The Mystery of the Lost Dauphin Solved!

When Louis-Charles, the 10 year old son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, died in a French prison in 1795, the surgeon who performed his autopsy quietly pocketed the boy’s heart. What followed was 200 years of that organ surviving a student theft, a deathbed confession, a revolution that destroyed a palace, and multiple international border crossings before scientists finally extracted mitochondrial DNA from it in 1999 and compared it to living descendants of Marie Antoinette.

The match was pe