Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [64]
“Both of whom were imprisoned and guillotined during the Revolution,” Jean-Paul says.
“Indeed. After his parents were killed, Louis-Charles remained in prison under the care of a brutal man, Antoine Simon—a shoemaker and a member of one of the ruling factions at the time.”
“Why did the boy remain in prison?”
“Perhaps I should not have suggested this, Andi,” Lili says, doing her best to talk over G—no easy feat—who’s answering Jean-Paul’s question and describing Louis-Charles’ life in prison. “Are you sure you want to keep watching?”
“Yeah, I do. It’s okay, Lili.”
I want to listen. I want to know. That heart is no longer just a sad photograph to me. It’s real. I’m getting to know the little boy to whom it may have belonged. And the girl who cared for him. Fought for him. Kept him safe.
“… and was, in effect, walled up alive,” G says.
“My God, how horrible,” Jean-Paul says.
“Yes, it was.”
“Did no one help him?”
“Eventually word of the conditions he was kept in started to leak out, but those who spoke out against his treatment endangered their own lives.”
“How so?”
“I will give you an example,” G says. “After Robespierre was overthrown, in 1794, the boy was allowed a doctor—Pierre Joseph Desault. According to his reports, Desault went into the cell and found … and I quote, ‘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 cruelest of treatments.’ The boy was dirty, ragged, and covered in sores. He could no longer stand and could barely speak. Desault, a kindly man, was furious about Louis-Charles’ treatment and said so. In fact, he called it a crime. Shortly after making these statements, he was invited to a dinner held by the ruling party. A few days later, he was dead. Of poisoning.”
“Were the ones who did it charged?” Jean-Paul asks.
G laughs. “It’s likely that the ones who did it were in charge. You must remember that this was a very difficult time for France. We are talking about the death and rebirth of a nation. The country had just transformed itself from a monarchy to a republic and had endured a long and bloody revolution to do so. Many still hated the former king and his family. And so it was very unwise to show concern for this royal child.”
“What became of him?”
“He died, very miserably, at the age of ten. An autopsy was performed and one of the officiating doctors, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, stole the heart.”
“To take it to St-Denis. Because it was the tradition—no?” Jean-Paul says. “Before the Revolution, the hearts of kings were embalmed and placed in the basilica at St-Denis.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” G says. “However, the basilica had been desecrated during the Revolution. Many of its crypts had been opened and the remains they contained thrown into the streets. It’s thought that Pelletan wanted to keep the heart until it was once again safe to take it to St-Denis. He put it in a jar and covered it with alcohol to preserve it.”
“When did he take it to St-Denis?”
“He didn’t. He kept it. For so long that the alcohol evaporated and the heart dried out. In the meantime, France had again become a monarchy. Pelletan tried to give the heart to the new king, but he didn’t want it. Eventually the Archbishop of Paris took it. In 1830, a second revolution broke out and the archbishop’s palace was looted. A rioter smashed the urn and the heart was lost. Days later, Pelletan’s son went back to the palace grounds to search for it. He found it, put it in a new urn, and locked it away. Years later, the heart was given to Don Carlos de Bourbon. He put it in the chapel of an Austrian château where Louis-Charles’ sister, Marie-Thérèse, who survived her imprisonment, had lived for several years. During the Second World War, the château was looted, but the duke’s family rescued the heart, and, as I have mentioned, returned it to France. To the Duc de Bauffremont, who