Blind Spot: Little Dauphin Lost

In 1789 France, the Third Estate, or the commoners, formed the National Assembly in defiance of King Louis XVI, seeking more proportional representation and a constitutional monarchy. Fearing a military coup because of the king’s gathering of troops, revolutionaries seized the Bastille and its armory in July, and the French Revolution was underway. In October, when a mob of angry fishwives protesting the price of bread marched on Versaille and dragged the royal family back to Tuileries Palace in Paris to be held captive, the reality of the situation must of struck the young prince, or dauphin, Louis Charles, who at four and a half years was described as a joyful and carefree child previous to the ordeal his family was about to endure. To illustrate his temperament, upon learning earlier that year that his older brother Louis Joseph had died of consumption, the fact that he had inherited his brother’s dog consoled him far more than the fact that he was now the heir to the throne of France. And while he may have been sheltered from the reality of their captivity in Tuileries for some years, in 1791, when an abortive attempt at escape ended with the royal family returning to Paris, harried the whole way by vicious revolutionary commoners who spit on his father and ripped his mother Marie Antoinette’s clothes, and afterward, when the little 6-year-old was locked away with his family in Temple Prison, he must certainly have become aware of his predicament. When in 1793 his father bade him farewell for the last time before being taken to the guillotine, King Louis XVI made the nearly 8-year-old dauphin promise never to seek vengeance. And it would seem he kept that promise, for according to history, he never made it out of Temple Prison alive. Or did he?

In the summer of that same year, after his father’s death and Marie Antoinette telling Louis Charles that he was now the rightful king of France, Louis XVII, the boy was taken from his mother’s bosom and made to live with a new tutor, Antoine Simon, an illiterate cobbler who rather than edifying the dauphin proceeded to teach him to curse and sing revolutionary songs. Under Simon’s tutelage, the child was transformed into a “little sanscullotte,” an ill-mannered commoner who profaned his own mother as a whore. It went further than this, however, as those in charge of the royal prisoners were determined to debase them entirely. Winning Louis Charles’s affections with bribes of puppies and canaries, they induced him to make the most heinous of accusations against his mother: that she had sexually abused him. And yet, despite what sounds like it may have been a traumatic captivity, there is testimony indicating that Simon and his wife may have genuinely cared for their charge, as he appears to have been fed well and given a considerable amount of freedom within the prison grounds. However, now began the Reign of Terror, during which Marie Antoinette was guillotined—a fact never shared with the young dauphin—and much internal strife prevailed among radical factions. In early 1794, Antoine Simon’s position was terminated, and he and his wife were driven from their lodgings. At around the same time, other guards familiar with the child had also been removed from their positions, and thereafter, the dauphin was confined in a dungeon alone.

The Temple Prison, via Wikimedia Commons

It is noteworthy that the dauphin’s sister, Marie Thérèse, reported hearing noises on the day of Simon’s departure and believed it was the sound of her brother being removed and another prisoner being put into his cell. After that, we know little of the dauphin’s treatment except what can be gleaned from the later testimony of guards, who reported that his dungeon was crawling with rats, such that he was accustomed to leaving uneaten food on the table as a distraction so that he might get some rest undisturbed. Apparently, the boy seemed very inactive, and despite the shouting of guards from outside his cell, calling him a child of vipers and demanding he get up, he mostly lay in bed. After Robespierre met his end and his Terror subsided, a member of the National Convention investigated rumors that the dauphin had been rescued and found the child in his cell wasting away in his own filth, covered in vermin, lying on a cradle rather than on the bed because, as the boy claimed, this relieved his pain somewhat, for his knees were terribly swollen and he proved unable to stand. Efforts were made to clean the child and treat his illness, presumed to be late-stage consumption, or as it might be understood now, tuberculosis resulting in severe arthritis—a surprising eventuality since before his solitary confinement some 6 months earlier, he had shown no definite signs of the illness, and as Dr. Jan Bondeson points out in his treatment of the mystery, which I have relied on as my principal source, this would indeed represent an unusually swift progression of the disease.

As the prisoner’s illness continued to worsen, his guards maintained unusual precautions when anyone called on the child, insisting they not speak to him, and later, in 1495, as the child’s illness grew worse and he eventually died, the doctor who came to perform the autopsy, Dr. Phillippe Jean Pelletan, was sworn to secrecy about anything he might see during the performance of his duties. After the autopsy, during which Pelletan cut skin flaps away from the skull in order to saw into it, he replaced the flaps and wrapped a bandage around the head to keep the skin and the top of the skull in place, and it was in this condition that his body was identified by the guards and soldiers of Temple Prison. Thereafter, he was shuttled away in a coffin and supposedly put into a pauper’s grave at Sainte-Marguerite Cemetery, although rumors abounded that his coffin had been fished out and absconded with or that the gravedigger had subsequently disinterred his corpse to give him a more proper burial place nearer the church.

Plaque commemorating the "old Sainte-Marguerite Cemetery where were buried in June 1794 the corpses of 73 persons killed by guillotine, and on the 10th of June 1795 that of the dead child in the dungeon of the Temple," via Wikimedia Commons. 

The following year, rumors that the prince had not died in prison after all became hard to ignore when a teenager jailed as a vagrant in rural France claimed to be the lost dauphin. And he convinced many of his veracity, including one of the dauphin’s former guards at the Temple, before his father appeared and coaxed out of him a confession that he was just a swindler by the name of René Hervagault. Thereafter, in 1801, author Jean-Joseph Regnault-Warin wrote a novel detailing the dauphin’s escape from the Temple, and it would go on to inspire many a false dauphin just as it appears to have inspired Hervagault to renew his own claims, which now included the tale that he had sought help from Pope Pius VI and that the pontiff had acclaimed him the King of France and branded his leg so as to better identify him—a mark Hervagault could easily show to prove his claims. Odd that the Pope would take such a precaution when there had been no others claiming to be the dauphin at the time, but this detail would be taken up in the future by many another impostor claiming to be Louis XVII.

After the claims of Hervagault and the fiction of Regnault-Warin, another revelation helped to cement forever the legend that the dauphin escaped. In 1811, the wife of the prison tutor Antoine Simon began telling the nuns in the hospital where she had been admitted that she and her husband had helped the dauphin escape in a linen basket after smuggling another child into the prison inside a papier-mâché horse to take the prince’s place. She even claimed he had come to visit her in the hospital years earlier to thank her. While there is ample reason to doubt her story as a lie recasting her and her husband as loyal royalists when in fact the Simons were nothing of the sort, her story meshed somewhat with Hervagault’s, as that pretender had said he was smuggled out in a wicker basket. But it did not match well with the stories of the many other pretenders who would soon rear their heads. In 1815, a drunk vagrant who was probably an orphan by the name of Mathurin Bruneau showed up in Brittany claiming to be the Lost Dauphin. He actually managed to gather supporters despite his erratic behavior, which in the end sent him to a madhouse. In 1828, a more refined pretender appeared, although he still seemed to have a background as a petty criminal. Baron Richemont, as he was called, not only claimed to have been rescued as a child from the Temple Prison by a doctor, but also to have been rescued from other prisons since, for he asserted that he was the two previous pretenders, Hervagault and Bruneau. And after facing further imprisonment for his swindlery, he appears to have escaped again in 1835 to live out the remainder of his life insisting he was Louis XVII.

Then there was Carl Wilhelm Naundorff in Berlin, who began asserting he was the dauphin while Richemont was on trial for his own claims. Naundorff’s claim was laughable in some ways. At first, he didn’t even get the dauphin’s name right when making his claim, and he couldn’t speak a word of French! During his career as a false claimant, he moved to London and wrote very fanciful memoirs detailing multiple substitutions at the Temple prison as well as all the abductions and shipwrecks he had survived. He began to build bombs in London, which may seem odd but isn’t when one considers that previous to making his claims he appears to have been an arsonist. Because of all the accidental explosions and fires in his workshop, he nearly drove his neighbors to riot. After a stint in debtor’s prison, the Dutch government paid him for his bomb design, and he pursued a career as a bomb maker in Holland, where he passed away in 1845, his death certificate bearing the name King Louis XVII.  Although all evidence seems to point to Naundorff being a fraud, he was the most successful of all claimants, inspiring numerous conspiracy theories to explain away problems with his tales, and even rallying a set of parliamentary deputies, the Naundorffists, to his cause during the Third Republic in France. His proponents argued for his legitimacy long after his death.

Naundorff on his deathbed, via Wikimedia Commons.

There have been more than a hundred men claiming to be the long lost dauphin, some of whose claims strained credulity far more than others, such as Eleazar Williams, whose claims were met with skepticism and even outright mockery due to his dark skin and Native American heritage. The claims of all such pretenders suffered from the same inherent flaw; it was hard to credit the idea that the Simons or some other royalist plotter would have been able to smuggle a replacement child into Temple prison, let alone spirit Louis Charles out, when the republican guards scrutinized all objects brought in and out. A perhaps more feasible theory is that, if a substitution had ever taken place, it was with the full cooperation of the officers on duty, perhaps to hide the fact that the dauphin, who remained a valuable political pawn, no longer lived. As we have discussed, he seems to have been quite healthy when he was moved from the care of the Simons into solitary confinement, and the rapid advance of disease in the child who would later die there has led many to believe the dauphin was replaced with a sickly or dying boy. What if this was done to cover up the dauphin’s murder? Some have pointed to a cryptic note of a committee secretary in 1794 indicating a decision had been reached to get rid of the prince as proof that the dauphin’s captors killed him. And furthermore, this may have been the reason for firing Simon and other guards who would have recognized that a substitution had occurred. Or perhaps the guards and even Simon, in an act of extremist republicanism had slain the young royal and had been discharged for their insubordination. Either way, it would have been wise to pretend they still had the prince in custody. One report to corroborate this version comes from 1801, when a prisoner digging in the garden of the Temple uncovered a child’s skeleton that had been buried in quicklime. As the story goes, the prison governor admitted it was the Lost Dauphin’s corpse, but the bones stayed where they lay, and eventually a house was built atop them.

All of these fanciful accounts rely on the idea that sometime just before or after his seclusion in the dungeon, the dauphin was swapped out for some other child, and it was this replacement boy who died in June of 1795. But there is now substantive evidence that that child was indeed the dauphin, for it seems the doctor, Pelletan, upon performing his autopsy, secreted away the child’s heart and preserved it in alcohol. Years later, after the heart had been stolen from him and he eventually regained it, he gave the heart to the archbishop of Paris, who promised to return it to the Lost Dauphin’s remaining family. During a riot in 1830, the archbishop’s home was ransacked, but luckily, the heart was found discarded among the remaining debris. Thereafter, it passed through various hands before finally ending up in an Austrian shrine to the Bourbon dynasty. In 1998, the heart underwent DNA testing, comparing to hair samples from Marie Antoinette as well as blood samples from some descendants of the family. Astonishingly, it revealed that the heart purported to have been preserved at the 1795 autopsy contained mitochondrial DNA identical to that of Marie Antoinette, proving that it belonged to a child related matrilineally to her mother, Empress Maria Theresia. So this would seem the final nail in the coffin of this mystery… but as we always see, there arises reason to doubt almost any seemingly incontrovertible proof. In this case, there is considerable evidence that, back in 1830, when the rioters looted his residence, the archbishop had actually been in possession of more than one preserved royal heart. You see, the hearts of royals were sometimes removed during embalming and kept as relics, and in this case, it seems the archbishop may have had both the heart from Pelletan’s autopsy of the child in the Temple who may or may not have been Louis Charles and the heart of Louis Joseph, the Lost Dauphin’s older brother who had died before the revolution. The possibility then remains that the heart tested for DNA was that of Louis Joseph, another son of Marie Antoinette, mistaken among the wreckage of the archbishop’s house for the heart Pelletan had collected. And as long as that is a possibility, it would seem that science, rather than solving this case, has only created a further mystery.

The organ purported to be the heart of Louis XVII, via Wikimedia Commons.