Monday, February 15, 2016

LOUIS XVII, A STORY THAT HAS NO END


HE WAS BULLIED, BEATEN, THEN KEPT IN A ROOM THAT WAS NEVER CLEANED AND ALMOST WITHOUT LIGHT, COMPLETELY ALONE 

He died when he was 10.

  Dauphin Louis-Charles of France by Alexandre Kucharsky, 1792, zoom

Internet, source not said

 
 
# # #

Royalists were thought to have spirited him away, and that the buried body was that of another child. Louis XVIII rewarded a man who showed proof of his death with this theater:


History of Paris
The Theater of  L'Atelier

For having brought Louis XVIII indiscutable witness of the death of the Dauphin Louis XVII, Sevestre is rewarded with the concession of the theaters situated beyond the city walls...
 
Yet innumerable adventurers claimed to be the Dauphin. They inspire the figure of the county-fair quack in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." 
(Written in 1883)

A DNA test of 1993 should have ended the myth,
but a man told me that he was his descendant
and that in Belgium he was called Monseigneur ["My lord"].
 
When I asked why he did not prove his claim by DNA,
he said it would cause too great an upheaval.
*    *    * 
Next,

No comments: