Death in the Temple

I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy thedolphin, that would a been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.

"Po' little chap."

"But some says he got out and got away, and come to America."

"Dat's good! But he’ll be pooty lonesome — dey ain' no kings here, is dey, Huck?"

"No."

"Den he cain't git no situation. What he gwyne to do?"

"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them learns people how to talk French."

- Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 14

IN A CEMETERY at Delft, south-east of The Hague, one tombstone dated 1845 stands out by the sheer incongruity of its wording amid the honest-mijnheer memorials surrounding it. Defiantly this tombstone proclaims the resting-place of "Louis XVII, Charles-Louis Duc de Normandie, King of France and Navarre". For here lies the man more usually styled Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, German clockmaker, counterfeiter and arsonist, who persuaded thousands of his contemporaries — as well as, most crucially, himself — that he was really the rightful Dauphin Louis, spirited away from Paris's Temple prison in 1795, two years after Louis XVI's martyrdom.

Not that Naundorff stood alone in alleging Bourbon blood. During the first decades of the nineteenth century so many persons bragged of being the real Louis XVII (or, in some cases, allowed this brag to be made on their behalf) that a 1999 survey of the topic sported in complete seriousness the title Louis XVII et les 101 Prétendants. The ornithologist John James Audubon and an Iroquois chieftain named Onwarenhiiaki are merely among the odder names in the catalogue of those purporting to be, as Huck Finn said, "the dolphin". (Actually the joke was on Mark Twain, did he but know it: for centuries the words dauphin and dolphin remained interchangeable in English.)

Significant and meritorious contributors to Louis-XVII-related literature have included J.B. ("Beachcomber") Morton in 1937 and, in 1910, none other than Dracula's creator Bram Stoker. In a way it is to human nature’s credit that belief in Louis XVII’s survival to adulthood should have been so tenacious. For if young Louis had indeed outlived his tormentors, and if the Tsarevna Anastasia had indeed outlived hers, then perhaps even the French and Russian Revolutions might seem less horrible to contemplate, and less insanely wasteful of innocent lives, than they would otherwise be.

Partly because it took Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette so long to have any offspring at all, and partly because an older son of theirs had died when only seven, the Dauphin Louis's earliest years — he was born in 1785 — are known to us in a detail rare for any eighteenth-century children, however exalted their upbringing. He did not strike even his kin as intrinsically brilliant. (Widely impersonated royals hardly ever do. Far from rising above the monarchical average, they tend to fall significantly below it. Richard III’s nephew, the Earl of Warwick, possessed such importance purely through his high birth as to have terrified Henry VII in 1487 by false reports that he had escaped his captors to lead an army; but he had so little inherent brain-power that he "could not tell a goose from a capon". Portugal's sixteenth-century king Sebastian, ascribed messianic splendours after his death, was a total disaster in life. Tsar Peter III entirely lacked the courage and the gifts of leadership exhibited by those pseudo-Peter-IIIs who abounded in Catherine the Great's reign. And poor Anastasia proved easily the least intelligent of Nicholas II’s children.) Less acute than his sister Marie-Thérèse, the future "Madame Royale" — seven years his senior — little Louis periodically disheartened his mother through his taste for childish lying. He nevertheless endeared himself to those around him, such as the long-suffering valet Hanet Cléry, by his fundamental kindness of heart.

Which kindness goaded his revolutionary torturers to heights, or depths, of debauching fury. Louis's Temple jailer Antoine Simon re-educated the lad by forcing him to sing revolutionary songs, plying him with alcohol, decking him out in sans-culotte attire, and, when these methods failed, kicking him like a dog. The enragé editor and demagogue Jacques-René Hébert, as convinced as any twenty-first-century Australian tabloid ink-slinger that sexual abuse occurs exclusively among Catholics, publicly accused the boy of committing incest with his mother. (Even Robespierre, in his pedantic fashion, drew the line at this gobbet of calumny: "It's not enough that [Marie-]Antoinette should be a Messalina. That idiot [Hébert] must make her an Agrippina.") Pleasingly, within six months of Marie-Antoinette's judicial murder, the Committee of Public Safety had finished off Hébert too, upon charges of (believe it or not) royalist plotting. He and eighteen of his hoodlums died on the guillotine in March 1794, behaving at the last like — in the comment of one eyewitness — "cowards without balls". Simon, for his part, met the same end on the same day as Robespierre. But no lasting improvement marked the conditions that Louis had to endure; one doctor visiting his cell in May 1795 and overcome with pity (despite his republican fervour) at the sight which confronted him, described the royal child as "dying, a victim of the most abject misery". Covered with scabies, hypersensitive to the smallest noise — as he had been, to his mother’s distress, well before the Revolution — and riddled with diarrhoea as well as tubercular, Louis almost certainly perished the following June.

The government's reluctance to announce Louis's demise led, during the late 1790s, to widespread rumours that Louis remained alive. Early beneficiaries of this belief included a tailor's son, Jean-Marie Hervagault, who insisted that he had been removed from the Temple in a linen basket. (Other pretenders boasted of having been thus removed by means of concealment inside a rocking-horse.) Notwithstanding the support which various minor aristocrats and clergy gave Hervagault, and the genuine alarm which his allegations inspired in even the usually unflappable police chief Joseph Fouché, his career came unstuck in 1802 when the authorities sentenced him to four years' incarceration for swindling. Unrepentant to the last, Hervagault died in 1812. In the same jail (the dreaded Bicêtre) resided a fellow would-be Louis XVII: one Mathuran Bruneau, a peasant from the Loire Valley with a record of convictions for impersonating nobles.

More plausible and quick-witted was a smooth-tongued operator who employed the alias "Ethelbert Louis Hector Alfred, Baron de Richemont". This determined fantasist published in 1832 a lurid account of his escape from Simon's clutches; his subsequent service in Egypt under Napoleon (service which, if his boast of being Louis were genuine, would have occurred at the ripe old age of thirteen); and the iniquities of "Citizen King" Louis-Philippe, on whose seizure of France's throne in 1830 the "baron" lavished contumely. Within a year of being imprisoned for fraud, "Richemont" triumphantly escaped. He retained a limited but loyal following till his death in 1853.

All three of these pretenders to Louis XVII's identity — the others included a gentleman who on the slightest pretext would doff his trousers, to reveal genitalia allegedly bearing suitably regal moles — were thrown into the shade by the almost Napoleonic campaigning of Naundorff. Known to the Prussian police for his habits of incendiarism and forging coins, Naundorff should logically have given the Bourbons less trouble than any of his predecessors, especially because as late as 1833 he spoke almost no French. In fact he turned into a seemingly endless nightmare for Madame Royale, and became the one claimant skilful enough to have frightened her into concluding that he just might have been the genuine article.

Previous impersonators had needed to content themselves with, at best, a handful of adherents from the upper classes; Naundorff won over luminary after luminary of the erstwhile Bourbon court. The knowledge he displayed of that court's personnel convinced Louis XVI’s former chamberlain, two of his former private secretaries, and a former lady-in-waiting that Naundorff spoke the truth. Only Madame Royale held out against the newcomer, refusing to meet him or to answer his voluminous letters to "my dear sister", let alone to countenance in public his claim. Deported to England as much for his innate pestiferousness as for any outright criminality, Naundorff took increasingly to a crank religion of his own devising (divine revelation had somehow conveyed to him the news that paradise was located in the centre of the sun), and to the manufacture of explosives, his masterpiece in this field being called "the Bourbon bomb". Alas, he ran up so many debts that shades of the prison house closed on him yet again, this time thanks to his creditors. Freed in January 1845, he died the following August, after the Dutch War Ministry had purchased his "Bourbon bomb” method and expressed interest in commissioning further scientific research from him.

By the 1880s all except a hard core of eccentrics had concluded that Naundorff could not have been Louis, but Naundorff's own descendants continued to assert that they and they alone constituted the true House of Bourbon. Indeed, they uphold this line still. (They issue regular bulletins on the latest news of their crusade; and they now maintain a website, simultaneously apocalyptic and rather forlorn — www.louis-xvii.com — devoted to their cause.) The rest of the world has accepted the verdict of two geneticists, Belgium's Jean-Jacques Cassiman and Germany's Bernd Brinkmann, who in late 1999 and early 2000 tested the mitochondrial DNA of Louis's mummified heart. They compared the results with those furnished by surviving locks of hair from Marie- Antoinette and two of her sisters. From these they concluded that Louis really had died in the Temple after all. (On May 1, 2000, Time quoted French historian Philippe Delorme, who had urged the DNA tests, as putting upon the outcome a saccharine gloss befitting a compatriot of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. "Clearly," Delorme announced, "the finding spells the end of this example of the eternal myth—that of the little prince and the hidden king. Perhaps we should undertake, as I do, the spiritual and philosophic venture of looking for the little prince that sleeps within all of us.") Naundorffians have refused to accept the Cassiman–Brinkmann–Delorme verdict, sometimes emphasising the element of doubt which even DNA testing's advocates concede, sometimes basing their objections on the idea that the heart in question belonged not to Louis, but to a relative: perhaps that unfortunate brother who died in childhood.

Yet did it really need the DNA era to make Naundorffians' contentions — and the similar contentions of other pretenders — implausible? Surely a prima facie objection to each self-proclaimed Louis XVII is the one that Sophie Masson emphasised some years ago: had Louis left the Temple alive and well, late-1790s Chouans would have avidly seized his person and used him as the best possible visual aid for recruiting royalist armies. That they never did so (and, it would appear, never contemplated doing so) forms, of itself, powerful negative evidence that Louis did indeed die in 1795.

All this is so finely recounted by Deborah Cadbury that one has good reason for leaving until the end of a review any discussion of her achievement: one scarcely notices it, so unobtrusive is her dexterity. It is hard to think of a higher compliment that anyone could pay her. In her prose she has arrived at the windowpane aesthetic which Orwell lauded in others' work and attained in his own. Not since Antonia Fraser's debut can British coverage of European politics show a parallel to Miss Cadbury's unobtrusive expertise. This is not only the best book in the English language on its theme (though for longer and more elaborate studies, readers with French should continue to seek out Maurice Garçon's Louis XVII ou La Fausse Enigme [1952] and Paul-Eric Blanrue's Mystère du Temple [1996]); it is the best book in the English language which can be imagined on its theme.

R. J. Stove is the author of The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (2002), issued in America this year by Encounter Books of San Francisco. He is currently working on a history of royal impersonators.

© Quadrant, 2003