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Home / World

French scanners uncover the secret affair of guillotined queen

By Henry Samuel
NZ Herald·
14 Jan, 2016 09:16 PM2 mins to read

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Marie Antoinette. Photo / iStock

Marie Antoinette. Photo / iStock

Newly decoded letters penned by Marie-Antoinette suggest France's last queen had a torrid affair with a Swedish count and two of the children she had with Louis XVI were illegitimate.

Two centuries after she was guillotined during the revolution, researchers have 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, it was penned in black ink six months after the count unsuccessfully tried to spirit the captive royals out of Paris. A year later, Louis XVI was executed.

Historians have long debated the nature of the relationship between Marie-Antoinette and Fersen - 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.

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Until now, her letters to Fersen were almost exclusively limited to matters of state. The more personal sections were carefully redacted by a mystery hand - thought to be the 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, proved fruitless.

However, a team at France's Research Centre for the Conservation of Collections, CRCC, has managed to extract the original handwritten text, using cutting-edge scanners.

News of the revelations follow the publication of a book by British historian Evelyn Farr, which suggests her daughter, Sophie, who died as an infant, was fathered by Fersen.

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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."

"I love you madly' - you don't say that to a good friend. It implies a physical relationship. They were lovers," said Farr.

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