The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA (31 page)

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Authors: Deborah Cadbury

BOOK: The Lost King of France: A True Story of Revolution, Revenge, and DNA
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While the Baron de Richemont was eking out his existence as a shadowy character, hidden from view of the authorities, his challenger, who had so boldly interrupted the court proceedings against him in 1834, went on to become a legend in his own right. This new dauphin came from Prussia, where he had worked as a clockmaker under an assumed name, “Karl Wilhelm Naundorff.” He told his story to a local Leipzig paper in the summer of 1831, disclosing his identity as the real Louis XVII for the first time. As the news spread, supporters encouraged him to abandon his life in Prussia and make his way to Paris to seek recognition. When he arrived in May
1833, he was penniless and spoke barely a word of French. Yet unlike any previous pretenders, his credentials were to prove so compelling that he effectively founded a rival royal dynasty and his case was to prove more disturbing to Marie-Thérèse than any of the others.
Naundorff began by trying to make contact with former key members of Louis XVI’s household staff. On August 17, 1833, less than three months after arriving in Paris, he obtained an introduction to a former lady’s maid to the dauphin, Veuve de Rambaud. As he stepped into the room to greet her, Madame de Rambaud instantly recognized him and was overcome by emotion. They exchanged recollections of happier times at Versailles and with growing excitement she became convinced this was indeed the child she had nursed forty years ago.
She heard of his astonishing escape from the Great Tower. First, a dumb child, named Tardif, had taken his place in November 1794, while he was held secretly elsewhere in the Temple; this was, he said, the silent child reported by Jean-Baptiste Harmand. In early June 1795, there had been a further switch. A child dying of tuberculosis replaced Tardif, only to die a few days later. This child was buried in the garden of the Temple, while the real dauphin was drugged “with a strong dose of opium and placed in the coffin … filled with rubbish to give it sufficient weight.” On the way to the burial ground, he was rescued by royalists.
This was followed by a whole series of breathtaking adventures in which he was variously kidnapped or imprisoned, then successfully engineered heroic escapes. “My misfortunes have been unparalleled,” he declared; some of his supporters had been assassinated and he himself had been attacked. Once, while sailing from Italy, he had been captured by a French ship and his assailants had deliberately cut his face with the intention of disfiguring him. He had been imprisoned once more, only to escape later with the help of the Empress Joséphine.
By 1810, he had made his way to Berlin where the authorities had seized his papers and given him the name of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. Anxious to keep a low profile, he had established a small business as a clockmaker
in the neighboring town of Spandau. In 1818, he had married, he said, “a young woman of the highest class,” Jeanne Frederick Einert, and they soon had a family.
Madame de Rambaud was overwhelmed to meet him again after all these years. Soon after her meeting in August 1833, she wrote to the Duchesse d’Angoulême, who was now in exile in Prague, to tell her the good news. “Madame, I am impelled by my conscience to take the liberty of writing respectfully to you to assure you of the existence of your illustrious brother. I have seen him and recognized him with my own eyes,” she declared. “His long sufferings, his resignation and submission to the will of Providence, as also his kindness, are beyond belief.”
Despite Veuve de Rambaud’s evident enthusiasm, the duchess’s characteristic approach was one of patient observation: how would the new claimant be seen by others? She waited for more information; caution had proved right in the past and gave her time to calm the emotional turmoil that always accompanied these “dauphin episodes.”
It was not long before Naundorff obtained an introduction to the former chamberlain of Louis XVI, Marco de Saint-Hilaire. He, too, was struck with the similarity of this stranger to the dauphin. “The Prince has all the characteristics, mannerisms and inclinations of his illustrious father. He also possesses all his virtues,” he enthused. “Whoever has seen him once, cannot doubt his identity.” His wife, Madame de Saint-Hilaire, a former maid to Louis XVI’s aunt, was equally impressed and noted that Naundorff could answer any question on Versailles without difficulty, even citing the names of twelve of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Not surprisingly, the “prince” rapidly established a court of loyal followers—including some deserters from Richemont’s camp—who generously lifted him from the unsuitable poverty in which he had arrived. Among these supporters were many members of the old court, even Louis XVI’s former minister of justice and private secretary, Monsieur de Joly, who at first was extremely skeptical. “Everything which he related to me could only be known by the Dauphin and myself,” Monsieur de Joly confided to a
friend. “Now nothing in the world could shake my belief that he and the son of Louis XVI are one and the same.”
With no response to her letters, Madame de Rambaud became so frustrated by the duchess’s refusal to meet her “brother” that she produced a sworn statement. “In case I should die before the recognition of the prince,” she wrote solemnly, “I consider it my duty to testify here on oath before God and men that I have seen the illustrious Duc de Normandie.” She was persuaded not just by his vivid recall of life with his family but also because he possessed all the appropriate physical characteristics: vaccination marks, moles, the slightly prominent shape of his front teeth, even a scar from a rabbit bite on his lip. She pointed out that she had been with the dauphin from “the day of his birth until August 10, 1792,” and knew every last detail of the distinguishing marks on his body. Finally, she set out her most compelling evidence. She had always preserved a treasured relic from the days when she had cared for the young prince: a pretty blue suit, which he had worn only once at Versailles. She placed it in front of Naundorff and set a trap for him by falsely stating that this was a suit he had worn in Paris. To her astonishment, he immediately corrected her, “‘No Madame, I only wore it once at Versailles,’ and he told me when.”
The anxious recipient of such testimony and letters in Prague was soon to feel still more troubled. One of Louis XVI’s former private secretaries, Monsieur de Brémond, had become so convinced by Naundorff’s claims that he had become his servant. In his letter to the duchess, Brémond probed her conscience, reminding her of the Crown treasure that she had inherited. “This treasure, Madame,
belongs
to the lawful king, and this lawful king, whom you will one day joyfully embrace, is your illustrious brother, the Duc de Normandie … . You are no longer entitled to make use of this treasure against him … . You are responsible before Almighty God and your lawful king for the use which you make of it. Madame, I have fulfilled my duty.”
The duchess was becoming disconcerted; so many credible people whom she trusted were sincere in maintaining that this was, at last, her brother. If they were right, she could be doing him a terrible disservice, one that
expressly went against her mother’s last wishes. How could so many former servants be so hopelessly deceived? Did people really imagine that she refused to embrace this new “brother” because she did not wish to share her inheritance? The Duchesse d’Angoulême was by now sufficiently unnerved by all these letters from previous members of the royal household that she appointed a friend, a former French minister, to follow him: the distinguished Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld.
The viscount related an account of his first meeting in his letter to her on November 16, 1833. “I found myself in the presence of a man who undoubtedly bears a certain resemblance-taking his age into account—to the more careful portraits of Louis XVII, and who possesses the general features of the Bourbon family.” His behavior was “unaffected,” and he seemed in no way “confused or self-conscious” as perhaps an impostor might. On the contrary, “his eyes were very penetrating; his features were calm and attentive and showed neither self-consciousness or overeagerness.” The “prince” had talked to the viscount at some length about the Duchesse d’Angoulême: “My poor sister has been hatefully deceived; I will enlighten her; I wish even now to save the honor of my family,” Naundorff said to the viscount. “I am certain that my sister would recognize me after ten minutes’ talk; I propose that she should meet me; I
demand
it of her. Let her go to Dresden—from Prague—under some pretext or other.” With tears in his eyes he added, “Monsieur le Vicomte, I am indeed the son of the unfortunate Louis XVI, and the time is not far off when it will be proved.”
Naundorff’s performance was so utterly compelling that the viscount admitted to the duchess that he was “seized with a sort of dizziness” as he heard him talk so movingly about his family. With his “head and his heart spinning” he realized, “There was nothing in his behavior, in his tone, his manner of speech which suggested impudence or fraud, let alone roguery, and still less blackmail … . He is so calm, so convincing, that one is almost convinced oneself.”
The duchess agonized over this latest disturbing missive from her own trustworthy confidant. If the pretender was an impostor, he had to be a
very clever one to succeed so effortlessly in deceiving so many friends and staff. Quite apart from the myriad of convincing details he had supplied, even his handwriting was similar to members of the Bourbon family and he possessed over a hundred papers and documents that appeared to prove his case. In refusing to see him, she could be spurning the very brother who had already suffered so much in the Tower and who had lived in a wretched exile all these years. On January 12, 1834, the duchess was prepared to receive Morel de Saint-Didier, Naundorff’s advisor and lawyer. With penetrating intensity, she cross-questioned Saint-Didier closely about Naundorff, his account of life in the Temple and his escape. Eventually, she agreed to look at the documents but still refused his request for a meeting.
Within two weeks of this meeting, she received a shocking message from her agent, the Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld. Two men had tried to assassinate Naundorff with a dagger. The attack took place on January 28, 1834, in the Place du Carrousel in Paris. “A man came to see me in great haste to inform me that on the previous evening about eight o’clock he [Naundorff} had been stabbed several times … . and that one of the wounds seemed to be deep,” wrote the viscount. He was suspicious that the attack was fabricated—just another attempt to play with Marie-Thérèse’s emotions—and went to check on the patient’s wounds for himself. “All his linen was soaked in blood,” he wrote. “The wounds are quite close to the heart … . The festering of the wound shows that it must be very deep and can have barely escaped being fatal.” It was only a silver medallion that apparently saved him. The viscount sent “a clever and discreet surgeon to see him” to note all the “facts with scrupulous exactness.”
Madame de Rambaud also wrote to the duchess to put her mind at rest that she had undertaken to nurse her “brother.” “I have the joy of seeing him continually,” she said. “Day by day, I find in him the same character which he showed in his childhood.” The old nurse was totally convinced that she was caring for the genuine prince and she delighted in continued confirmation of this from his behavior. As for the ailing “dauphin” himself, even from his sickbed, his main concern was to meet with Marie-Thérèse and prove he was her brother.
On February 13, 1834, as he was recovering from the attack, Naundorff wrote directly to his “sister.” He appealed to her conscience by reminding her of the traumas that he had already endured and painful episodes that haunted them both. “Your Royal Highness no doubt well remembers that night so terrible to us all, when I was awakened roughly and torn from the arms of my virtuous mother.” He spoke briefly of the “cruel treatments” he suffered at the hands of Simon, and afterward, when he was locked alone in a little turret, “loaded with all sorts of abuse and ill-treatment by the wretches who surrounded me.” After a year of this confinement, he told her, “I was then in a deplorable state, almost dying, my clothes in rags, and covered with vermin.” He elaborated details of his escape and promised if she was only prepared to meet, “I am ready to give
my sister alone, by word of mouth, indisputable proofs
which will remove all your remaining doubts” [his italics].
Naundorff stated that he was now convinced that his previous letters to her had been used against him, and others had “taken advantage to ruin me in your opinion.” The alleged history of this correspondence was set out and copies of some of the previous letters were attached to his memoirs. He claimed that he had written many times to Louis XVIII before his death and to his “beloved sister.” As early as August 3, 1815, he had apparently sent her a letter from Spandau in Prussia: “My very dear sister … It is in you that I repose the small share of confidence that I can feel in any human being. I know it is attempted to conceal my existence from you; but a time will come when all traitors will be punished.” He had pleaded with her then to help him as an “undeniable witness to my existence.”
This appeared to be followed by another letter, dated March 1816, reopening the rawest of wounds: “My dearly beloved sister, forgive me if, rejecting all court etiquette, the tenderness of a brother who has never forgotten you dictates these lines. For I declare it to you, I am living, I myself, your own brother … . Doubt no longer of my existence! Have I not suffered as much as you, and together with you, in the Temple? To convince you of it, must I bring to your recollection, the day when I saw you again with so much delight, after having been cruelly separated from our good
mother … . You remember that same day you were dragged before the judges, no one in the world, but I, your brother, could describe to you the place where I saw you afterward. No, none but I could repeat to you the iniquitous interrogatory to which those men, those monsters, dared to subject you, as well as my virtuous aunt.”

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