A letter from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, dated 4 January 1792, that has been partially redacted CRC
Throughout the throes of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette expressed her love for Swedish depend Axel von Fersen via phrases which might be lastly readable 230 years later.
Fashionable scanning know-how has efficiently distinguished the ill-fated French queen’s ink from that of von Fersen, who scribbled over her textual content in what was in all probability an effort to guard his shut pal and possible lover, says Anne Michelin at Sorbonne College in Paris.
She and her colleagues lately investigated 15 letters exchanged between Antoinette and von Fersen from 1791 to 1792 on the request of the French Nationwide Archives. Whereas the vast majority of every letter was readable, sure phrases or sections had been hidden below closely penned loops and random letters – Js, Ls, and Ts largely – supposed to censor the doc. Forensic items of the French Nationwide Police made an unsuccessful try to uncover the hidden phrases within the Nineteen Nineties, however the know-how of the time was missing, says Michelin.
This 12 months, Michelin’s crew used X-ray fluorescence scanning to hone in on the compositions of metallic parts like copper, iron and zinc within the letters’ ink. As a result of the assorted inks used within the letters contained totally different ratios of those parts, the researchers have been in a position to customise their scanning strategies to decipher authentic phrases buried below the layers of looping ink – typically needing to regulate their strategies even for a single phrase, which might take a number of hours to scan.
Their analyses additionally resolved the thriller of who had censored the letters. By evaluating the compositions of the ink used for scribbling out phrases and that used for von Forsen’s personal writing, the researchers confirmed that von Fersen himself had performed the redacting.
“There have been in all probability political causes for maintaining the letters,” says Michelin, including that they may have been supposed to current a extra beneficial public picture of the queen, who was finally beheaded by guillotine in 1793. “However von Fersen might have simply been very connected to those letters, as properly.”
Marie Antoinette wrote to von Fersen at lengths about political considerations of the time, together with how the royal household was dealing with the revolution, says Michelin. Her censored writing, nevertheless, featured extra romantic vocabulary – phrases like “beloved” and “adore” and intimate phrases like “No, not with out you” and “you, whom I like and can proceed to like till my…”.
Extramarital relationships have been commonplace all through the historical past of French royalty, so a romance between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen wouldn’t be stunning, says Michelin. Even so, the newly found phrases don’t verify that they have been lovers.
“Correspondence is at all times only one a part of the entire story,” she says. “We write, however we don’t essentially write what we predict. And what we write will be exacerbated by dramatic conditions, like a revolution. The queen was now not free to maneuver round, so in fact that may exacerbate her feelings. You possibly can actually really feel that in her writing.”
Sadly, the researchers’ scanning strategies nonetheless weren’t superior sufficient to discriminate the buried phrases in seven of the letters, which stay a thriller, says Michelin.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg4266
Extra on these subjects:
