The Not So Telltale Heart
Heart of Louis XVII, St. Denis, Paris, France. (author photo)
One of the most beloved and enduring mysteries in European history is “what ever happened to Louis XVII,” the eight year old son of guillotined monarchs Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI? More romantically, the question has also been dubbed “the mystery of the Lost Dauphin.” This is because Louis XVII held the title “the Dauphin” as crown prince of France up until his father’s death in 1793, and despite many assertions to the contrary, Louis’s fate has never been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.
The subriquet “Lost Dauphin” was bestowed by Mark Twain, of all unexpected people, in the mid 19th century, in his novel, Huckleberry Finn. Twain made fun of only one of the dozens of young, blonde men who turned up all over the world in the first decades of the nineteenth century claiming to be Louis XVII. Some of these would-be Dauphins showed up even in Green Bay, Wisconsin, 30 miles from my home town, but many more miles than that away from places like France, where you might expect to find them.
The Lost Dauphin was back in the news most recently in 2001, when two separate DNA labs analyzed tissue taken from a heart that had been preserved since 1795. The heart was claimed to have been wrested from the chest of the Dauphin during his autopsy, and preserved in a series of crystal jars from that time forward, many of them filled with some kind of preservative liquid, and most of them engraved with fleurs de lis.
The journal Nature published the results of the study and declared firmly, “the consensus mtDNA sequence of the heart was identical to that of the maternal relatives of Louis XVII.” For most people, this settled the matter: the DNA analysis proved that the poor little Dauphin did not escape from Temple Prison, but died there as was always claimed. More cautious interpreters, however, like the study authors, agree that, at minimum, DNA analysis shows that the heart belonged to someone descended from Marie Antoinette’s maternal line. The list of available “someones” whose preserved heart would pass the DNA test being quite small, most of the world has declared the mystery solved. But is it?
Why on earth, you ask, would I even be questioning DNA evidence, of all things? Well, I will get to that. But let’s start with why it ever came up as a question.
The initial chapters of the Dauphin’s story are pretty terrible, and this is one of the reasons so many of us root for him to have escaped somehow. The worst events in the known record took place during what is now called the “Reign of Terror,” which was what we call the French revolutionary period from mid 1793 to mid 1794. During this period, a governing body called the Committee of Public Safety arranged for tens of thousands of people to be killed all over France by guillotine (but also by hanging, throttling, crushing, etc.) for being “insufficiently revolutionary.” It was not a good time to be a member of the aristocracy, much less of the royal family.
The record also agrees that after his father, Louis XVI, was guillotined in January, 1793, the Dauphin was wrested physically out of the arms of his mother, Marie Antoinette, after her captors explained to the queen that the choices were for both of them to die, or just for her to. She was killed shortly thereafter as promised. Meanwhile, the eight year old boy was taken away to live completely alone in a cell in the Temple Prison, except when he was brought out as entertainment for his captors and made to shout anti-monarchy slogans. On one occasion he was forced to testify that his mother and his aunt had sexually molested him.
The next part of the story is a little bit more hopeful, though, because subsequent events are ambiguous, and even suspicious. A series of changes were made to the Dauphin’s living conditions right around the time the Reign of Terror came to an end, in July, 1794. For reasons that have never been well explained, all of the jailors who had originally been assigned to watch the Dauphin were suddenly replaced with different people, so that by October, 1794, not a single person in charge of his person had laid eyes on him before that autumn. In December, he was reported to have lost the power of speech altogether, which would certainly be understandable, based on his ordeal, but which was not a symptom anyone had reported before. When the boy in the Temple Prison died, in June, 1795, the declared cause of death was tuberculosis, which was not something from which the Dauphin had been reported to suffer, either, even when he suddenly went dumb in the previous December.
After the autopsy in June, 1795, at which his heart was pocketed by the presiding surgeon, the boy’s body was rushed out of the prison and thrown into a common grave, creating problems later, during the Bourbon restoration, when people tried to find him to re-bury him in reconstituted royal crypts at St. Denis. When the coffin most likely to be his was found, however, it contained the body, not of a ten year old, but, based on the length of the leg bones, that of a fourteen year old. People felt that a switch might have taken place.
Theories about how this happened include charming and farcical components.
Marie Antoinette had had a very serious fan, an English actress who had married rich and then been widowed, called Lady Atkyns. Lady Atkyns reports in her memoirs that she spent a fortune to smuggle herself into France in 1793, and even into the prison where Marie Antoinette was being held, in order to offer to switch places with the queen. She reported that Marie Antoinette sent her away but begged her to instead save her son, the not-yet-lost Dauphin.
Lady Atkyns acceded to this request, and by all accounts, her next step was to deforest all the land around her inherited country house, to the dismay of the neighbors, and to sell the wood as timber. Then with the lumber money, she hired ships to sail up and down the English channel, in order to meet up with various teams of kidnappers she had hired and charged with breaking the Dauphin out of Temple Prison in Paris.
Lady Atkyns’s crafty plan was to find some boy (probably already suffering from a terminal illness, to soften the immorality of the transaction) whose parents she could pay, who could be swapped in for the Dauphin, to die in prison, where the Dauphin could then be whisked away to the coast and to freedom.
The best thing about this plan is that Lady Atkyns succeeded! She whisked away the boy and swapped in a different boy. But the problem was that when she met the boy she had rescued, he was definitely not the Dauphin. He was a deaf-mute she had never seen before in her life. Either her hired kidnappers had pulled a fast one, or someone else had gotten to the real Dauphin first, and she had rescued a substitute.
She was probably a dupe, you say, yawning. And besides, what about the DNA evidence? Indeed! What about the DNA evidence? It makes the Lady Atkyns story seem a bit far-fetched.
BUT! We have to look at chain of possession of the heart. Or shall we say, “hearts?” It turns out that the doctor who originally plucked the heart out of the boy he thought was Louis XVII saved the organ in a crystal case, as one does, and then a few things happened, and eventually the doctor died, and after that, the heart fell into the possession of the Archbishop of Paris.
Legend has it that in 1831, the then-current revolution in Paris caused the Archbishop’s rooms to be destroyed, creating the need for heart collecting zealots to pick through the refuse to find the remains of the crystal case with the remains of the heart in it. This, they meticulously did.
And they must have done a good job of it, too, if the heart they found has was tested in 2001 as belonging to a descendent of Marie Antoinette’s maternal line!
BUT! It turns out that the Archbishop of London was actually in possession of—yes—TWO hearts! For reasons I don’t fully understand, the Archbishop not only had a crystal case on his desk holding the heart of the supposed Louis XVII. He also had a crystal case holding the heart of the OLDER BROTHER of Louis XVII, a boy named Louis Joseph, who had died several years before the French revolution even started. It is within the realm of possibility that the heart found in the smoking ashes of the Archbishop’s study was the heart of this older brother.
And of course the older brother would have ALSO been descended from Marie Antoinette’s maternal line. The DNA may not lie, but the DNA may not, on the other hand, be telling the truth you expected to hear.
So we find ourselves asking again, what happened to the Lost Dauphin? Further DNA research has ruled out the claim of some of the more prominent pretenders, but stories still abound. And that’s a great thing, if you ask me.
The historical writer I respect the most in the world, Elizabeth Sparrow (1928-2016) has an amazingly researched book about the real-life spy upon which the Scarlett Pimpernel novels were based, entitled Phantom of the Guillotine (2013). The topic is not the main point of the book, but as an aside, Swallow says that the Dauphin ended up in Cornwall, married, and had, in the end, a peaceful and fulfilling life. Ms. Sparrow had an inside track on a lot of espionage topics. If she says the mystery of the Lost Dauphin had a happy ending, I am more than glad to hear it.
