Excerpt from The Wired:
Gourd may contain the dried blood of Louis XVI
Sick of taxes, a lack of rights and living in poverty, French revolutionists condemned Louis XVI to the guillotine on the morning of January 21, 1793. After a short but defiant speech and a menacing drum roll, one of the last kings of France lost his head as a crowd rushed the scaffold to dip handkerchiefs into his blood as mementos.
Or so the story goes.
Lending new life to the demise of Louis XVI, scientists performed a battery of DNA tests on dried blood inside a decorative gunpowder gourd that purportedly contained one such handkerchief. The results, described Oct. 12 in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, show the blood belongs to a blue-eyed male from that time period: a possible dead-ringer for the executed king.
“The next step is find a descendant either of the king or his mother,” said Davide Pettener, a population geneticist at the University of Bologna in Italy who helped with the analysis. “Otherwise we’ll have to try to get a sample of the dried heart of Louis XVI’s son.” …
The gourd … is emblazoned with key figures of the French Revolution and bears an inscription that reads, as translated from French into English by the researchers, “Maximilien Bourdaloue on January 21st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of the king after his beheading.”
There was no handkerchief in the gourd when the scientific team received it, but there was plenty of dried blood inside to scrape out five small samples. …
The tests showed the blood belonged to a blue-eyed man with a rare genetic makeup and not to an animal, nor to anyone in the laboratories, nor the gourd-owning family nor or any one of tens of thousands of people in genetic databases. Pettener added that the blood is also “quite old,” making a forgery more unlikely.
“A match on the Y chromosome of the Dauphin will immediately authenticate the blood as belonging to the king Louis XVI,” Carles Lalueza-Fox, a biologist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and lead scientist of the analysis team, wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “In any case, even with this information, we have historical evidence that this gourd could in fact contain the blood of the king.”