A doctor stole the heart of the boy king Louis XVII, and DNA in 2000 ended 200 years of impostors

Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, became Louis XVII to royalists when his father was executed in 1793. He was held alone in the Temple prison and died there on 8 June 1795, aged ten, of tuberculosis. At the autopsy, Dr Philippe-Jean Pelletan took the heart and kept it in alcohol. Because the death was secret and the body went into a common grave, more than 100 men later claimed to be the escaped king. The best known, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a Prussian watchmaker, was buried in Delft in 1845 under the name Louis XVII, and his descendants used the name Bourbon. The heart passed through several owners and ended at the Saint-Denis basilica. In 2000 geneticists in Leuven and Münster compared its mitochondrial DNA with hair from Marie Antoinette and with living Habsburg relatives, and found a match. Earlier tests on Naundorff's remains had found no match^†. The heart was buried at Saint-Denis on 8 June 2004.