the dauphin, somehow miraculously escaped from prison.

The pretenders included a stable boy, a convicted murderer, a mason, a field marshal and an American colonel. In Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” one of the most colorful characters, an itinerant con artist, also says he is the dauphin, son of “Looy the Sixteen” and “Marry Antonette.”

The most persuasive claimant of all, Berlin clockmaker Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, died in 1845 in the Netherlands and was even given an official death certificate by the Dutch identifying him as Louis XVII.

If the victim in the tower was indeed the dauphin, it was a somber page in the annals of the fledgling French republic. “I am not against the revolution, but these people were exterminating a clan, and that’s very shocking,” Le Roy Ladurie said in an interview. The belief by some that the boy was an impostor allowed France’s small but devoted contingent of royalists to hope that a direct living link with the main branch of the Bourbons remained.

The doctor who performed the autopsy, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, placed the dead child’s heart in a crystal vase filled with ethyl alcohol, and it stayed for 15 years on a shelf. It was stolen by one of his students, then returned, and finally given to the archdiocese of Paris for safekeeping.

In 1830, as yet another republican revolution shook Paris, the building where the heart was kept burned down. Pelletan’s son, also a physician, later found the shards of the crystal vase, and the heart, buried under a pile of sand.

The organ, now as desiccated and hard as a piece of wood, has been preserved in a crystal urn in the crypt of the basilica of Saint-Denis north of Paris, resting place of the kings and queens of France, since 1975. In December, two small tissue samples were cut off with a saw, to be compared with DNA extracted from preserved locks of hair from the dauphin’s mother, Marie Antoinette; two of the ill-fated queen’s sisters; and contemporary descendants of the Hapsburg dynasty, to which the Austrian-born Marie Antoinette belonged.

On Wednesday, the researchers who performed the DNA tests, Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the University of Louvain’s center for human genetics in Belgium and Ernst Brinckmann of the University of Muenster in Germany, issued their findings.

In the heart tissue, “the two scientists found more DNA than they thought,” reported historian Philippe Delorme, who suggested the analysis. He said the DNA tests also turned up positive with two living Hapsburgs, Anne of Romania and her brother, Andre de Bourbon-Parme.

The results “reinforce further a more than probable family link between these different persons,” Delorme said.

The dauphin, in fact, may have been sired by Marie Antoinette’s Swedish lover, Count Axel Fersen, Louis XVI being notorious for his lack of virility. Louis Charles was born March 27, 1785, with the title of duke of Normandy, and became the dauphin, or heir to the throne of France, upon the natural death in 1789 of his older brother, Louis Joseph, duke of Burgundy.

On Jan. 21, 1793, more than three years after revolutionaries stormed the Bastille prison in Paris, Louis XVI was guillotined. For five months, the royal family had been imprisoned in the Temple, the former Paris quarters of the Knights Templar. At his father’s death, the dauphin was 7.

In a decision now difficult to interpret as anything other than needlessly cruel, the Committee of Public Safety, the main instrument of anti-royalist terror, ordered that the dauphin be taken away from Marie Antoinette and kept isolated in a well-guarded tower of the Temple. Historians say there were several competing plans to free the boy--by monarchists who dreamed of a restoration, but also by republicans who wanted him as a hostage.

The cause of his death was officially given as tuberculosis, but there are widespread suspicions that at the very least, his captors let him die to extinguish the royal bloodline. The death certificate was made out in the name of “Louis Charles Capet, son of Louis Capet, last king of the French.”

“That Louis XVI was guillotined, that can be understood, though it’s contestable; the man had certain qualities,” Le Roy Ladurie said. “As far as his wife was concerned, it’s as if Mrs. [Henri Philippe] Petain or Mrs. [Adolf] Hitler were guillotined. And making the child suffer was absurd.”

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End of France’s Royal Riddle

The fate of the 10-year-old son of King Louis XVI is now known. Scientists have confirmed through DNA tests that a boy who died in a Paris prison 200 years ago was the son of Marie Antoinette and heir to the French throne.

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Sources: Quid 2000; Le Petit Robert