Marie Antoinette and Fersen: what X-rays found under the scribbled-out lines of their letters

Axel von Fersen was a Swedish count, born in 1755, the same year as Marie Antoinette.

He met her in 1774 at a masked ball at the Opéra, when they were both 18. She wasn't queen yet. He then became a regular at court, went off to fight in America during the War of Independence, and came back. And in June 1791, he was the one who organized the royal family's escape, the one that ended with their arrest at Varennes. He rode with them as far as Bondy, just outside Paris, then let them go on without him.

After Varennes, the king and queen were closely watched at the Tuileries, and Fersen lived mostly in Brussels. They couldn't see each other anymore, so they wrote.

From late June 1791 to late June 1792, they were very careful: invisible ink (ink you can't see until it's revealed), coded passages... Fersen kept everything. He filed the queen's letters and the drafts of his own, and he copied out some important letters, which was common practice back then. That's why most of the surviving letters are in his handwriting, even when the words are Marie Antoinette's.

The blots cover anything from a few words to a few lines. The letters were published in the 19th century by Fersen's great-nephew, without those passages of course, and ever since, historians had wondered what was underneath.

The work was done by the Centre de recherche sur la conservation (CRC), a French lab run by the National Museum of Natural History, the CNRS and the Ministry of Culture. The study came out in October 2021 in the journal Science Advances, by Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottier and Christine Andraud.

It didn't work on every letter. Out of the 15, 7 are still unreadable: none of the methods brought the text back.

No state secrets: the recovered passages are about love. Here are some of the ones the study published, with the 18th-century French spelling:

• "ma tendre amie" (my dear love): Fersen, October 13, 1791.
• "vous que j'aime et aimeroi jusqu'a mon..." (you whom I love and will love until my...): Marie Antoinette, December 7, 1791. The end of the sentence is missing.
• "pour le bonheur de tous trois" (for the happiness of all three): the same letter, a little further on.
• "non pas sans vous" (not without you): Marie Antoinette, January 4, 1792.

Anne Michelin, one of the researchers, sums up the vocabulary of the hidden passages in four words: "beloved", "dear friend", "adore", "madly".

"sans vous il n'est point de bonheur pour moi l'univers n'est rien sans vous" (without you there is no happiness for me, the universe is nothing without you)
Axel von Fersen to Marie Antoinette, October 1791

The extracts the team transcribed point the same way. On September 26, 1791, the queen wrote that she had cried when she heard he planned to spend the winter in Brussels instead of going home to his family. She asked him not to give up seeing his parents for her: "ceci seroit trop exiger" (that would be asking too much).

For a long time, the suspect was Fersen's great-nephew, the one who published the letters: he would have wanted to protect the queen's honor, and his family's.

The ink tells a different story. The ink of the blots almost always has the same makeup as Fersen's own ink, the one in his drafts and copies. On one letter, there's even a passage added in his handwriting, right above a blot, in the same ink. According to the researchers, it really does look like Fersen hid those words himself.

Why? Nobody knows. It may have been for personal reasons, or political ones: maybe he wanted to be able to use these letters to defend the royal family without damaging the queen's honor, or his own.

That's THE question people have been asking for two centuries. The recovered passages show an intimate relationship, something that had never been proven in black and white on Fersen's side. But Anne Michelin stays careful: they "do not allow us to settle once and for all the true nature of their feelings".

Love affair or passionate friendship, everyone will read it their own way. Either way, it was a feeling they had to keep secret until the end. They only saw each other once more, secretly at the Tuileries, in February 1792. Marie Antoinette was guillotined on October 16, 1793.

Fersen never married. He died on June 20, 1810, in Stockholm, killed by a mob during a prince's funeral procession, nineteen years to the day after the escape to Varennes.

Sources: Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottier and Christine Andraud, "2D macro-XRF to reveal redacted sections of French queen Marie-Antoinette secret correspondence with Swedish count Axel von Fersen", Science Advances, October 2021 (read the study); Anne Michelin, "La correspondance de Marie-Antoinette aux rayons X", The Conversation, January 2022 (read the article, in French).

Image: Marie Antoinette with a Rose, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, 1783, Palace of Versailles; portrait of Axel von Fersen, Carl Fredrik von Breda, around 1800, Östergötland Museum. Public domain.