The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA (22 page)

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Authors: Deborah Cadbury

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Despite the official interest, weeks passed after Barras’s visit and the prison staff still refused to carry out the foul and disgusting task of cleaning Louis-Charles’s room. Laurent was determined to break the impasse and finally, on August 31, he obtained the necessary permissions. “I have been authorized by the representatives of the people to let two
trusted
men enter junior Capet’s room,” he recorded, “to clean it and to attempt to get rid of the vermin that are encouraged by the dirtiness” this italics].
The next day, September 1, 1794, eight months after the commencement of his solitary confinement, Louis-Charles’s cell, at last, was cleaned out. He had his first feeble glimpse of daylight as a small section of the shutter was removed. The grille was taken down separating his room and the antechamber. Laurent himself removed the boy’s “sordid garments, swarming all over with vermin” and bathed his sores with lukewarm water. “His toenails and fingernails were as long as the claws of a wild animal … and as hard as horn.” These were now clipped. His hair was cut and washed and a doctor came to dress his wounds. “Laurent took down a little bed that was in my room,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “because the one he had was full of bugs; and he removed the vermin with which he was covered.”
Apart from being clean, he also had an identity. He was no longer dehumanized as simply “Capet” or “wolf cub.” Laurent referred to him politely as “Monsieur Charles” and encouraged other keepers to do the same. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was difficult for the child to adapt to this new treatment. He was suspicious and asked Laurent; “Why are you taking care of me? I thought you didn’t like me.” And even under this improved regime he was still isolated. Laurent was only permitted to enter his room at mealtimes, and then under the close scrutiny of a guard. Marie-Thérèse wrote with concern that for most of the time, “they still left him alone in his room.” He became frightened to speak and withdrew from the adult world. The child who was once outgoing and sunny-natured “had become almost entirely silent.” His eyes were languid, his expression fixed and disinterested. “Solitude was completing the work that ill-usage had begun.”
The day before Louis-Charles’s room was cleaned, there was a massive explosion at a powder factory in Grenelle. Royalist sympathizers were
thought to be behind the disaster and, fearing an upsurge in proroyalist activity, the Committee of General Security ordered a fresh inspection of security at the Tower. In September, the authorities panicked about a suspected royalist plot to seize the dauphin. There were rumors of English involvement in a complex plot masterminded by the exiled French princes to rescue Louis XVII. So intense was the speculation that by October, the Committee of General Security again sent two deputies to the Tower to check on Louis-Charles and his sister. Security was tightened still more. Unbelievably, the entire guard for the sick boy and his teenage sister now exceeded five hundred men.
Laurent, concerned for the boy’s health, had, without success, repeatedly asked for an assistant to help him. In October, following reports from spies in London that an attempt to free the dauphin from prison was imminent, it was finally agreed that Laurent should have support. The Committee of General Safety appointed Jean-Baptiste Gomin, the son of an upholsterer. At first, Gomin was so alarmed by the plight of the boy that he resisted taking on such a position. Laurent persuaded him to stay on. “Gomin took extreme care of my brother,” writes Marie-Thérèse. “For a long time my brother had been without lights; he was dying of fear. Gomin obtained permission that he might have them … . He spoke to the committee and asked that he might be taken down to the garden for exercise.” Marie-Thérèse understood, presumably from Gomin himself, that “Louis-Charles soon perceived Gomin’s attentions, was touched by them and attached himself to him. The unhappy child had long been accustomed to none but the worst treatment—for I believe that no research can show such barbarity to any other child.”
No one had told Louis-Charles about the fate of his mother. With the greater freedom he now had to move around the prison, he was able to walk past the locked door of his mother’s former room, where he had been separated from her over a year previously. According to one account, once when he went for a walk to the top of the Tower he saw some yellow flowers clinging to some crumbling stonework in the parapet wall. He picked them,
and on his way down he left them outside her room on the third floor, in the wild hope that she was still near him. To his young mind, it might only be a matter of time before they were reunited.
Marie-Thérèse still had no contact with her brother. She constantly begged to be able to see him but her requests were always refused. “She was continually questioning the keepers and commissaries, without being able to obtain anything from them but vague words, which though intended to reassure her, only alarmed her the more. Her entreaties to see her brother and to be allowed to nurse him were always refused.” Both children were now permitted to walk outside under guard—but never together. It had been expressly forbidden to allow any meeting to take place between the two children. Deputies of the Committee for General Security had insisted on this “prohibition in the most formal manner.” Consequently, although Laurent was at pains to reassure her that her brother’s nightmare was over and that he was now in good care, he would go no further to reunite them.
The official reason for their separation was to prevent any collusion between them that might help an escape plan or undermine the security of their imprisonment in any way. However, historians have suggested a more sinister reason for keeping them apart. The real motive for their enforced separation could be that the sickly and uncommunicative child held captive in the Tower was not Louis-Charles at all, but a substitute child. If Marie-Thérèse were to find out that her brother had escaped and tell the guards, rumors could spread, precipitating a political crisis. Consequently, the kindly Laurent was forced to keep the children apart. It was entirely possible that the young boy, guarded like precious stones in the keep, was no longer the royal prince.
 
By late 1794, the mood in France was slowly beginning to change. In this slightly more open atmosphere, news of Louis-Charles’s shameful treatment in prison began to leak out. On November 26, 1794, journalists for the newspaper
Le Courrier Universel
dared to publish the following piece, which openly acknowledged some of the horror:
The son of Louis XVI should also benefit from the Revolution of the 9th Thermidor. It is well known that this child was abandoned to the care of Simon, the shoemaker, a favored acolyte of Robespierre whose punishment he shared. The Committee for General Security, being of the opinion that a human being ought not to be degraded below the level of humanity, just because he happens to be born the son of a king, has appointed three commissaries, men of sound judgment and intelligence, to replace the late Simon. Two are responsible for the education of the orphan. The third should ensure that he is not deprived of the necessities of life, as he was in the past.
The journalists were promptly arrested and brought before the Convention. Their article caused such a stir that Mathieu, a member of the Committee for General Security, was forced to give a formal denial to the “calumnious and royalist” article in the
Courrier.
In his statement before the Convention, to reassure the many citizens who wanted no pity shown to the offspring of the hated tyrants, he explained that the boy was treated as a common prisoner and “that any idea of bettering the condition of Capet’s children or giving them tutors was completely foreign to their intentions.”
Although Robespierre was dead, France was not yet ready to make peace with its royal family. Many still wanted to purge France of every last vestige of royalty. Toward the end of 1794, there were repeated calls for the son of Capet to be banished from France forever. Others argued that to deport him would simply deliver him up to France’s enemies who would rally royalists and threaten the republic. Many republicans continued to be haunted by the fear that while Louis XVI’s son was still alive, the return of the monarchy remained a possibility. Even though his wretched conditions in the Temple were becoming more widely known, few dared to intervene, fearful of being branded royalist traitors. Members of the Convention were increasingly making a cynical calculation. If Louis-Charles were to die in prison, this would solve the problem of what to do with the boy at a stroke.
European diplomacy to secure the release of Louis-Charles had come to a
standstill; in truth, he had been all but abandoned. By early 1795, Spanish ministers tried to bring an end to their two-year war with France. They offered to recognize the French Republic on the condition that Louis-Charles was handed over. Sensing that Spain had no stomach for a fight over the issue, the French refused.
In February 1795, a report was secretly passed to the Committee for General Security stating that there was “imminent danger that the prisoner’s life was slipping away.” The committee heard that he had swellings in all his joints and “that it was impossible to extract a word from him.” Yet the son of Capet’s final agonies evoked little sympathy from those around him and no doctor was summoned. Years later, Gomin reported a comment of one guard who saw the ill child, covered in tumors and barely able to move: “Well, there are plenty of children worth as much as he who are far more ill. And many die who are far more useful!”
For many at the Convention, it would be only too convenient if the boy were to die. On February 26 the Committee for General Security ordered a team of three to make a full report on his health. Jean-Baptiste Harmand later wrote an account of this visit in which, to his astonishment, he found a completely mute child.
The prince was sitting beside a little square table on which were scattered a good many playing cards … . He was busy with these cards when we went in and did not cease his occupation … . I approached the prince. Our movements did not appear to make any impression on him. I told him that the government was too late appraised of the bad state of his health and of his refusal to take air and exercise, or to answer any questions … and had sent us to him to find out the facts.
Harmand then claims that he tried to encourage the prince to talk by offering inducements. He told the prince that they were authorized to find ways of extending his walks, or procuring “any objects of amusement or diversion” that he might wish.
While he was speaking, however “the boy looked fearfully at me, without
changing his position and listened, apparently with the greatest attention, but not one word did he reply.”
Harmand says he then offered even more attractive delights: “a horse, a dog, some birds, playthings of any kind, one or more companions your own age … . In vain did I repeat everything that I could think of as agreeable to his age. I received not one word in reply, not even a sign or a gesture, although his head was turned toward me, and he was looking at me with a strange fixedness in his eyes which expressed the utmost indifference.”
Harmand persevered for more than an hour, but could not elicit a single word. “I was in despair and so were my colleagues; indeed, that look had such an expression of resignation and indifference that it seemed to say, “What is it to me? Complete the sacrifice. Finish off your victim!”
Harmand wrote his report during the Restoration, at a time when there was considerable interest in the fate of Louis XVII by a public now appalled at the cruelty he suffered. Consequently Harmand cast himself in a favorable light, when according to Gomin, the offers of toys, pets, or other inducements were never made. Nonetheless, there seems no doubt that the child would not speak, although the delegation tried hard even to extract a simple yes or no. Officials could not be entirely sure that the sick, dumb child was really the royal prince. Was it possible that royalists had somehow substituted a sickly child in his place? And if this was the prince, what degradations had brought him to this tragic point? Harmand writes that they debated the moral and physical condition of the prince at length in the antechamber once they had left him: “I asked them in the anteroom whether this silence did really date from the day on which the child had been forced, by the most barbarous violence, to sign that odious and absurd deposition.”
Almost three more months were to elapse before the apparently mute child was permitted to see a doctor. On May 6, 1795, the authorities finally agreed to appoint a Dr. Pierre-Joseph Desault, head surgeon at the Hôpital d’Humanité and a leading practitioner in Paris. Desault was authorized to examine the boy only in the presence of the guards. He soon arrived and
once he had signed his name in the register, he was taken to see the young prince.
Desault was shocked and did not hesitate to state his opinion. He reported that he “encountered a child who is mad, dying, a victim of the most abject misery and of the greatest abandonment, a being who has been brutalized by the cruellest of treatments and who it is impossible for me to bring back to life … . What a crime!” Desault gave instructions for lotions to be applied to the tumors and rubbed into the child’s knees and wrists to ease the pain. He pointed out that there had been far too great a delay in sending him to the child and he proposed “his immediate removal to the country in the hope that the healthy air might succeed in prolonging his life.” Needless to say, the committees were not impressed and no action was taken.
Desault, however, returned at nine every morning to see the patient and see that his instructions were being carried out. He made sure that the child was at least carried out onto the roof of the Tower for some fresh air. Desault gently asked Louis-Charles if “he wished to breathe, to see a garden, birds or flowers, to possess a few toys.” It was useless. “The child looked at me sadly and bent his head without answering.” According to Beauchesne, gradually the child responded to the keen interest of the physician, and “ended by placing his entire confidence in him.” Although he rarely spoke, “the kind treatment restored his speech … . He found the words to express his thanks.”

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