Tea at Trianon: Redacted

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 4, 2021

Redacted

None of this is new (see older post, HERE.) Marie-Antoinette wrote in a loving way to ALL her friends, male and female, and used terms that now we would consider strictly romantic. Henrietta Maria wrote in the same manner, one hundred and fifty years earlier! Our world has grown so cold that we see affection expressed between good friends as a sign of a romantic liaison. No doubt it was Count Fersen's nephew who crossed out certain passages because he did not want them to be misinterpreted, as they are being now. Fersen usually kept any scrap of paper that was evidence of the Queen's affection for him, and was not shy about letting people think they had been more than friends. As he grew older, he became more haunted by her death and more desperate to prove that she had really loved him. And there are people today who are as desperate to prove it as Fersen was. From Ars Technica:

Most people associate Marie Antoinette with the affair of the diamond necklace, "Let them eat cake!" and the onset of the French Revolution. The French queen and her royal husband, Louis XVI, were guillotined in 1793, 10 months apart. But her colorful life also included a possible clandestine love affair with a Swedish count, and historians have been diligently working to decipher the surviving letters between the two for years.

The letters were cyphered, as was the custom at the time for politically sensitive correspondence. Fifteen of the surviving letters in the collection of the French National Archives also have significant portions redacted, amounting to some 108 illegible lines in all. Thanks to cutting-edge x-ray imaging techniques and data processing methods, the redacted portions of eight of those letters have finally been revealed, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The research is a collaboration between the National Archives, the French Museum of Natural History, and the Fondation de France.

Marie Antoinette and Count Hans Axel von Fersen of Sweden met as teenagers at a masquerade ball, when she was still Dauphine of France, and he became a frequent visitor to Versailles thereafter. Her royal husband famously proved unable to consummate the marriage for the first seven years.

Some speculated that Louis XVI had a medical condition that made it difficult to perform, but the queen's brother, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, concluded during a visit that it was primarily due to the king's inexperience and the queen's lack of interest. He described the pair as "complete bumblers".... Eventually the couple figured things out and Marie Antoinette went on to have four children, only one of whom lived to adulthood. But by then rumors were already swirling about her supposed infidelity, and von Fersen was among her rumored lovers. (Other candidates included the Duc d'Orleans and the Comte d'Artois.) They were certainly quite close. In 1780 von Fersen requested a transfer to America, as an aide-de-camp to General Rochambeau, and fought valiantly at the Siege of Yorktown. Eventually he returned to France as a Swedish ambassador to Versailles, and became part of the queen's private inner circle. (Read more.)

There are so many falsehoods in the above article, all I can do is ask people to please read my book, HERE. Louis XVI had no medical condition, as is evident from the doctor reports. The "fault" was with Antoinette whose immaturity made her physically and emotionally unable to be a wife until she grew older. Please read my past posts about the letters, HERE, HERE, and HERE. As the scientists themselves said of the Queen and Count Fersen:

To read under the censorship does not make it possible to know the truth about the nature of their feelings as the interpretation of texts is always questionable...But for the historian, this correspondence remains a precious testimony of a troubled time, and of the way in which the tragic political events influence the transformation of the emotions and the exacerbation of the feelings visible, in particular in the personal writings here in these redaction sections.

More about the x-rays, HERE, HERE, and HERE.