29. The Love of Marie Antoinette’s Life?
Count Axel von Fersen kept a lot of his correspondence with Marie Antoinette. It contained no proof of a love affair, but 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. Words such as “adore”, “madly”, and “beloved” jumped out of the pages to indicate that the relationship between the two was not platonic.
Even in worldly France and the decadent world of the eighteenth-century French court, no woman would lightly use a word like “beloved” to a man who was not her husband. Stuff like that triggered duels, and in the case of a queen, could amount to treason and result in a trial for adultery or even execution. Indeed, French history had examples in which extramarital affairs with royal women ended in the torture and execution of their lovers and the imprisonment of the royal ladies. For Marie Antoinette to refer to von Fersen as her “beloved” on paper, in her own handwriting, was not the equivalent of a modern innocent “Dear X”.
