The Heart of a King
Dec. 22nd, 2003 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arisbeThe desiccated heart of the son of King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette is to be buried in France's royal crypt, ending a 200-year-old mystery over the boy's fate after the French revolution.
...
Historians accept that the dauphin was taken to the Temple prison in Paris, with the rest of his family, in 1792. The following year - in January - his father, the king, went to the guillotine and the dauphin was separated from his mother. In October she too was guillotined.
The dauphin spent the remainder of his life in prison, held in isolation in harsh conditions - at best neglectful, according to historians; at worst, brutal - until he died, aged 10, of tuberculosis. A doctor, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who took part in the autopsy, hid the child's heart under his coat, smuggled it out and preserved it in alcohol.
In 1830 Pelletan handed the heart over to the Archbishop of Paris, who in turn passed it on to the Comte de Chambord, a member of the Austrian royal family. It was later given to members of the Italian aristocracy, who finally returned it to France in 1975, where it was placed in a crystal urn in one of the chapels at the Basilica Saint-Denis.
...
Three years ago, modern scientific techniques appeared to settle the matter when two sets of independent DNA tests compared fragments of the heart with samples of Queen Marie-Antoinette's hair.
-- Kim Willsher in The Telegraph
...
Historians accept that the dauphin was taken to the Temple prison in Paris, with the rest of his family, in 1792. The following year - in January - his father, the king, went to the guillotine and the dauphin was separated from his mother. In October she too was guillotined.
The dauphin spent the remainder of his life in prison, held in isolation in harsh conditions - at best neglectful, according to historians; at worst, brutal - until he died, aged 10, of tuberculosis. A doctor, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who took part in the autopsy, hid the child's heart under his coat, smuggled it out and preserved it in alcohol.
In 1830 Pelletan handed the heart over to the Archbishop of Paris, who in turn passed it on to the Comte de Chambord, a member of the Austrian royal family. It was later given to members of the Italian aristocracy, who finally returned it to France in 1975, where it was placed in a crystal urn in one of the chapels at the Basilica Saint-Denis.
...
Three years ago, modern scientific techniques appeared to settle the matter when two sets of independent DNA tests compared fragments of the heart with samples of Queen Marie-Antoinette's hair.
-- Kim Willsher in The Telegraph
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Date: 2003-12-22 10:03 am (UTC)Not that I am a royalist by a long shot, mind you. ;)