Home is where the heart is

I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in France long time ago; and about his little boy the dolphin, that would a been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died there.
“Po’ little chap.”
“But some says he got out and got away, and come to America.”
“Dat’s good! But he’ll be pooty lonesome — dey ain’ no kings here, is dey, Huck?”
“No.”

–Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
209 years after his death, the heart of the dauphin Louis-Charles, the youngest son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the woulda-been King Louis XVII, will be buried in the French royal crypt of Saint-Denis in Paris.
If you’d like to read a marvelous book about Louis-Charles and his heart, the Revolution, and the mysteries of his imprisonment and death (and the multitude of royal pretenders who came out of the woodwork as a result of those mysteries), then please check out Deborah Cadbury’s The Lost King of France. Gripping and fast-paced popular history, with a storyline not too dissimilar from Robert Massie’s standard-setting The Romanovs: The Final Chapter.
Rest in peace, little “dolphin”.

3 comments

  1. Dave J

    Le roi est mort; vive le roi. Would this be an inopportune moment to suggest that it’s pretty much been all downhill for France since 1789?

  2. newscaper

    I’m assuming with the quotes around “dolphin” you’re aware that is bastardized from the correct “dauphin”. But perhaps your readers were unaware.
    I’m from Mobile, Alabama, founded by the French in 1702 — and where we have a “Dauphin Street”.