The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

THE CUP OF SUFFERING,

WAS, WHILE STILL YOUNG

AND BUT ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE,

CUT DOWN BY DEATH.

HE DIED ON VIII JUNE MDCCLXXXXV,

AGED X YEARS II MONTHS AND XII DAYS.

However, when his body could not be found the official plans were scrapped and his burial place was never built. The following year a communal grave in the ossuary of the royal crypt was constructed to receive the bones of all the French kings and queens, Bourbons, Capetians, Orléans and others, who had been flung from their grand tombs into paupers’ graves during the Terror at the height of the revolution. But the uncrowned king was not among them. Without a body, no one could be completely sure that Louis-Charles was dead.

As in a fairytale, after the revolution the young prince sprang to life. He was sighted in Brittany, Normandy, Alsace and in the Auvergne. Was he the charming and dignified ‘Jean-Marie Hervagault’ who held court so convincingly and attracted a large and faithful following intent on seeing him attain the throne? Could he have been the rough diamond ‘Charles de Navarre’, generous-natured, confident, whose love of parties usually ended in drunken bad manners, accounts of which tallied so neatly with the brutalising treatment meted out to the ‘son of Capet’ in prison? Navarre was popular and resourceful and promised to reduce the price of bread as well as taxes and be in every way like the illustrious Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, a father to his people. Or was Louis-Charles the suave and smooth-talking ‘Baron de Richemont’, who could tell of his childhood in Versailles and the Temple prison in compelling detail and whose epitaph in Gleizé in France acknowledged him as ‘Louis-Charles of France, son of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette’?

Over the years more than a hundred young dauphins stepped forward to claim their inheritance, the constant uncertainty adding to the anguish of Marie-Thérèse, the lost king’s ‘sister’, who thought her brother was dead. Many an adventurer or vagrant suddenly recalled their blue-blooded descent and potential princes hopefully presented themselves at the gates of the palace of the Tuileries in Paris. The ‘little boy the dolphin’ – as he was disparagingly called by Mark Twain – appeared in London, America, Russia, even in the Seychelles. In time, dauphins – not necessarily of French origin or even French-speaking – surfaced in all corners of the globe; one was an American Indian half-caste. Some claimants seemed genuine, gaining supporters willing to sponsor their cause, and lived out their days in lavish surroundings holding court with devoted admirers. Others were thrown into prison or swiftly exposed as frauds.

To the astonishment of Europe, nearly forty years after the official death of Louis-Charles, a certain Prussian, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, returned to France and announced that he was the lost king and wished to claim the throne on the restoration of the monarchy. Unlike many other claimants, ‘Prince’ Naundorff could remember his childhood in Versailles with chilling accuracy and vividly describe his escape from the Temple prison. A succession of former courtiers at Versailles, even the Dauphin’s governess and nursemaid, joyfully confirmed he was telling the truth and begged his ‘sister’ to acknowledge him. Yet she refused to meet him; the French authorities rejected his claims, his numerous identity documents were seized and he lived out his years in exile.

When ‘Prince’ Naundorff finally died in Holland in 1845 he too was recognised by the Dutch authorities. His tombstone was engraved:

HERE LIES LOUIS XVII.

CHARLES LOUIS, DUKE OF NORMANDY,

KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE.

BORN AT VERSAILLES ON MARCH 27th 1785.

DIED AT DELFT ON AUGUST 10th 1845.

There were now three graves for Louis-Charles – two in France and one in Holland – and more were to follow. Several claimants even created their own dynasties; to this day, Naundorff’s descendants resolutely seek to prove that he was the rightful king of France.

There is one remaining clue to the mysterious life of the young prince – a grisly relic inside the great gothic basilica at Saint Denis, in a northerly suburb of Paris. By the high altar, almost hidden by the tall pillars, there is a dark passageway leading down to an even darker underground world: ‘the City of the Dead’. Stretching almost the entire length of the basilica is the vast crypt, with vaulted ceiling and thick shadowy arches where by tradition the kings and queens of France now rest. At the bottom of the dark passageway, barred from the main crypt by a heavy iron grille bearing the Bourbon coat of arms, there is a side chapel known as La Chapelle des Princes. Unlit, except for an ornamental brass ceiling light which casts strange, spiky shapes across the deep shadows of the room, the chapel is crammed with wooden coffins.

Beyond these coffins, thin shafts of light direct the eye to a crucifix and stone shelving behind, displaying various brass caskets. These contain the preserved organs, hearts and entrails of various Bourbon kings of France, removed, according to tradition, prior to embalming the bodies. Hard to discern in the dim light, on the bottom shelf behind the crucifix there is a small, plain, crystal urn, marked with the Bourbon fleur de lys. It contains a round object that, on first inspection, resembles a stone, shrivelled and dried hard as rock, hanging on a thread. Yet this is no ordinary stone. This is thought to be the actual heart of the ill-fated boy who died in the Temple prison, stolen from his dead body at the height of the revolution.

Now over two hundred years old, this child’s heart has had a remarkable journey through time. Cut hurriedly from the supposed Dauphin’s body during his autopsy in the Temple prison in 1795 and smuggled out in a handkerchief, the heart which once raced and quickened to the Terror of the revolution even in death became a symbol to be treasured or despised. Preserved merely to be stolen once more, hidden in grand palaces and lost again during the revolution of 1830, only with the passage of time, as the years slowly buried all painful memories, was the child’s heart quietly forgotten, eventually coming to rest by the coffins in La Chapelle des Princes.

With recent developments in forensic science it has become possible to uncover one of the most enduring secrets of the French revolution – what actually happened to the Dauphin – and for his true identity to be revealed. With improvements in the restoration of ancient DNA and the analysis of special genes inherited from the maternal line, known as mitochondrial DNA, the petrified heart of the child offers a possible end to two hundred years of speculation.

The fate of the royal family during the revolution was still a sensitive issue in France. Some maintained that modern science was making an unwelcome intrusion into the past and might reveal secrets best forgotten. However, the Duc de Bauffremont, head of the Memorial of France at Saint Denis, an organisation that superintends the royal graves, gave his consent. ‘There are so many hypotheses about what happened,’ the Duke told reporters. ‘Now, maybe, we will know what happened once and for all.’

On 15 December 1999, at the abbey of Saint Denis, the crystal urn which held the heart was veiled in a purple cloth and brought out from its shadowy tomb in La Chapelle des Princes for scientific testing. A small crowd had gathered in the basilica: leading scientists such as the geneticist Professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman from the University of Leuven, Belgium, historians with an interest in the case, notaries to witness the proceedings, the inevitable TV crews and the various Naundorff and Bourbon pretenders to the French throne. The heart was placed on a small table in front of the high altar. Here, bathed in a fine tracery of stained-glass light, it could be clearly seen: an unprepossessing object, not unlike a garden stone. It was blessed by the priest who led a short ceremony. ‘I do not know whose heart this is,’ he said, ‘but it is certainly symbolic of children anywhere in the world who have suffered. This represents the suffering of all little children caught up in war and revolution.’

With great solemnity, the crystal urn was taken in a hearse to the nearby Thierry Coté Medical Analysis Laboratory in Paris. Here, with every step of the proceedings scrutinised by law officers who were masked, gowned and standing well back, it was placed on a bench and carefully examined. In spite of its eventful passage through history, Professor Cassiman could see at once that the organ was remarkably well preserved; its vessels and compartments were still intact. Could this really hold the secret to the identity of a small boy who was meant to inherit the most prestigious throne in Europe? Looking at the heart, he was immediately struck by something else as well. ‘The way the large blood vessel, the aorta, had been cut – this was not fine work, in fact it was really crude,’ he said. ‘This suggests that the heart had been removed from his body hurriedly. It’s not evidence – but it supports the history of the heart.’ Pathologists examined the heart and the development of the blood vessels to ascertain the age of the child. They estimated the child was eight to twelve years old, ‘which again fits nicely with the age of Louis XVII’, adds Cassiman.

The two-hundred-year-old heart was hard as rock. Anticipating this, Cassiman and his colleague, Dr Els Jehaes, had brought a sterile handsaw with which they could cut along the bottom tip. It took some time to saw a small strip, barely a centimetre wide; this was then split in two. ‘One sample we put in a sterile tube for us to test in Belgium,’ says Cassiman. ‘The other was for a leading genetics laboratory in Germany which we had invited to carry out tests independently.’ Both tubes were sealed and escorted to the respective laboratories.

Invisible to the naked eye for over two centuries, the secrets locked within the tissues of this heart could now be revealed to modern science. Did the young son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette die a brutal death during the French revolution? Or did he escape this fate and survive, only to be ridiculed later as an impostor when he returned to claim the throne of France? In the gloved hands of the geneticists, the centuries of time which had slowly buried the terrible story of the owner of the heart could now be rolled back to solve one of the great enigmas in the history of the revolution. For the first time, the true story of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s son and heir can be told and his memory can finally be laid to rest.

PART ONE (#ulink_341ed630-fd4f-58c5-b8e9-b85f7afc4629)

1 ‘THE FINEST KINGDOM IN EUROPE’ (#ulink_a16d5bf6-58f9-5265-ba6e-94b11fa19476)

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract (1762)

On Saturday 21 April 1770, Archduchess Maria-Antonia of Austria left her home, the imperial palace of Hofburg in Vienna, for ever and embarked on the long journey to France. On departure, in the courtyard in front of the palace, the royal entourage assembled. Two grand berlines lavishly upholstered in blue and crimson velvet and decorated with fine embroidery had been provided by the French ambassador to take Maria-Antonia to Paris. These were to be conveyed in a cavalcade of almost fifty carriages, each to be drawn by six horses and an array of guards and outriders. The whole of the Austrian court, in all its silken and bejewelled finery, attended this auspicious event. Maria-Antonia, the youngest daughter of the distinguished Empress Maria-Theresa and Emperor Franz I, was to marry the future king of France and, it was hoped, consolidate Austria’s troubled relationship with France.

Maria-Antonia was slightly built, with all the attractiveness of youth. ‘She has a most graceful figure; holds herself well; and if, as may be hoped, she grows a little taller, she will possess every good quality one could wish for in a great princess,’ wrote her tutor, the Abbé Jacques de Vermond, adding, ‘her heart and character are both excellent’. Maria-Antonia had large blue eyes, reddish blonde hair and a good complexion; many even considered her a beauty. The ageing French king, Louis XV, eagerly enquiring about the prospective Austrian bride for his grandson, was told by officials that she had ‘a charming face and beautiful eyes’. She had, however, inherited the Habsburg projecting lower lip and prominent brow, which prompted her mother, in preparations for the event, to bring a coiffeur from France to arrange her hair to soften the line of her forehead.

Maria-Antonia, the subject of all this detailed scrutiny, had had her future determined when she was thirteen. ‘Others make war but thou, O happy Austria, makest marriages,’ was a family motto. Her mother, the Empress Maria-Theresa, who was widely considered to be the best queen in Europe since Elizabeth I of England, ruled the Habsburg empire. Her territories encompassed most of central Europe, reaching to parts of Romania in the east, regions of Germany in the north, south to Lombardy and Tuscany in Italy and west to the Austrian Netherlands, now Belgium. Some of this success was due to a series of strategic marriages, which were an important part of royal diplomacy. Maria-Antonia was the youngest of sixteen children and several of her older sisters had already taken part in Austrian foreign policy. One sister was married to the governor general of the Austrian Netherlands, another became the Duchess of Parma, and a third, Maria-Antonia’s favourite sister, Maria Carolina, had become the queen of Naples – a role that at first she deplored. ‘The suffering is true martyrdom,’ Maria Carolina wrote home, ‘made worse by being expected to look happy … I pity Antonia who has yet to suffer it.’

For the Empress Maria-Theresa, eclipsing all these marriages was the prospect of an alliance with the French. France was seen as the richest and most powerful state in Europe, and, with twenty-five million people, was also the largest. Yet France had been Austria’s enemy for over two hundred years. For many, a permanent alliance between the two former long-standing enemies seemed out of the question, even potentially dangerous. However, the empress was determined to secure a match between her youngest daughter and the Dauphin of France. Such an important marriage would seal a political alliance and enable the two countries to work as allies against the growing Prussian influence.

Despite the exciting prospects that lay ahead, Maria-Antonia’s departure from her home, and her mother in particular, was still an ordeal, according to one witness, Joseph Weber, the son of her former nurse.

‘The young Maria-Antonia burst into tears and the spectators, touched by the sight, shared the cruel sufferings of mother and daughter. Maria-Theresa … took her into her arms and hugged her … ‘Adieu, my dear daughter; a great distance is going to separate us, but be just, be humane and imbued with a sense of the duties of your rank and I will always be proud of the regrets which I shall always feel … Do so much good to the people of France that they will be able to say that I have sent them an angel.’

As her carriage departed, Maria-Antonia, ‘her face bathed with tears, covered her eyes now with a handkerchief, now with her hands, and put her head out of the window again and again, to see once more the palace of her fathers to which she would never return’. All she had to represent her future was a miniature portrait of her future husband, Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin.

Her magnificent cortège travelled for a week through Austria and Bavaria until finally they reached the frontier with France, on the banks of the River Rhine near Kehl. On an island in the middle of the river, Maria-Antonia had to undergo a ceremony in which she was symbolically stripped of her Austrian roots and was then reborn, robed in French attire. A magnificent wooden pavilion, over a hundred feet long, had been constructed, divided into two main sections. On one side were the courtiers from Vienna and on the other those from France. Once the formal ceremonies were completed the door to the French side was opened, and the Dauphin’s future bride had to make her entrance into the French court, no longer Maria-Antonia but Marie-Antoinette. As she realised that the door to the Austrian side had closed behind her on all those familiar faces, she was overwhelmed, and ‘rushed’ into the French side ‘with tears in her eyes’.

As she continued her journey into France she received a rapturous welcome. Every kind of extravagant preparation had been made to honour the young princess. There were displays of all kinds – fireworks, dances, theatre – great triumphal arches built, petals strewn before her feet, floating gardens on the river beneath her window, fountains flowing with wine, endless enthusiastic crowds, cheer upon cheer. If she had left the Austrian court in tears, her slow progress through France to such approbation could only fill her with every possible hope.

By 14 May she arrived at Compiègne, some forty miles north-east of Paris, where she was to meet her future husband, Louis-Auguste. By now well briefed on etiquette by her new advisor, the eminent Comtesse de Noailles, Marie-Antoinette stepped from her carriage and sank into a deep curtsy before the king. Louis XV was still a handsome man, whose regal presence eclipsed that of the shy and somewhat overweight sixteen-year-old standing next to him. If she was disappointed by her first impressions of her future husband, there is no record of it. Others, however, have left a less than favourable account. ‘Nature seems to have denied everything to Monsieur le Dauphin,’ Maria-Theresa’s ambassador in France had reported, somewhat harshly. ‘In his bearing and words, the prince displays a very limited amount of sense, great plainness and no sensitivity.’ Indeed, the tall, ungainly youth was more than a little awkward with his prospective bride. When Marie-Antoinette politely kissed him he seemed unsure of himself and promptly moved away.

It took twenty-three days from leaving the Hofburg in Vienna to reach Versailles on 16 May 1770. As the cavalcade of carriages turned into the drive that sunny morning the vast scale of the magnificent chateau came into view. Once the dream of the Sun-King, Louis XIV, who had transformed it from a hunting lodge to a sumptuous estate and symbol of royal power, it created an immediate impression of classical grandeur, ionic columns, arched windows and balustrades receding into the distance as far as the eye could see. The ornamental façade of the main block alone, in brick and honey-coloured stone, stretched over a third of a mile. This was the administrative centre of Europe’s most powerful state, nothing less than a town for up to ten thousand people: the royal family and their entourage, several thousand courtiers and their servants, the King’s Household Troops, Swiss Guards, Musketeers, Gendarmes and countless other staff and visitors.

Marie-Antoinette was taken to the ground-floor apartments where her ladies-in-waiting were to get her ready for her wedding. Nothing can have prepared the princess for the lavishness of the palace; the Hofburg in Austria was modest by comparison. The reception rooms were of an unbelievable richness and elegance, and the draped and canopied beds of the royal apartments had more in common with Cleopatra’s silken barge than the planks and straw of the common lot. Then there were the endless mirrored panels of the vast Galerie des Glaces where courtiers were assembling to greet her. This famous Hall of Mirrors was the talk of Europe, with its four hundred thousand reflected candles, gold and more gold, the sparkle of diamonds and the finest crystal – and, beyond the tall western windows, the perfect view with its enchanted blue distance held for ever in mirrors. It could not fail to seduce the senses and beguile the emperor’s daughter as to her assured prospects at Versailles.

The marriage ceremony took place later that day in the gilt and white chapel at Versailles. In this regal setting, Bourbon kings were traditionally christened and married, secure in the knowledge of their ‘divine right’ as monarch. Standing before the carved marble altar, the Dauphin, dressed in cloth of gold studded with diamonds, found the whole procedure something of an ordeal. ‘He trembled excessively during the service,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘He appeared to have more timidity than his little wife and blushed up to his eyes when he gave [her] the ring.’ Marie-Antoinette, her slender figure seeming lost in her voluminous white brocade gown, was sufficiently nervous that when she signed the register, she spilt some ink.

The ceremony was followed by a grand reception in the Galerie des Glaces for over six thousand guests and a sumptuous wedding feast in the Opera House, which was inaugurated in their honour. Afterwards, following customary French etiquette, the bride and groom were prepared for bed in a very public ritual where the king himself gave the nightshirt to his grandson. Yet for all the weeks of imposing preparations in anticipation of this happy moment, when the sheets were checked in the morning, there was no evidence that the marriage had been consummated.

While the ageing king ‘was enchanted with the young Dauphine’, observed her First Lady of the Bedchamber, Henriette Campan – ‘all his conversation was about her graces, her vivacity, and the aptness of her repartees’ – her new husband was not so appreciative. Rumours soon began to circulate that the Dauphin was impotent or had difficulty making love. He showed only ‘the most mortifying indifference, and a coldness which frequently degenerated into rudeness’, continues Madame Campan, whose memoirs as the queen’s maid convey many intimate details of Marie-Antoinette’s early years in France. ‘Not even all her charms could gain upon his senses; he threw himself as a matter of duty upon the bed of the Dauphine, and often fell asleep without saying a single word to her!’ When Marie-Antoinette expressed her concerns in a letter to her mother, the empress advised her not to be too impatient with her husband, since increasing his uneasiness would only make matters worse. None the less, Marie-Antoinette was worried and ‘deeply hurt’ by his lack of physical interest in her.

The Dauphin was, in fact, a serious, well-intentioned young man who suffered from a chronic lack of confidence and self-assertiveness. As a child, Louis had felt himself to be in the shadow of his brothers; first his brilliant older brother, who had died at the age of ten, and then his younger brothers, the clever and calculating Comte de Provence – who wanted the throne for himself – and the handsome Comte d’Artois. To add to his sense of insecurity, when Louis was eleven his father had died of tuberculosis, to be followed soon afterwards by his mother – a loss which he felt deeply. Increasingly anxious about whether he was equal to his future role, he withdrew, absorbing himself in his studies, especially history, or pursuing his passion for the hunt. Somewhat incongruously for a future king, he also loved lock-making and had a smithy and forge installed next to his library. Marie-Antoinette did not share his interest in history or reading and thought his smithying quite ridiculous. ‘You must agree that I wouldn’t look very beautiful standing in a forge,’ she told a friend. Her mother, the empress, was increasingly concerned about their apparent incompatibility.

For the public, however, the fortunate young couple symbolised all the promise of new age. When Louis and Marie-Antoinette made their first ceremonial entrance into Paris on 8 June 1773, there was jubilant cheering. Their cortège clattered across the streets of the capital, which had been strewn with flowers. ‘There was such a great crowd,’ wrote Marie-Antoinette, ‘that we remained for three-quarters of an hour without being able to go forwards or backwards.’ When they finally appeared on the balcony of the palace of the Tuileries, the crowds were ecstatic and their cheers increased as the Dauphine smiled. Hats were thrown in the air with abandon, handkerchiefs were waving and everyone was enthusiastic. ‘Madame, they are two hundred thousand of your lovers,’ murmured the governor of Paris, the Duc de Brissac, as he saw the sea of admiring faces.

The following year, their protected lives were to change dramatically. On 27 April 1774, Louis XV was dining with his mistress when he became feverish with a severe headache. The next day, at Versailles, he broke out in a rash. The diagnosis was serious: smallpox. Within a few days, as his body became covered with foul-smelling sores, it was apparent that the king was suffering from a most virulent form of the disease. Louis and Marie-Antoinette had no chance to pay their last respects; they were forbidden to visit him. In less than two weeks the once handsome body in his exquisite gilded bed festooned in gold brocade appeared to be covered in one huge, unending black scab.

For those who could not come near the sick room, a candle had been placed near the window, which was to be extinguished the instant the king died. Louis and Marie-Antoinette were waiting together, watching the flickering light at the window with growing apprehension. When the flame went out, ‘suddenly a dreadful noise, absolutely like thunder’, wrote Madame Campan, was heard in the outer apartment. ‘This extraordinary tumult … was the crowd of courtiers who were deserting the dead sovereign’s antechamber to come and bow to the new power of Louis XVI.’ The courtiers threw themselves on their knees with cries of ‘Le roi est mort: vive le roi!’ The whole scene was overwhelming for the nineteen-year-old king and his eighteen-year-old queen. ‘Pouring forth a flood of tears, [they] exclaimed: “God guide and protect us! We are too young to govern.”’

The coronation ceremony was held on a very hot day in June 1775. Louis-Auguste walked up the aisle of Rheims cathedral dressed in stately splendour and bearing the sword of Charlemagne. He was anointed with oil and the crown of France was solemnly lowered onto his head. Such was the magnificence of the occasion and the jubilation of the crowds that Marie-Antoinette was overwhelmed and had to leave the gallery to wipe away her tears. When she returned the spectators in the packed cathedral cheered once again and the king’s eyes were full of appreciation for his young wife. ‘Even if I were to live for two hundred years,’ Marie-Antoinette wrote ecstatically to her mother, she would never forget the wonderful day. ‘I can only be amazed by the will of Providence that I, the youngest of your children, should have become queen of the finest kingdom in Europe.’