According to Madame Simon, on January 19, 1794, the last day the Simons worked at the Temple, she and her husband had helped Louis-Charles to escape. She claimed members of the prison staff had smuggled into the Great Tower “a wickerwork hamper with a double bottom, a wooden horse and several toys” for Louis-Charles. Hidden in the wooden horse was a substitute child of the same age as the dauphin. The prince himself was wrapped “in dirty linen and loaded onto a cart with the hamper.” As they left, the guards demanded to see the contents but “Simon flew into a rage and declared it was his own linen and the guards let him pass.” Madame Simon said she had no idea where the dauphin was taken but was “convinced that he was living and would one day wear the crown.” Once
she had given away her secret, the old woman repeated it frequently, and her startling revelations leaked out. It was difficult to dismiss the evidence of a firsthand witness with an authentic-sounding story.
The continued uncertainty over her brother was a terrible burden to Marie-Thérèse. As the Duchesse d’Angoulême, she had followed her uncle, loyally enduring years of exile in Russia and then Poland. An engraving of her leaving Russia, walking with her uncle through a snowstorm, helped to confirm her status as a living legend, “a French Antigone.” Napoleon ordered all copies to be banned. Later she returned to Russia, but in 1807, with Napoleon’s army less than two hundred miles away, they were forced to flee the continent to seek safety in England.
In time, the exiles settled at Hartwell House, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where the years passed uneventfully. They heard of Napoleon’s endless exploits and his divorce from his wife, Joséphine. In 1810,
le Corse
as they referred to him disparagingly—married into the distinguished Habsburg family, to Marie-Thérèse’s own cousin, Marie-Louise, the young daughter of Francis II of Austria. For Marie-Thérèse it was an appalling irony—in view of the fate of her own mother—that another Austrian archduchess should made to seal a political alliance as consort of the ruler of France. Later that year they heard of the brutal murder of Marie-Antoinette’s devoted friend, Count Fersen, by protesters in Stockholm in June—the sort of news that would remind Marie-Thérèse that life could be dangerous and painful.
In all her years of exile, “the life of the Temple was there like a background” and the Duchesse d’Angoulême lived as though always on guard, “amid the habit of pain.” As the disappointment of her marriage removed all last hopes of happiness, she seemed to others to have “a stiffness and apparent hardness of character.” Often she would appear in public “with a redness about the eyes,” as though she had been crying for hours. This continued grieving took its toll. “In her twenty-year-old freshness she was gifted with a beauty of which she afterward lost every trace,” observed one courtier, the Baron de Maricourt. Stoic endurance and rigid self-control had become such a habit that only occasionally, in her privacy with close
friends, “would she let herself go” and adjust to a little gaiety. In those rare moments, “a certain pleasantry did not frighten her.”
Just as she was beginning to find some peace of mind she began to receive disturbing letters—from her brother: “It is the companion of your misfortunes, my sister, who writes to you,” he began. “You inhabit the abode of honors and veneration; your brother laments in the place destined for crime, destitute of everything and without any other consolation than that which comes from God.” It was not long before she would learn from her most trusted advisors that Louis-Charles was in fact still alive, and desperate to see her.
Meanwhile, the heart stolen from the orphan of the Temple was still hidden in Dr. Philippe-Jean Pellatan’s house in the Rue de Touraine in Paris. Since the spirit vinegar had evaporated, the relic had become hard and solid, like a small, dark rock. The doctor removed it from his medical cabinet and placed it in a drawer in his desk. “Constantly opening my drawer, I went scarcely a day without seeing the heart, which I hadn’t even wrapped for fear of making it appear suspicious,” he recorded in a statement years later. However, he found himself unable to keep his strange possession completely secret. “I was imprudent enough to show the heart—along with the other specimens contained in my drawer—to Mr. Tillos, my special pupil and resident secretary.”
One day, to his alarm, when he opened the drawer of his desk, he suddenly realized the heart was missing. Pellatan searched everywhere, without success. To his great dismay, it became evident that the child’s heart had been stolen. Faced with the growing likelihood that the monarchy might be restored in France, Pellatan began to have some qualms about what he had done and felt he should have taken greater care of the heart. Given the growing number of pretenders, he considered it his duty, if the monarchy was restored, to return the relic to the royal family as a memorial to the dead prince.
The doctor was certain that one of his students had stolen the heart. He strongly suspected Jean-Henri Tillos but could prove nothing. The child’s heart had vanished.
RETURN OF THE LILIES
If the pretended dauphin should be the true one, his claims should not prevail; reasons of State prescribe silence, and it is time to cover with an eternal veil an intrigue in which unappeased factions find such dangerous sustenance.
—ARCHIVES, MINISTRY OF POLICE, 1817
A
fter years of revolution and war, France now turned to the monarchy it had swept aside over twenty years ago. On Holy Thursday, March 25, 1814, at Hartwell in England, Mass for the royal family was interrupted by news that a carriage, festooned with white cockades and white banners, was winding its way up the drive. Tears and laughter were mixed together in total delight as Provence and the Duchesse d’Angoulême greeted the deputies from Bordeaux who came to recognize their prospective king, and brought news of the swiftly changing political scene in France. Over the next two weeks, the allied troops entered Paris, Napoleon was forced to abdicate to the island of Elba near Corsica, and Provence was formally proclaimed the king of France as Louis XVIII.
Following twenty long years of dreary exile, the emotional journey back home to Paris for the royal family was nothing short of extraordinary. As they entered London and made their way down the length of Hyde Park, Park Lane and Piccadilly, the streets were crammed with exuberant crowds, enthusiastically cheering them on and crying out that all was now well.
Previously on the fringes of society, they suddenly found themselves fêted at the very heart of it in magnificent celebrations led by the prince regent in the “great galleries of Carlton House which shone with gilding and lights.” Eventually they set sail from Dover on the
Royal Sovereign
and as they approached Calais, Louis XVIII and the Duchesse d’Angoulême could see an immense crowd, “the shouts, exultation, the enthusiasm of the people on the pier at first overcame them and tears flowed down their cheeks.” Finally, they set foot on French soil and, in all the delirious excitement, the royal carriage was unhorsed and pulled triumphantly though the streets by hand, with people running alongside, crying with joy.
They entered Paris through the Porte Saint-Denis on May 3, 1814, in an open carriage drawn by eight white horses to deafening cheers of
“Vive le Roi.”
“The crowd was very great, and most of the windows were decorated with white flags,” recalled one eyewitness, the Comtesse de Boigne. People had much sympathy for Marie-Thérèse, who had become a symbol of all the suffering of France. “For everyone, the Duchesse d’Angoulême was
the
orphan of the Temple.” The last time she had been seen in public in Paris was in 1793 with her father, mother and brother as they were taken through jeering crowds to the prison tower, from which all her family were to leave for the scaffold or the grave. Whether such memories overwhelmed her, or whether it was just not in her nature, Marie-Thérèse disappointed many who came to see her that day, by her unsmiling, sad face and tense manner, partially concealed behind her open parasol. “I must own that the people in the open carriage did not correspond to my hopes,” continued the Comtesse de Boigne, a view that became widely held.
While Marie-Thérèse was indeed unresponsive and ill at ease as she reentered Paris, everywhere along the cheering route her eyes met reminders of a previous journey with her parents when violence and hatred could hardly keep their hands off her. On reaching Notre Dame, she lost her composure completely and collapsed on her prayer stool, “face in hands, shaking with sobs.” Later as they passed the
Conciergerie
—with its inevitable association with the last days of her mother—and approached the Chateau of the Tuileries, she almost fainted. It was hard for her not to feel that if there was any
justice at all, it should have been her charming young brother at her side, instead of ghostly memories of his unloved fate.
Yet many did want to make peace with the haunting recollection of the revolution and its aftermath. On May 14, a Requiem Mass was sung in Paris churches for Louis XVII, his mother, father and aunt. At Notre Dame, the Abbé Legris-Duval captured the royalist sentiment when he paid homage to the
Enfant-Roi:
“This mortal angel … we are weeping for you, sweet offspring of our kings, who knew only the bitterness and pains of life.” On June 8, the anniversary of his death, funeral ceremonies were held across France in memory of “the little king and martyr.” To complete the honoring of his brother’s family, Louis XVIII gave orders for the bodies of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to be exhumed from their common graves in the Madeleine cemetery and officially reburied in the royal crypt at Saint-Denis.
However, although bodies that were thought to be those of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were found, it proved much harder to locate Louis-Charles. There were no official records to show the exact position of his grave at the Sainte Marguerite cemetery. Louis XVIII was concerned that unless his body was found and the fate of Louis XVII resolved beyond all reasonable doubt, speculation that the boy king was still alive would inevitably continue. As he set about the enormous task of establishing a parliamentary monarchy after years of military despotism, creating order in a country that was impoverished by revolution and war, and even restoring Versailles, Louis
“Le Désiré”
still had enemies who could potentially exploit the uncertainty about his nephew to undermine his position. Consequently, in January 1815, Louis XVIII instructed his minister of the interior the Comte de Vaublanc, to conduct a full inquiry into the fate of Louis XVII.
From the outset, the inquiry was severely hampered by the secrecy surrounding the detention of the boy in the Temple prison and the lack of documentary evidence. To add to the difficulties, years had elapsed since Louis-Charles had been incarcerated, and many of those who had been present in the Tower between 1793 and 1795 had since died. Louis-Charles’s death certificate—signed in 1795 by those on duty at the Temple—was
available, but to those who believed that the real prince had been spirited out of the Temple this proved nothing.
Some witnesses, however, did come forward. The staff at Sainte-Marguerite cemetery confirmed that the gravedigger himself was a man called Pierre Bertrancourt. Although Bertrancourt had died in 1809, his widow, Gabrielle Bertrancourt, was still alive. In January 1815, she was granted an audience with Louis XVIII to reveal anything she might know about his nephew’s burial.
In her intriguing testimony, Gabrielle Bertrancourt explained that before her husband had died, he had confessed to her that he had secretly moved the prince’s coffin. Initially, Louis-Charles had been buried in a common pit in the Sainte-Marguerite cemetery. However, under cover of darkness, on the third night when there were no sentries, Betrancourt had crept back, reopened the common pit and found the child’s coffin, which he had distinguished with chalk. To be completely sure, he had even prized opened one of the planks and glimpsed the boy’s head, now with growing signs of putrefaction, the scalp shaven and showing gruesome signs of the surgeon’s work. Carefully, he removed the coffin and carried it some distance before reburying it partly under the wall of the church on the left side of the chapel. According to his wife, he hoped to benefit if ever a search was made for the royal child. “One day you will receive something handsome and be happy,” he told her a few hours before he died. “When they find the dauphin again, they will reward you for me!” Bertrancourt had also confided his remarkable secret to his close friend, Découflet.
Meanwhile, not waiting for the results of the official inquiry, the Duchesse d’Angoulême took matters into her own hands. She had, by now, heard of the story of the shoemaker’s widow, Marie-Jeanne Simon. At the Hôpital des Incurables, the Lady Superior of the Community had tried to verify Madame Simon’s account. She had interviewed four of the nuns who saw Madame Simon on an almost daily basis: Sister Lucie Jonnis, Sister Euphrasie Benoit, Sister Catherine Mauliot, and Sister Marianne Scribes. The Lady Superior noted that in all details their versions were identical; evidently Madame Simon was consistent from day to day. Furthermore, the
nuns confirmed that Madame Simon was far from infirm: “She was sincere, possessed good sense and a good heart. She was clean and had never been seen drunk.” Perhaps most convincing of all, “nobody could have influenced her … since she never saw anybody; yet she had never erred or varied in her statements.” Madame Simon’s testimony troubled the duchesse d’Angoulême. The old woman’s story matched her own suspicions formed at the time, while captive in the room above her brother, and a small seed of doubt now began to grow. She was only too aware that the Simons had had continuous contact with Louis-Charles, until their departure from the Temple in January 1794. Around this time, she herself had heard a great deal of noise and had conjectured that her brother must be leaving the Temple. She had even seen packages and linen baskets being removed—could one of these be the very same linen basket in which Madame Simon claimed her brother had escaped? She knew only too well that after the departure of the Simons, she no longer heard her brother singing or crying on the floor below.
On Tuesday, December 13, 1814, as part of her tour of hospitals and charities, the Duchesse d’Angoulême made a point of visiting the Hôpital des Incurables. Records show that she was accompanied by two others, the Comte de Pastoret and Vicomte de Montmorency. If she was hoping to see Madame Simon, she was to be disappointed. To avoid causing her any distress, orders were given at the hospital that Madame Simon was to be locked up for the duration of the duchess’s visit. Madame Simon was furious. “I had a great secret to tell her,” she cried. It seems likely that the Duchesse d’Angoulême was also disappointed. According to an anecdote reported by the historian Georges Lenôtre, she was determined to meet Madame Simon and took the compromising step of returning once more to the hospital.
She was clearly anxious not to start rumors flying or to appear to give weight to Madame Simon’s testimony merely by her presence, for she dressed incognito. She was wearing simple clothes and was accompanied by a lady of honor and a friend, the Comte de Montmaur, as they walked through the hospital searching for “Mère Simon.” The old woman, dressed in the regulation clothes of a skirt of grey duffel with a black tulle cap,
was only too keen to relate her story of his escape in full. She went on to tantalize the princess, adding that “her Charles” had returned to see her in 1802. When pressed about how she could recognize him after so many years, she added, “Well, I recognize you quite well, not withstanding your disguise, Madame Marie-Thérèse.” The Duchesse d’Angoulême was so distressed—both at the story, and, perhaps, at being recognized—that she hurried away immediately.
At around the same time, Jean-Baptiste Harmand, who twenty years previously had been asked by the Committee for General Security to investigate the dauphin’s health, wrote a report of his findings for Louis XVIII’s inquiry into his nephew. Harmand had found in February 1795 that the sickly child in the Tower would not speak—no matter what tantalizing inducement was offered. At the time, he had assumed that the boy’s silence might be the result of the trauma that he had already endured in prison. However, when his account became more widely known in 1815, others put a different interpretation on the boy’s silence. For many, this appeared to confirm Madame Simon’s version that the real Louis-Charles had already been smuggled out of the Temple. The impostor was surely a mute boy deliberately chosen so that he could not reveal his true identity. The reason why the boy did not answer any of Harmand’s questions was quite simple: the substitute was deaf and dumb.
There was little chance to pursue these lines of inquiry before the investigation was brought to an abrupt halt. In February 1815, Napoleon set sail from his exile in Elba with a few hundred men and prepared to march on Paris. The Duchesse d’Angoulême was in Bordeaux when she heard the news and immediately set about organizing resistance, striving to “electrify the soldiers” as she went through the barracks; to no avail. Louis XVIII was forced into an ignominious flight from Paris as Napoleon swept to power yet again on a tide of popular enthusiasm. On March 20, 1815, the newspaper
Moniteur
made a short and discreet announcement: “The king and the princes left in the night. H. M. the emperor arrived this evening at eight o’clock in his palace of the Tuileries, at the head of the same troops which had been sent to block his route this morning.”
As the news reached foreign governments, the allies would not tolerate the reinstatement of the emperor and united against France. British, Dutch, Belgian and Hanoverian troops under the Duke of Wellington met the French near the village of Waterloo in Belgium. Joined during the battle by the Prussians, Wellington staged an outstanding victory on June 18, 1815. It was Napoleon’s final defeat, ending in the rout of his Grand Army and his second abdication. Taking no chances, this time the allies sent the unsuspecting former emperor to the remote, rocky island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. On July 8, as Louis XVIII reentered Paris, he was greeted even more enthusiastically than the previous year.
Once again he had to restore order and reestablish his government, and consequently, nearly a year elapsed before he was able to resume his inquiries into the fate of his nephew. It was February 21, 1816, when his minister of the interior, the Comte de Vaublanc, reopened his files on Louis XVII and two police commissaries, Messieurs Petit and Simon, were appointed to find his body. They already knew of two burial sites: in a common grave at Sainte-Marguerite according to the official record or, if the gravedigger’s wife was to be believed, near the chapel wall. To try to clarify the matter, Petit and Simon tracked down the very man who had been in charge of the dauphin’s funeral arrangements: Étienne Voisin.