Posted on 06/04/2004 5:04:58 AM PDT by billorites
PARIS, France (AP) -- The heart of the 10-year-old heir to France's throne was cut from his body when he died in prison, pickled, stolen, returned, and DNA-tested two centuries later.
Next week, Louis XVII's heart will be placed in France's royal crypt north of Paris now that genetic testing has persuaded many historians that the tiny petrified heart is almost certainly the real thing.
In ceremonies on Monday and Tuesday, European royalty will honor the little boy who became a pawn of the French Revolution, dying alone in a filthy prison.
After a Mass on Tuesday, his heart will be laid to rest at the Saint-Denis Basilica near the graves of his parents, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
The ceremonies recognizing the royal heart seek to close 209 years of rumor, legend and historical uncertainty surrounding the child's death -- though some skeptics still insist the mystery has not been solved.
Many historians had insisted that the true heir escaped and the sickly boy who died was a substitute.
"I would have liked to believe the story that the child survived," Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon de Parme, one of Louis XVII's closest living relatives, told a news conference.
"Today, science has proved the contrary."
Louis XVII's short life was the stuff of nightmares. He lost his parents to the guillotine.
He was locked in Paris' Temple prison for three years -- for part of that time, in solitary confinement in a darkened cell, without anyone to wash him or clean up after him, said historian Philippe Delorme.
The boy finally died of tuberculosis in 1795, his body reportedly ravaged by tumors and scabies.
The child's corpse was dumped in a common grave -- but first, a doctor secretly carved out his heart in keeping with a tradition of preserving royal hearts separate from their bodies.
The doctor smuggled it away in a handkerchief and kept it as a curiosity, Delorme said in a telephone interview.
Instantly, rumors spread that the true heir had been spirited away from the prison, with a commoner left in his place.
"It's a universal myth, the myth of the lost or hidden king," said Delorme, whose research about Louis XVII led him to organize the DNA tests in 2000.
"In all civilizations, in all eras, there is this myth of people who have been hidden from us."
Among the most persistent comes from Russia, where rumor has circulated for years that Nicholas II's youngest daughter Anastasia escaped the Bolshevik firing squad that killed the czar and his family.
Two sets of remains from the family -- Nicholas, his wife and their five children -- have never been found.
Several people have since come forward claiming to be Anastasia, and many more have said they were Louis XVII.
After the Restoration of France's monarchy in 1814, about 100 people came forward claiming to be him, in places as far-flung as the Seychelles, Delorme said.
Even a Wisconsin missionary who was part Native American claimed to have been the "lost dauphin," as Louis XVII was often called.
In France, the doctor who had performed the boy's autopsy kept the heart in a crystal vase filled with alcohol on a shelf -- a tantalizing souvenir for one of his students, who stole it.
< SNIP >
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Imagine the horror of keeping an innocent child in solitary confinement for three years, in filth and sickness, and leaving him to die of a dreadful disease alone. There are times when death is a blessing, I suppose, and God took this baby to His mercy. But with the exception of our own, revolutionaries tend to be cruel. May the monsters who did this to Louis XVII suffer for their sins.
Crocodile tears. He's secretly happy that potential bloodlines which might prevent his own rise to the throne have now been disproved.
Or maybe I've been reading too many trash summer novels.
The revolutionaries were the predecessors of the thieving, murdering bolsheviks in Russia.
PING
they have - theyre french - I can think of no worse punishment than to be a gravy sucking, cheese breathed, beret sporting, stripe shirted, surrender monkied ,art snob
Amen. It is perhaps even more monstrous that, having separated the little boy from his mother, the revolutionaries poisoned his mind with lies, "persuading" him to testify against his mother Marie Antoinette at her trial in order to charge her with incest.
Prince Charles-Emanuel is nowhere near being the claimant to the French throne, regardless of whether any descendants of Louis XVI survived. French monarchists are divided as to whether the Count of Paris (Henri VII) or the Duke of Anjou (Louis XX) should be regarded as the rightful king.
Exactly. It could also be argued that the French Revolution paved the way for Nazism, by establishing the idea that the State was justified in doing whatever it took to remake society establish a New Order, regardless of how many people died in the process. And the French still celebrate the anniversary of this despicable, disastrous event as their national holiday...
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