The letters of Marie Antoinette were censored: thanks to X-rays, we now know who the censor was and which passages he had erased
Between 1791 and 1792 Queen Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, kept up a close correspondence with the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen, her confidant and – according to the chronicles of the time – her lover.
The French National Archives keep almost 50 letters of that particular correspondence: historians and philologists have been wondering for years why in 15 of those letters some passages are completely illegible. A heavy line of black ink seems to deliberately hide many of Marie Antoinette’s words.
Marie Antoinette’s censored letters
One thing is clear: the letters that Marie Antoinette sent from France to her friend and ally von Fersen were censored. Until now, it was widely believed that such censorship had been applied to the letters by the descendants of Count von Fersen, in order to preserve his reputation, which was then endangered by the rumors of a dangerous liaison with the wife of the King of France.
The deep friendship between the two was born in 1774, when Marie Antoinette and the Swedish count met in Versailles: their friendship was so deep that it was von Fersen himself who organized the attempted escape of the royal family in June 1791, which later became known as the flight to Varennes.
In 1792 the end of Marie Antoinette, and with it the fall of the ancien régime, was approaching. The king and the queen of France were kept under strict observation by the royal guards, but the queen managed to keep alive her correspondence with von Fersen.
The acquisition of the correspondence by the National Archives of France took place only in 1982, when the letters had already been widely censored.
An anonymous censor had in fact literally erased dozens and dozens of passages in the letters written by Marie Antoinette. Scientists have been trying since the 1990s to read beneath the censorship, but it wasn’t until today that materials analyst Anne Michelin, to whom the letters were delivered in 2014, found a solution to the riddle.
After testing several approaches, Michelin decided that the best way to reveal the secrets of the actual correspondence was through spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence.
Who was Marie Antoinette’s censor?
The use of X-ray technology allowed Michelin’s team to isolate and map the different types of ink present in the letters, so they could separate the ink used by Marie Antoinette from that of the censor.
Thanks to spectroscopy, the research was able to uncover as many as 45 of the many censored passages. However, there was still no trace of the identity of the censor.
Only the analysis of all the available data led Michelin to a conclusion that the researcher herself defines as “obvious”. The ink that covered the queen’s words, in fact, was identical to that used by von Fersen in the writing of letters following the affair.
“I was very surprised,” Michelin admits, but it is clear that Marie Antoinette’s censor was indeed Count von Fersen.
The reasons for the censorship are still unknown, but it is believed that the Swedish count’s intent was to preserve the queen’s honor. I passaggi censurati sono piuttosto sentimentali: nelle lettere di Maria Antonietta non sono stati toccati i commenti relativi alla politica o le opinioni personali della regina.
Piuttosto, le frasi censurate sono del genere “felice il mio cuore” e “te che io amo”, ad indicare che la censura fosse esplicitamente diretta a nascondere le parole più sincere ed amorevoli della regina.
Un inedito viaggio nei pensieri più profondi di Maria Antonietta, ma anche un’importante acquisizione scientifica: la ricerca di Michelin, e la scoperta di quanto i raggi X possano svelare dei vari inchiostri antichi, sarà senz’altro d’aiuto nella soluzione di altri enigmi conservati dai testi antichi.
Fonte foto: getty images