Marie-Antoinette's affair revealed in decoded letters
Since our world has so many other problems at the moment.
I hope you won't mind if I make this comment:
I think we all should feel a sense of regret.
at this late invasion of the privacy of Marie Antoinette
After all, everybody is entitled to at least one love that's great
And Royal Marriages are more or less legal affairs of state.
Hence I wish they would let the poor lady alone in her pain;
Since it is much too late to chop off her head once again.
Besides, since we all need some diversion from the woes of today.
Let's wonder nsead who is going to write the inevitable screenplay.
Not to mention an opera, whether produced on stage or TV
In which the Queen can once again proclaim her love so beautifully
that none will then disparage
an unfaithful loveless marriage. .
HzL
1/13/16
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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
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7:20PM 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.
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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.
Count Axel de Fersen
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.
Louis XVI in his finery Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
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.
Marie-Antoinette went to great lengths to keep the affair secret Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
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.
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