Marie-Antoinette's
torrid affair with Swedish count revealed in decoded letters
French experts
unravel mystery content of Marie-Antoinette’s secret love letters
to a Swedish count thanks to cutting-edge imagery technology
By Henry
Samuel7:20PM GMT 12 Jan 2016
Newly decoded
letters penned by Marie-Antoinette suggest France’s last queen had
a torrid affair with a Swedish count, amid claims that two of the
children she had with Louis XVI were illegitimate.
Two centuries after
the notoriously decadent royal was guillotined during the Revolution,
researchers in France have finally unlocked the secrets of
blacked-out secret passages from Marie Antoinette’s letters to Axel
de Fersen, a friend of France’s royal family.
The first of 13
passages to be revealed in the coming months reads: “I will end
[this letter] but not without telling you, my dear and gentle friend,
that I love you madly and that there is never a moment in which I do
not adore you.”
Dated January 4,
1792, the declaration of love was penned in black ink six months
after the count unsuccessfully tried to spirit her and her captive
husband out of Paris. A year later, Louis XVI would be executed.
Historians have long
debated the nature of Marie Antoinette and Fersen’s relationship –
whether it was romantic, sexual or merely platonic. The question was
a crucial at the time as revolutionaries depicted the queen as a
frivolous thief and a traitor to husband and country while royalists
insisted she was loyal to Louis XVI.
Until now, her
letters to Fersen were almost exclusively limited to matters of
state. The more personal sections of the letters were carefully
redacted by a mystery hand – thought to be the Swedish count
himself or his descendants in a bid to preserve her honour.
All previous
attempts at deciphering the censored messages, meticulously obscured
by circular scribbles to mask Marie Antoinette’s original
handwriting, proved fruitless.
Now, however, a team
working at France’s Research Centre for the Conservation of
Collections, CRCC, has managed to extract the original text
handwritten by Marie Antoinette.
Using cutting-edge
x-ray and different infrared scanners, researchers said they were
able to “discriminate between the two levels of writing” thanks
to slight variations in copper content.
New of the
revelations follow the publication of a new book by a British
historian, out in the spring, which suggests her daughter, Sophie,
who died as an infant, was fathered by her Swedish lover.
In I Love You Madly
– Marie-Antoinette: The Secret Letters, cites, Eveyln Farr reveals
secrets that she believes will send shock waves through France.
“From what the
Duke of Dorchester insinuated to the Duchess of Devonshire, it was
fairly obvious [Princess] Sophie was Fersen’s child,” Ms Farr
reveals.
Ms Farr also
reportedly calls into question the paternity of Antoinette's son
Louis Charles.
The main piece of
evidence is a 1791 note from a friend of the couple, Quintin
Craufurd, to then-British Prime Minister William Pitt and his Foreign
Secretary Lord Grenville.
Mr Craufurd is cited
as affirming that the count, who he knew "intimately", was
"generally supposed to be the father of the present Dauphin
[eldest son of the King of France]."
The book cites the
amorous count as telling the queen in one letter: “I love you and
will love you madly all my life.” She in turn called him “the
most loved and loving of men” and informed him “my heart is all
yours”.
“‘I love you
madly’ is a very strong phrase – you don’t say that to a good
friend. It’s really telling; it implies a physical relationship.
They were lovers,” Ms Farr is cited as saying.
According to the
book, the couple – which it says had a 10-year physical
relationship – hid the content of their passionate correspondence
using invisible ink and code names. "I live and exist only to
love you – adoring you is my only consolation," Fersen wrote
in one. "My God, how cruel it is to be so near and not be able
to see each other!," she responded.
Communiqué de
presse
Paris novembre 2015
Les passages cachés
des lettres de Marie-Antoinette au comte de Fersen livrent leurs
premiers secrets.
De la fin juin 1791
à la fin juin 1792, alors que la famille royale est en résidence
surveillée aux Tuileries, la reine MarieAntoinette
et le comte de
Fersen ont échangé une correspondance secrète conservée depuis
1982 aux Archives
nationales. Si une
partie de ces lettres qui étaient codées ont pu être déchiffrées,
sur d’autres le texte en est
cependant incomplet
car il a été en partie masqué par un caviardage soigneux. Ceci a
longtemps conduit à alimenter
diverses hypothèses
sur la nature des informations livrées par la Reine.
Après plusieurs
tentatives restées sans succès, aujourd’hui, les lettres
caviardées commencent à livrer leurs
secrets !
Dans le cadre des
actions de soutien à la recherche de la Fondation des Sciences du
Patrimoine (FSP), en 2014 un
projet déposé par
les Archives Nationales a permis au Centre de recherche sur la
conservation des collections (CRCC)
d’analyser ces
lettres à l’aide de techniques récentes d’imagerie dans trois
domaines distincts du spectre
électromagnétique
: celui des rayons X, du visible et du proche-moyen infrarouge ainsi
que celui de l'infrarouge
lointain afin de
discriminer les deux niveaux d’écriture.
Les encres de
l’époque, dites métallogalliques, étaient préparées à partir
d’un mélange aqueux de sulfate de fer ou
de sulfate de
cuivre, de tannins végétaux (acide gallique extrait de la noix de
galle) et d’une gomme végétale (gomme
arabique) jouant le
rôle de liant pour les pigments formés par ce mélange.
Des cartographies
chimiques ont été réalisées sur la lettre « 4401_1-43 » datée
du 4 janvier 1792, une des rares
lettres autographes
de Marie-Antoinette. Grâce à de légères variations dans les
concentrations de cuivre entre les
deux encres, la
fluorescence de rayons X sous micro-faisceau (μXRF) a permis de
distinguer les deux niveaux d’écriture
et d’extraire le
texte original (les mots en italique-souligné sont interpolés) :
« je vais finire,
non pas sans vous dire mon bien cher et tendre ami que je vous aime a
la folie et que
jamais jamais je ne
peu être un moment sans vous adorer ».
Au-delà de
l’information obtenue sur le contenu de cette correspondance,
l’étude a permis d’asseoir diverses
méthodologies
d’imagerie utiles pour analyser plus finement des manuscrits et en
extraire des informations invisibles
à l’œil nu.
C’est l’un des
objectifs de l’Equipement d’excellence PATRIMEX que gère la FSP
et qui vise à mettre en synergie de
nouvelles techniques
pour mieux connaître, comprendre et préserver les biens culturels.
Fort de ce premier
succès et avec l’idée de déchiffrer la totalité de la
correspondance entre Marie-Antoinette et Axel
de Fersen, la FSP
souhaite pouvoir assurer la poursuite du projet.
2
2
Contact :
crcc@mnhn.fr
Partenaires
1) Les Archives
Nationales
2) Le Centre de
recherche sur la conservation,
USR CNRS 3224,
Sorbonne Universités, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle,
Ministère de la
Culture et de la Communication
3) Le laboratoire
ETIS, UMR CNRS 8051, ENSEA, Université de Cergy-Pontoise
4) La Fondation des
Sciences du Patrimoine
(LabEx Patrima /
EquipEx Patrimex : programme Investissements d’avenir)
Avec le concours du
Musée de la Musique et de l’Institut National du Patrimoine (INP)
également
partenaires de la FSP.
Equipe :
Florian Kergourlay2
, Christine Andraud2
, Anne Michelin2
, Aymeric Histace3
, Bertrand
Lavédrine2
, Isabelle
AristideHastir1
, Rosine Lheureux1
, Emmanuel Poirault4
 |
Count Axel de Fersen
|
Marie-Antoinette’s
30-year romance with a Swedish count revealed in new book
Letters show the
queen’s love was far from platonic, the author of new book tells
Katie Grant
Katie Grant /
Wednesday 30 December 2015
Marie-Antoinette has
endured centuries of negative press – and now, more than 200 years
after being guillotined, things are about to get worse as far as the
late monarch’s reputation is concerned.
A historian and
biographer of the queen is set to publish a tranche of correspondence
which she claims proves that not only was the notorious queen of
France unfaithful to her husband, Louis XVI, but that one of her
children was illegitimate.
Born in Austria in
1755, Marie-Antoinette married Louis in 1770. Her indulgent lifestyle
and frivolous spending came to symbolise the excesses of the reviled
French monarchy. Her decadence was a factor in the unrest that led to
the French Revolution and the monarchy’s demise.
In her book, I Love
You Madly – Marie-Antoinette: The Secret Letters, the British
historian Evelyn Farr lays bare the queen’s alleged infidelity with
the powerful Swedish statesman Axel von Fersen and calls into
question the parentage of her daughter, Sophie, who died as an
infant, proposing the princess was fathered by the devoted lover.
The title of the
book, due out next spring, was inspired by a quote from the adoring
count, who told the royal in one letter: “I love you and will love
you madly all my life.” She in turn called him “the most loved
and loving of men” and informed him “my heart is all yours”.
Until now the only
correspondence published between Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen
concerns affairs of state. The complete and unexpurgated collection
of their letters “confirms unequivocally their passionate and
enduring love affair,” according to the book’s publisher Peter
Owen.
“This is the first
time the full extent of their relationship has been exposed,”
according to Ms Farr.
Months spent
trawling through archives in the UK, France and Sweden revealed a
wealth of information, leaving the author in no doubt that the pair
were lovers.
The author says she
needed “detective-like skills” to decode many of the couple’s
letters. They used a series of techniques to ensure their romance
remained top secret, from writing in invisible ink and using code to
creating secret stamps and enlisting trusted friends as go-betweens.
“Because it was such a compromising correspondence it had to be
kept secret,” Ms Farr says.
Some of their
acquaintances were rather less discreet than the pair might have
hoped, though. Previously unpublished correspondence between their
“very gossipy” friends sheds a whole new light on their
relationship, says Ms Farr, who believes one particular revelation
will send shockwaves across France.
“From what the
Duke of Dorchester insinuated to the Duchess of Devonshire, it was
fairly obvious [Princess] Sophie was Fersen’s child,” Ms Farr
reveals.
Many French scholars
are “reluctant” to acknowledge the pair were more than just good
friends, according to the author, but the historian believes her
research settles the matter once and for all.
“‘I love you
madly’ is a very strong phrase – you don’t say that to a good
friend. It’s really telling; it implies a physical relationship.
They were lovers,” she insists.
“It was a pretty
instantaneous crush they had on each other,” Ms Farr says of the
pair’s first meeting, which occurred when they were in their late
teens in about 1774.
“They were
extremely smitten,” she adds, claiming that the relationship lasted
until Marie-Antoinette’s untimely death at the hands of the
revolutionaries in 1793.
“Most French
historians sit on the fence. Some insist it was a platonic love,
others say we can never be sure,” Ms Farr says.
“I found quite a
few declarations of love. Once you’ve started discovering passages
like those you can’t sit on the fence any more.”
Royal letters:
Intimate exchanges
Count Fersen to
Marie Antoinette
25 October 1791
“My dear and very
tender friend – my God, how cruel it is to be so close and not be
able to see each other! … I live and exist only to love you;
adoring you is my only consolation”
29 October 1794
“Adieu, my tender
friend, I love you and will love you madly all my life”
Marie Antoinette to
Count Fersen
4 January 1792
“I am going to
close, but not without telling you, my dear and very tender friend,
that I love you madly and never, ever could I exist a moment without
adoring you”
19 March 1795
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