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| Amaury de Bourbon de Parme, who is related to Louis XVII, at Saint Denis Cathedral, Paris. (Reuters) |
Saint-Denis (France), June 8 (Reuters): France’s royal descendants and their supporters today buried the shrivelled heart of Louis XVII, the boy king who died during the Revolution, after DNA tests confirmed the organ’s authenticity.
Exactly 209 years after the heart was cut from the king’s body following his death in a grim Paris prison, a crystal urn containing the tiny pickled organ was carried to the cathedral of Saint-Denis outside Paris, burial place of French kings.
Following a two-hour mass, it was laid to rest in the royal crypt next to the remains of his parents Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were both executed by the revolutionaries.
To a chorus of trumpets, Amaury de Bourbon de Parme, a young boy related to the former child king, brought in the urn draped in a purple cloth and placed it next to a crown on a column draped in the royal fleur-de-lis pattern.
“Finally, he will be able to rest in peace with his parents,” said Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, a Spanish banker whose blood ties date back to Louis XIV and who was cheered outside the cathedral by supporters shouting: “Long live the king!”
The ceremony comes four years after DNA tests confirmed that Louis-Charles de France perished in jail of tuberculosis at the age of 10, putting to rest centuries of speculation that he had escaped his captors and was survived by royal heirs.
The heart was removed from its resting place in the Saint-Denis cathedral in 1999 to enable scientists to compare its DNA make-up with samples from living and dead members of his family — including a lock of Marie Antoinette’s hair.
Eight-year-old Louis-Charles automatically became King Louis XVII when Louis XVI was guillotined before huge crowds in central Paris at the height of the revolution in 1793.
At the time, the boy was held like a caged animal in the forbidding Temple prison to prevent any monarchist bid to free him, and was forcibly separated from his mother.
