Summer reading: Science seeks a lost king

By JOHN GARDNER

With great care and reverence, Professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman took a strip from the small heart. It was not easy. The heart was 200 years old and as hard as a rock.

But Cassiman and his colleague Dr Els Jehaes persisted.

The aim was to use modern DNA techniques to solve a mystery that had puzzled scholars and historians for generations.

The heart had been kept as a sacred relic, the pathetic mortal remains of Louis XVII, son of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, the French royals whose reign ended in the terror of the French revolution.

But it was also possible that the heart was not the remains of the boy thought to have died a miserable death in prison but that of a substitute and that the heir to the French throne had escaped.

The story, as recounted by Deborah Cadbury in The Lost King of France, is a thriller that yields nothing in sensation to any airport best-seller and which has at its core one of the classic ingredients of fairytales, the changeling.

It begins in unimaginable privilege and descends through cruelty, barbarism and claims of child sex abuse into a welter of conspiracy theories reminiscent of the wilder reaches of the internet.

As royals go, the boy's father was not the worst example. A well-meaning and serious young man, he read thoroughly and indulged in the odd but harmless hobby of making locks.

At 19 he was married to Maria Antonia of Austria, the 18-year-old youngest daughter of the Empress Maria-Theresa and Emperor Franz, who had modified her name to Marie Antoinette in a gesture to win the hearts of the French.

Her progress into Paris was greeted by ecstatic crowds, and she did the decent thing by bearing heirs.

The mood was to change.

The year after the marriage, her husband ascended the throne on the death of Louis XV to find himself confronted with an economic mess far beyond his competence to remedy.

His young wife occupied herself with an increasingly giddy and indulgent social whirl. She gambled, ran up extravagant debts and developed a taste for bigger and better diamonds that brought a stern rebuke from her mother.

Her Austrian nationality fuelled hostility as the tide of public opinion swung against her. Scandal sheets wallowed in scabrous tales of her sexual excesses.

As she whirled off to the balls and parties, waiting in the wings was the political event that was to change the face of world history - the French revolution.

In a now familiar pattern, a high-principled drive to resolve chronic legitimate grievances slipped into paranoia and a hunt for blood sacrifice.

The royal family became prisoners surrounded by a mounting tide of horror.

The well meaning, blundering, indecisive king was tried and guillotined leaving behind his widow, the 15-year-old Princess Marie Therese and the heir to the throne, seven-year old Louis Charles. An older brother, Louis Joseph, died as a child four years before.

The death of the king was never going to satisfy the appetite of the vanguard revolutionaries like Jacques Rene Hebert, whose inflammatory ravings have the flavour of a demented talkback host.

He was determined to have her head. "The little whelp must lose the recollection of his royalty ... and his mother must be chopped like mincemeat."

The bewildered Louis Charles was separated from his mother and put in the hands of brutal masters. They brainwashed the child into accusing his mother of forcing him to have sex with her.

By now a frail and haggard figure, she responded to the accusation with maternal outrage and dignity. But the guillotine claimed her too.

The young prince, already maltreated physically and mentally by his jailers, was now totally at their mercy.

He had been a lively and charming child. Even Hebert was reported as saying "he is as beautiful as the day and as interesting as can be".

Now the attractive eight-year-old was enduring a nightmare. He was kept in solitary confinement in a small airless cell. No sanitary facilities were provided, bugs and fleas infested his bedding which was unchanged for months and his body was covered in sores.

Outside, some of his persecutors were, in turn, falling to the terror. Less than six months after having forced the child to accuse his mother, the unspeakable Hebert lost his head, as did one of the most brutal of the child's early jailers.

But it brought no respite. The child was the focus of the royalists' hopes, and the fear of counter-revolution stripped his keepers of humanity.

Not until eight months after he started his solitary ordeal was the boy's cell was cleaned and he was allowed to see daylight.

Some belated efforts were made to improve his conditions, but it was too late. His health had been destroyed, he was covered in ulcers and tumours and he had withdrawn into silence.

On June 8 1795, less than two years after he had been torn from his weeping mother the wretched child died.

Or did he?

Such was the sensitivity of the news of his death that it was not immediately announced. An autopsy was performed and the corpse was rushed into a common grave.

But one of the doctors at the autopsy, perhaps conscious he was at an historic event, slipped the royal child's heart into his handkerchief as a souvenir.

Louis Charles might physically have been dead but he was about to start a rich new life, in legend at least.

The royal pretender has an enduring appeal. In the sixth century BC, the Persians had False Bardia, the purported son of Cyrus "King of Kings".

Russia was infested with false tsars , and England produced two separate fake claimants to the throne as Edward, Earl of Warwick, in the late 1400s.



The secretive nature of the death of the young French prince provided a perfect opportunity for the pretenders, and they were not slow to emerge.

In 1797, a charming young man with a confident, stylish air was discovered wandering the country in north-east France.

He refused to give his identity, but he was so personable that fine clothes, a silver service and other luxuries were brought to the cell where he was kept. Eventually he admitted that he was the boy king.

It was known the prince had been kept in a darkened cell and that the guards looking in saw just a small boy lying down. With a few bribes it would, the faithful thought, have been easy to switch one small sick boy for another and spirit the young royal away.

Unfortunately a humble tailor called Rene Hervagault turned up to claim parentage of the pretender.

Like modern conspiracy theorists, Hervagault junior's "court" was not deterred by facts and he stuck to his guns.

The authorities were less keen and he was jailed for false pretences. Although he clung to his story after his release, the charm had worn off and after a life of petty crime he died in 1812.

As Napoleon lost his grip on France, dauphins began to turn up all over the place with varying degrees of credibility. Most lost their allure quickly although some had a good run backed by contradictory testimony from the fading memories of assorted jailers and former royal servants.

One had a three-year reign before a sensational trial in which "the prince" blew his chances by swearing like a trooper and insulting everyone in court.

Another claimant arrived from Prussia where he had worked as a clockmaker. Karl Wilhelm Naundorff kept up his claims from 1833 until his death in Holland in 1845, when the Dutch authorities issued a death certificate in the name of Louis XVII.

Efforts to end the speculation by fresh exhumations from the common grave were bedevilled by confusion, false clues and reburials.

Meanwhile the heart led an eventful life, preserved, forgotten, rediscovered, lost in the revolutionary violence of 1830, interred in an Austrian chapel and ending up in a royal crypt in France again.

The arrival of DNA techniques provided the perfect opportunity to solve an enduring mystery.

By 1999, the heart was in the hands of Professor Cassiman, a Belgian brought into the investigation because French scientists were still thought to be susceptible to charges of vested interests.

For his cross matching, Cassiman had authenticated hairs from Marie-Antoinette's sisters, preserved as keepsakes, from Marie Antoinette herself and from living relatives.

To reveal the conclusion would be to threaten the reader's pleasure in a book which is as much thriller as history, although Cadbury's telling of the French revolutionary backgrounds is lucid enough to tempt the unfamiliar into longer accounts such as those by Christopher Hibbert or Simon Schama.

As for the science, she makes clear the potential for using DNA to lift the veil on royal mysteries.

A DNA test is now being mooted to see if the perfidious English murdered the deposed Emperor Napoleon, and this month there were reports that efforts were being made in England to sneak a sample of Prince Harry's hair to check his paternity.

If these stories develop, we can only hope someone as skilful as Cadbury writes them.