Marie - Antoinette , the last queen of France , remain – 228 geezerhood after her execution – a figure of controversy and fascination . There are a lot of misconceptions about her , far-famed among them the utterance of “ permit them eat cake ” which was never actually say by her . There are also mystery connected to the queen regnant , such as the redacted surreptitious agreement between the Austrian - have royal stag and the Swedish count Axel von Fersen .
Count von Fersen was a close friend of Marie - Antoinette and has been rumored to have been her lover . The letters day of the month from June 1791 and August 1792 , right in the midsection of the French Revolution while the regal family was kept under near surveillance at the Tuileries Palace , which no longer exists . Fersen help organize the flight to Varennes , the Royal sept fail try at escape France . So historian had hop that within these letters secret of their relation back and such plans could be assemble .
But the letters had Bible and entire sentence censor long after they had been delivered and for 150 years , their secret have been maintain . Thanks to technical breakthroughs , the secrets in those letters have finally been revealed . The determination are reported in the journalScience Advances .
The varsity letter contains word such as “ beloved , ” “ tender friend , ” “ adore , ” and “ madly ” prove a very close relationship between the two . It also indicate that some of the letter written by Marie - Antoinette were in reality copy of the originals . By studying the copper - to - smoothing iron and zinc - to - atomic number 26 proportion of inks in the original texts and ink in the redactions , the scientist could differentiate that von Fersen was the one who made the copies .
Even more interesting , the work revealed the identity element of the censor . It was not a member of the von Fersen family , but it was Axel von Fersen himself . The researchers , direct by Anne Michelin , think that this suggest that the letters had strong sentimental and/or political note value for the Swedish count .
“ Another interest of the study , by identify Fersen as the censor , is to see the importance of the letter of the alphabet received and sent to him whether by drippy attachment or by political strategy , ” the team wrote in the paper . “ He resolve to keep his letters alternatively of put down them but redacting some sections , indicating that he wanted to protect the honour of the queen ( or maybe also his own interests ) . In any subject , these redactions are a way to identify the passages that he considered to be private . The mystery of these redacted enactment that make this correspondence special is perhaps the reason that let this correspondence to be spar when the relaxation was largely destroyed . ”
The proficiency used was x - beam fluorescence spectroscopy and it allowed the squad to microscan the letter in a non - destructive way . Combined with data processing techniques , this allowed them to reconstruct what was hide beneath the censoring .
