Paris: Newly decoded letters penned by Marie-Antoinette suggest France’s last queen had a torrid affair with a Swedish count and 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 have finally unlocked the secrets of blacked-out secret passages from her letters to Axel de Fersen, a friend of the royal family.
The first of 13 extracts 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 the relationship between Marie-Antoinette and Fersen relationship — whether it was romantic, sexual or merely platonic. The question was 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. However, a team at France’s Research Centre for the Conservation of Collections (CRCC) has now managed to extract the original handwritten text, using cutting-edge X-ray and infrared scanners. News of the revelations follow the publication of a new book by British historian Evelyn Farr, 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, she also questions the paternity of Marie-Antoinette’s son Louis Charles. The book cites the count as telling the queen: “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’ — you don’t say that to a good friend. It implies a physical relationship. They were lovers,” said Farr.
