6/8/2004: 209-year-old royal heart

[Undertoad]

209 years ago today, the ten-year-old Louis XVII died.

His parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, had their heads removed three years previous in the French revolution; and the boy, who would have been king, was imprisoned in a tiny cell. He caught tuberculosis and died, and they ditched his body; but before they did, his autopsy doctor cut his heart out to save it as a souvenir.

And then it was stolen; and then it was returned; and then it was bequeathed out of the country somehow; passed around Europe; lost; found in an Austrian castle in 1975, and finally returned to France.

And then of course there were rumors that it wasn't the heart after all, and so four years ago it was subject to DNA tests which matched its lineage with a lock of Marie-Antoinette's hair that had been saved.

So today they were to finally bury it once and for all. Hopefully they got the job done...