The execution of Louis XVI is not narrated as a scene in this account; it shadows a story of royal association, revolutionary suspicion, and a pair of jewels passed into hiding. Reconstructed from fragments gathered by Loïc, the episode connects Louis XVI’s relationship with Delphine de Castelmont to her arrest and to the secret inheritance that divides her sons.

Revolutionary Suspicion and Delphine’s Arrest

The account identifies Louis XVI as the former king, referred to as citizen Capet, and presents Delphine’s particular connection to him as the reason the Committee of Public Safety placed her on its list of intended victims. The political reversal is stark: an old friendship with the monarch becomes grounds for persecution under the revolutionary government.

The supposed intimacy is conveyed cautiously, through a report rather than an eyewitness account. The Marquise de Créquy wrote that she had heard two women whispering in a Versailles grove about a pair of cameos shared by Louis XVI and Delphine. According to the rumor, he had given her one and kept the other as a pledge of faithful friendship. The account thus ties the royal connection to an object, while retaining uncertainty about how the story first circulated.

The Cameos Before the Flight to Varennes

Shortly before the failed Flight to Varennes, Louis XVI learned that Delphine was staying with her mother in Paris and arranged for the second cameo, Castor, to be delivered to her. The secret mission was entrusted to the Duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt. Delphine kept both jewels on her person, then, sensing that her arrest was near, gave one to each of her sons and made them promise never to part with them for any price.

She concealed the transfer by sewing the cameos into the boys’ clothes. Louis received Castor; Charles received Pollux. The division turned the paired objects into separate inheritances, binding the brothers to their mother’s injunction even as their mutual hostility made them unlikely companions. The text does not depict Louis XVI’s execution itself; instead, his political fate is present through the danger surrounding Delphine and the urgent, clandestine passage of the jewels.

Retrospective Reconstruction and Significance

The episode reaches the reader through what Loïc could piece together from newspapers, memoirs, and correspondence. That documentary, fragmentary frame distinguishes reported rumor from the more definite account of the mission and the jewels’ concealment. Rather than offer a direct portrait of the execution, the narrative shows how the revolutionary upheaval continues through private consequences: Delphine’s royal tie exposes her to arrest, and the cameos survive by passing from her hands to her children’s.

The cameos therefore carry a history that outlasts the political moment in which they were transferred. Louis XVI’s gift, Delphine’s threatened arrest, and her sons’ promise form the backstory to the objects’ later division and to the family conflict attached to them.