The last days of Louis 17 (the son of King Louis 16 and Marie Antoinette), imprisoned in the temple prison, were pathetic, after he remained for several weeks weakening in his prison and becoming increasingly skinny to a frightening degree that made his guard request the presence of the doctor responsible for his health, so that Dr. Peletan was appointed on June 5 / June 1795 responsible for him instead of the previous doctor.

With these words, the French magazine Le Point (Le Point) opened a joint article between Frederic Luino and Gwendolyn dos Santos, who pointed out in its introduction that Dr. Peletan was an ambitious man who did not hesitate to replace his colleagues at the Hôtel de Dieu, and that he was suspected of being a spy for the Public Security Committee to prepare List of victims to be executed in Saint-Lazare prison.

Purple spots and tumors

After his death, the autopsy of the deceased heir to the throne of France was entrusted to Doctor Peletan with the help of 3 other doctors. The first examination showed purple spots on the skin of the corpse and rot reaching the abdomen, scrotum and inside the thighs, and several tumors were reported according to the autopsy report signed by the doctors.

And “when the abdomen was opened, more than half a liter of purulent, yellowish and very fetid serum flowed out. The intestines were pale and sticky together, but they were very healthy from the inside and contained only a small amount of bile, and the stomach, liver, spleen, pancreas, kidneys, heart and bladder were in good health, as well. brain,” according to the magazine, however, doctors found numerous lymphatic tubercles that led them to conclude that the boy’s death was caused by tuberculosis.

After the autopsy had been completed, Peletan's colleagues left the room and left him to sew the body alone. Thereupon he pulled a lock of hair and gave it to Municipal Officer Damont as a souvenir. Then he tucked the heart into his pocket. Years later, he wrote, "I wrapped it in a piece of cloth and put it in my pocket without anyone seeing me. Should no one think to search me as I leave the place?” And this is what happened, as the boy’s body was buried in St. Margaret’s Cemetery.

revolution in paris

On returning home, Pelétan put the heart in a vessel filled with spirit of wine and ethyl alcohol and hid it behind books in his library, and there he forgot it for 10 years. When he found it, the alcohol had completely evaporated and the heart had become a small piece of leather, and he threw it in a drawer with other "souvenirs".

One day, Billitan told the story of this heart to one of his students, and the latter hurried to steal it in 1810, but he died of tuberculosis shortly thereafter, and shortly before his death he asked his wife to return the heart to Billitan, who decided to return it to the royal family, but she refused the organ because she Doubt its origin despite the written evidence and testimonies provided by the doctor.

On May 23, 1828 Peletain gave the heart to the Archbishop of Paris, whom he considered a "sacred trust", and promised to do his best to return it to the boy's last surviving uncle, Charles X. But before the archbishop made good on his promise, the July Revolution broke out. 1930 The diocese is ransacked, but a worker named Liscrot seized the crystal jar in which Louis 17's heart was placed to protect it from thieves, and decided to return it to Peletain's son, but a man attacked him on the way and the jar fell to the ground and shattered, leaving the heart of the heir to the throne of France lost in a dark night.

Two centuries of wandering

A few days later, when Paris regained its calm, the worker returned to the scene with Peletan's son to try to find the royal organ, and they found him in a pile of sand, to be kept by Philippe Gabriel Pelletan until his death in 1879 after he requested in his will to hand him over to his friend, the architect Prosper Deschamps.

Finally, the heart ended up in the hands of Edouard Dumont, who in 1895 gave it to the representative of the Duke of Madrid, the rightful claimant to the throne of France, to take this heart at last a rest in the chapel of Frohsdorf Castle near Vienna, before he resumed another journey, before being carried by Princess Massimo, the Duke's daughter to Italy.

In 1975, the daughters of the Princess presented the heart to France to be buried in the tomb of its kings, where it should have been, after DNA analysis in 2000 confirmed that the heart belonged to a very close relative of Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI.