LOUIS XVII Heir's heart to be placed in crypt

After DNA testing, some skeptics still say the mystery hasn't been solved.
PARIS (AP) -- The heart of the 10-year-old heir to France's throne was cut from his body when he died in prison, pickled, stolen, returned, and DNA-tested two centuries later.
Next week, Louis XVII's heart will be placed in France's royal crypt north of Paris now that genetic testing has persuaded many historians that the tiny petrified heart is almost certainly the real thing.
In ceremonies Monday and Tuesday, European royalty will honor the little boy who became a pawn of the French Revolution, dying alone in a filthy prison. After a Mass on Tuesday, his heart will be laid to rest at the Saint-Denis Basilica near the graves of his parents, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
The ceremonies recognizing the royal heart seek to close 209 years of rumor, legend and historical uncertainty surrounding the child's death -- though some skeptics still insist the mystery has not been solved. Many historians had insisted that the true heir escaped and the sickly boy who died was a substitute.
"I would have liked to believe the story that the child survived," Prince Charles-Emmanuel de Bourbon de Parme, one of Louis XVII's closest living relatives, told a news conference. "Today, science has proved the contrary."
Life's hardships
Louis XVII's short life was the stuff of nightmares. He lost his parents to the guillotine. He was locked in Paris' Temple prison for three years -- for part of that time, in solitary confinement in a darkened cell, without anyone to wash him or clean up after him, said historian Philippe Delorme.
The boy finally died of tuberculosis in 1795, his body reportedly ravaged by tumors and scabies.
The child's corpse was dumped in a common grave -- but first, a doctor secretly carved out his heart in keeping with a tradition of preserving royal hearts separate from their bodies. The doctor smuggled it away in a handkerchief and kept it as a curiosity, Delorme said in a telephone interview.
In France, the doctor who had performed the boy's autopsy kept the heart in a crystal vase filled with alcohol on a shelf -- a tantalizing souvenir for one of his students, who stole it.
Repenting on his deathbed, the thief asked his wife to give it back.