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

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