Royal Lineage · Part I

Did he perhaps have a wealthy bachelor uncle in America? Nothing more was learned, and it was only later that the facts became clear to me. Marti’s paternal grandmother, the second wife of the master blacksmith and long-time Versam sexton Martin Bonadurer (1844–1879), was a Margaretha Rassel (1815–1894) from St. Antönien, a daughter of the schoolmaster Josef Franz Rassel, who worked in Trimmis and died there in 1834 — and this man, as incredible as it may sound, was the son of the royal couple Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who lost their lives in Paris in 1793 during the French Revolution.

Their two children, the Dauphin (Crown Prince) Louis XVII and his sister, survived the horrors of the Revolution. They were held under heavy guard in the notorious Temple Prison. The boy was abducted from there by royalists and brought with all necessary secrecy to Graubünden, to a place as remote as possible — specifically to St. Antönien. In France, it was later said that the Crown Prince had died in prison of tuberculosis. He had, in fact, been swapped with another seriously ill boy. Thus, the heir to the French throne lived unrecognized in St. Antönien under the alias Josef Franz Rassel, and later as a schoolmaster in Trimmis, where he married and became the father of nine children.

One of his daughters was Marti’s Nana (Margereth). But she was certainly just as poor as his Neni, who had about 17 children by two wives — that is, Martin Bonadurer was the husband of Margereth Rassel, who is the daughter of the teacher Josef Rassel. In Chur, there was a Bonadurer pastry shop from the Rassel line, and there was a Bonadurer known for paper-cutting, also from the Rassel family.

The Secret Will

But where was the wealth supposed to come from? From the sister of the Crown Prince, the later schoolmaster Josef Franz Rassel in Trimmis. The King’s daughter was taken to the court in Austria. She then became very wealthy as Duchess Marie Thérèse Charlotte and died childless in 1851 at Frohsdorf Castle in Wiener Neustadt at the age of 93. Before her death, she had drawn up a secret will with the provision that it could only be opened after 100 years. Her vast fortune was intended to benefit her brother’s descendants. And the watchmaker Marti was among these descendants. But despite all investigations, this will has remained unfound to this day. However, these investigations apparently provided proof that the Rassel family, who were citizens of St. Antönien, are indeed the direct descendants of the French heir to the throne, Louis XVII.

The watchmaker Marti in the almshouse at Versam was thus one of his great-grandsons. Who would have thought it? In August 2006, I learned that a person named Rassel still lives in Wergenstein, on the Schamserberg.