ABSTRACT
On the eve of King Charles X of France’s coronation in the Cathedral of Reims in 1825, François de Chateaubriand asked himself if the king would recall seeing his eldest brother being anointed on the same spot. ‘Will he believe that a coronation provides protection against misfortune? There is no longer any hand virtuous enough to heal the King’s evil, no longer any holy phial salutary enough to make kings inviolable’, he wrote. 1 While Louis XVI had touched 2,400 sufferers from ‘the King’s evil’ at his coronation fifty years earlier, only 120–130 showed up to be ‘healed’ by Charles X. 2
