When the dauphin died he was ten years and two months old. The members
of the Committee of Public Safety having concluded their day's sitting
when the news was brought, it was deemed advisable to conceal the event
until the morrow. Supper was prepared for the child as usual, and
Gomin, his attendant, took it up to the room. Many years afterwards
this man stated that when he entered the apartment he went to the bed
and gazed upon the corpse of the little dauphin. "His eyes, which
while suffering had half-closed," he relates, "were now open, and shone
as pure as the blue heaven, and his beautiful fair hair, which had not
been cut for two months, fell like a frame round his face." The next
morning four medical men came to examine the body, and make their
report, which they did in somewhat ambiguous terms, stating that at the
Temple on a bed in a room of the second floor of the Tower they had
seen "the dead body of a child, apparently about ten years old, which
the commissaries declared to be that of the late Louis Capet's son, and
which two of our number recognized as that of the child they had been
attending for several days." About twenty soldiers, however, who are
stated to have known the "little Capet" by sight when at the Tuileries,
were also admitted, at their own request, to view the body of the
child, and signed an attestation to the effect that they recognized it.
The body was finally put into a coffin, and on the 10th of June, 1795,
was taken to the cemetery of Sainte Marguerite, by the Rue St. Bernard,
and buried in an unknown spot, which to this day no one has been
enabled to find out.
THE FALSE DAUPHINS: JEAN MARIE HERVAGAULT.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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