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Until the year 1665 the concept of a cell simply did not exist. That year the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) gave this name to some compartments that he observed in a cork section with the help of a rudimentary microscope. Right now we know that each of us has approximately thirty trillion cells.
in 1676 Anton von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) announced that he had observed what would be the first living cells. But it was necessary to wait until 1890 for a German biologist, Richard Altmann (1852-1900), described some filaments inside them, what we know today as mitochondria. It is estimated that in each of our cells there may be up to two thousand mitochondria.
The next leap in this line of discovery came when two Swedish researchers, Margit and Sylvan Nassdiscovered mitochondrial DNA, a genetic material that is inherited from the mother.
Well, thanks to this DNA it was possible to know what happened to Louis XVII.
A prince without a crown and a king without a head
In 1789, France experienced some convulsive moments. To the cry of equality, freedom and fraternity, the revolutionaries sent to the thinking corner what would later be known as the Old Regime and stripped the Bourbons of the Gallic throne.
On August 13, 1793, King Louis XVI, his wife Marie Antoinette, along with their children Maria Teresa and Luis Carlos, and a sister of the monarch, Madame Elisabeth, were taken to the Torre del Temple, a medieval keep, and taken prisoner. .
The revolutionaries stripped them of all their titles and turned the heir into, simply, the ‘little Capet’. On September 8, 1792, King Louis XVI drafted an act of abdication in which he renounced the crown and established the formation of a Regency Council that would exercise the administration of the supreme executive power until the legal majority of Luis Carlos, the son of the.
That ruse was of little use to him because only María Teresa, the daughter of kings, came out of that prison alive. The monarch, the queen and the sister of Louis XVI ended up on the guillotine and little Luis Carlos remained imprisoned until he died in 1795, when he was ten years old.
The day after the little boy’s death, four doctors, with the greatest possible discretion, performed the autopsy. One of them, Dr. Pelletan, was in charge of opening the body, a fact that allowed him, taking advantage of a moment of distraction from his companions, to keep the heart of the son of Louis XVI.
The doctors certified that, who would have reigned as Louis XVII, died as a result of tuberculosis. Koch’s bacillus, and not the revolutionaries, ended his life. Despite everything, many refused to believe that the heir had died and the legend arose that one of the guards, at the last moment, would have allowed him to escape by replacing him with another child. This motivated a multitude of ‘Luises’ to appear at court for a long time claiming their dynastic rights.
the secrets of the heart
After the theft, Pelletan placed the organ in a jar of alcohol, which he replaced periodically until he managed to mummify it. In 1815 he presented the relic to Louis XVIII – brother of Louis XVI and uncle of Louis XVII – who rejected it. Later, the son of the Gallic doctor gave it to Edouard Dumont and he, in turn, to Carlos María de Borbón, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne. When Fernando VII’s brother died, the urn with the heart passed to his descendants, one of his granddaughters being the one who returned it to France. We are already in 1975.
From that moment on, the heart was deposited in the Parisian basilica of Saint Denis and it was not until the year 2000 when two independent laboratories were asked to determine whether that mummified organ had really belonged to a direct descendant of Louis XVI. After analyzing the remains of Marie Antoinette’s hair, which were kept in various museums and private collections, and comparing them with her heart, researchers from the University of Munster and the University of Louvain came to the same conclusion: the mitochondrial DNA was the same. . In Roman paladino, the thirty genes contained in the DNA definitively endorsed the story of Dr. Pelletan, debunking the legend that he defended that he had escaped with his life.
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