A Royal Marriage and Love Triangle
In his teens, Count Hans Axel von Fersen (1755 – 1810) went on a grand tour of Europe, and in 1774 he arrived in France. The count, two months older than Marie Antoinette, met the future queen at a ball when they were both nineteen-years-old and she was the Dauphine, or French Crown Princess. Both liked what they saw. For the Dauphine, the contrast was stark between the handsome youth and her schlub of a husband whom she had tied the knot with in a marriage of state, the future Louis XVI. A few years later in 1778, von Fersen was back in France, and Marie Antoinette, who by then was queen, had not forgotten the handsome Swede. She often inquired about him, and pouted when he missed some of her parties, informal affairs held in her private chateau on the grounds of Versailles, the Petit Trianon.
He wrote in his diary entry for November 19th, 1778: “The queen treats me with great kindness; I often pay her my court at her card-games, and each time she makes to me little speeches that are full of good-will. As someone had told her of my Swedish uniform, she expressed a wish to see me in it; I am to go Thursday thus dressed, not to Court, but to the queen’s apartments. She is the most amiable princess that I know“. Von Fersen kept much of his correspondence with Marie Antoinette. It contained no proof of a love affair. However, we now know that is because he had censored and altered a lot of it before he died. Scientists recently subjected some of the letters exchanged between the count and queen to X-ray fluorescence, which revealed what had been originally written.
