The Dauphin, Louis-Charles, was just seven years old when first thrown into prison. By all reports he was a happy, healthy boy with chubby cheeks, who enjoyed the family’s forced seclusion at the Tuileries because, as he once confided to a courtier, it meant he got to see so much more of his parents than he had at Versailles. His treatment in prison was actually worse than described here.
Interestingly, the physician who first treated the Dauphin, Dr. Joseph Desault, is reported to have said that the child in the Temple did not resemble the prince he had seen before the Revolution. Desault died suddenly on 1 June 1795 after hinting at dark deeds afoot. His wife insisted he had been poisoned.
After Desault’s death, Dr. Philippe-Jean Pelletan was brought in to treat the boy. When the child died, Pelletan was brought back to the Temple to perform an autopsy. At the end of the postmortem, Pelletan did indeed wrap the boy’s heart in his handkerchief and smuggle it out of the prison in his pocket. He preserved the heart in alcohol and kept it in a rock crystal vase in his study.
The history of the heart after that is long and convoluted. At one point, one of Pelletan’s students stole the heart. The student soon died of tuberculosis, so Pelletan was able to retrieve the heart from the student’s widow. After the Restoration, Pelletan tried to give the heart to Marie-Thérèse, and then to the newly crowned King Louis XVIII and to several other royals, but no one would accept it.
Finally, nearing death, Pelletan gave the heart to the Archbishop of Paris. The heart was in the Archbishop’s Palace when it was looted by rioters during the Revolution of 1830. The crystal vase was smashed, and the heart thrown on the floor.
However, some days after the riots, Philippe-Jean Pelletan’s son, Gabriel, who was also a physician (the real Pelletan had two sons and a daughter; Damion and Alexi, however, are my own inventions), went to the palace with one of the rioters, a man named Lescroat, and is said to have found the heart amongst the debris. The heart was put into a new vessel and ultimately given to the Bourbon claimant to the French throne.
After that, the heart traipsed around Europe, from Spain to Austria and Italy, threatened repeatedly by war and destruction, before finally being entombed in 1975 at the Basilica of Saint-Denis outside of Paris, the traditional burial place of French kings. But controversy over its authenticity continued. Recent DNA tests on the heart have shown that, despite its shaky provenance, the heart did indeed come from a descendent of Marie Antoinette’s Hapsburg maternal line.
However, that evidence is not as conclusive as it might seem, for (amongst other possibilities) Louis-Charles had an older brother, Louis-Joseph, who died in 1789. His heart was buried at Val-de-Grace and lost during the Revolution. The Archbishop of Paris, to whom Philippe-Jean Pelletan gave the heart in his possession, also had in his collection another heart, said to have belonged to Louis-Joseph. So it is possible that during the riots of 1830, the hearts were confused. At any rate, the Dauphin’s heart now has its own book: The Lost King of France: How DNA Solved the Mystery of the Murdered Son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, by Deborah Cadbury.
Marie-Thérèse’s ordeal in the Temple is much as described here. Whether she was raped in prison is not known, although most people at the time suspected or even simply accepted that she was. There are also letters in existence that hint at a resultant pregnancy. The most recent biography of the Princess Royale, as she was called, is Susan Nagel’s Marie-Thérèse: The Fate of Marie Antoinette’s Daughter. Nagel is a professor of humanities rather than a historian, and her book is frustratingly thin on footnotes. She is also extraordinarily sympathetic to her subject, which tends to color her account. But the story of this unhappy princess’s life makes fascinating reading.
Napoléon did indeed refer to Marie-Thérèse as “the only man in her family,” but the comment was made in 1815.
For years after her release from the Temple, Marie-Thérèse was besieged by pretenders claiming to be the Lost Dauphin. Very real plots had indeed been hatched to smuggle the boy out of prison and replace him with a dying deaf-mute, which naturally gave credence to the persistent belief that one of those plots had actually succeeded.
A gravedigger at the churchyard of Ste. Marguerite in the rue Saint-Bernard in Paris, to which the Dauphin’s body was sent, buried the prince’s body to one side and marked the grave. Later in the nineteenth century, that grave was twice dug up (in 1846 and 1894) and its contents autopsied. Both autopsies came to the conclusion that the remains were those of a boy who had indeed died of tuberculosis but who was older than ten at the time of his death. Those remains have never been DNA tested.