Mysteries of Marie Antoinette and Her Family

Yesterday I listened to this episode of the History Extra podcast, an interview with Nancy Goldstone about her new book, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters.

Although the episode title focuses on Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa, a large part of the conversation was about the empress’s youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette of France. In that section, Goldstone posited that:

• Louis XVI was on the autism spectrum.
• Marie Antoinette might have been dyslexic.

The latter theory didn’t appear in her book, she said. The former is a major argument, and her publisher is marketing that as part of what’s new.

Another element of Goldstone’s portrait of Marie Antoinette, not so new, is that she had a long emotional and sexual relationship with the Swedish count Axel von Fersen. I discussed the recent reading of their letters earlier this month.

Goldstone has written or co-written quite a range of books, including previous biographies of royal women, memoirs of the book trade, and murder mysteries. She hasn’t written about the eighteenth century before, however. I’ve seen some reviews complain that she’s overlooked sources that have come to light in the last few decades, which specialists would certainly use.

That said, Goldstone’s status as a non-academic historian writing for a popular readership has probably freed her to acknowledge the usual caveats about the impossibility of making any sort of sophisticated diagnosis when a subject has been dead for centuries and share her ideas anyway.

Autism and dyslexia may be like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, homosexuality, and other human conditions with genetic components that appear in individuals in all sorts of societies in all eras. Those societies understand and respond to the conditions differently—accepting, denying, punishing—leaving different evidence in the historical record. Our present understandings of those conditions may be more advanced than in previous centuries but are undoubtedly still limited. Nonetheless, I think these possible diagnoses are worth at least considering.

In the podcast Goldstone also raised the possibility of genetic testing to see if, as she suspects, Marie Antoinette’s two younger children were fathered by Count von Fersen rather than King Louis. I don’t know if there’s enough genetic material available to make that possible; both children died young, though one became the doomed Dauphin, whose heart is reportedly preserved.

The Secret of Sir Barrington Beaumont

While reading about Count Axel von Fersen for yesterday’s posting, I saw some intriguing anecdotes in his Wikipedia entry, quoted from The Reminiscences of Sir Barrington Beaumont, Bart., published in 1902.

I followed those up, finding a text with a lot about Von Fersen and a little about Horace Walpole, Charles James Fox, Marie Antoinette, and other famous figures that was much too good to be true.

Indeed, the reviewers of 1902 quickly caught on to that book as a fictional memoir of the eighteenth century.

The Irish Monthly reviewer wrote:

It pretends to be a real diary, the writer of which arranged that it should not be read till seventy years after his death; but one perceives at once that it is in reality a novel, bringing in such real persons as George Selwyn, Horace Walpole, Count Fersen, Marie Antoinette, and others. The writer has evidently studied the period well, though we suspect that Macaulay or Abraham Hayward would detect sundry inaccuracies and anachronisms. There is plenty of incident, lively conversations, epigrams original and selected, and a clear and correct style that is never dull.

Other readers, however, were not so pleased with the book. The Spectator stated:

No one, we imagine, is likely to be deceived by Memoirs of Sir Barrington, which profess on the title-page to be “now, by permission of his great grandson, published for the first time.” In spite of a serious preface, some notes by an editor, and the information that the names of the writer and the two chief personages have been altered, the imposture (if it deserves such a grave title) is so crudely and clumsily carried out that one scarcely thinks the writer or his publisher can expected it to be taken seriously. . . . [These pages] tell us little which was not well known, and that which is not well known in them is of little interest. The truth is they do not bear even upon the surface the stamp of genuineness.

And the critic in The Academy and Literature groused:

If the public greedily swallowed bogus love letters, the author probably argued, why should it not revel in bogus reminiscences? And we can only echo, Why not? The taste would not be more remarkable than that which finds savour in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. But to be successful the literary practical joke requires to be played with a nice combination of dash and dexterity. The creator of Sir Barrington Beaumont is not wanting in audacity,…but his attempt to imitate the style and reproduce the atmosphere of his chosen period is almost ludicrous in its inadequacy. . . .

This biographical joke might have been amusing if it had been better played, but unfortunately the author had no qualifications for his self-imposed task beyond a superficial knowledge of his period, and he has neglected to use use such simple devices as might have given his work external resemblance to a genuine memoir. He should have clothed the volume in imitation calf, and provided an elaborate index, copious foot-notes, and an appendix.

If a conscientious attempt had been made to imitate the style of 1812, and if the wits had been made to discuss contemporary tittle-tattle instead of paraphrasing their printed witticisms, the work might have mystified a section of the public. As it is, the author will probably fall between two stools, for his book is not a sufficiently good imitation of a last-century memoir to appeal to lovers of biography, nor a sufficiently good imitation of a novelette to appeal to lovers of light fiction.

The British Library now credits the book as a novel by Michael J. Barrington, a name that doesn’t appear anywhere in the printed volume.

Of course, some copies of this book got into larger library collections. Google Books scanned them. The Hathi Trust and Internet Archive took up one of the imperfect Google scans. Automated publishers of “classic” (i.e., public-domain) literature have vacuumed up the files and offer the book through online retailers.

As a result, The Reminiscences of Sir Barrington Beaumont, Bart. is more widely available today than it’s ever been, and most forms of the text carry no warning that it’s fiction. It is not and has never been a historical source about the eighteenth century.

Elements of Marie Antoinette’s Letters

The Swedish count Axel von Fersen (1755-1810) came to Rhode Island in 1780 to serve as an aide-de-camp to Gen. Rochambeau, commander of the French troops in North America. He met the American commanders and took part in the Yorktown campaign.

Unlike some European officers, Von Fersen wasn’t motivated by republican leanings. Instead, he had to leave France because his close friendship with the young queen, Marie Antoinette, was becoming close to a scandal. The two had meet in 1774 as teenagers, then renewed the acquaintance in 1778. Advisors felt it wiser for the count to go to another continent for a while.

Count Von Fersen returned to Europe in 1783 and was soon back in France as a diplomat for the king of Sweden. In 1787 that king appointed the count as his secret personal envoy to Louis XVI, which also gave him more time with Marie Antoinette. When the French Revolution broke out, Von Fersen became a close advisor to the royal couple.

By June 1791 the French government was holding the royal family in Paris, with Lafayette in charge of the guards. Count Von Fersen organized an escape plan, personally driving the family in a carriage out of the city.

Then the party split up. Louis and his family made it as far as Varennes before a crowd recaptured them and returned them to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. What little trust the government and people had in the royal family evaporated. Von Fersen fled across the border.

The count continued to correspond with Marie Antoinette in the months that followed. In 1982 his descendants sold a cache of those letters to the French national archives. Someone had scribbled over parts of fifteen letters, rendering phrases impossible to read.

In recent years scientists have developed new ways to analyze such cross-outs by mapping how they respond to types of radiation. These methods mean analysts no longer need to destroy samples of the paper or chemically alter the ink.

One example reported in 2013 involved the original score of Luigi Cherubini’s 1797 opera Médée. Large sections of the final pages were blotted out. According to tradition, Cherubini disliked critics telling him the opera was too long and bluntly cut it short.

Because Cherubini had written his score using standard iron gall ink and marked it over with charcoal, X-ray sensors could easily distinguish the elemental signatures of those two types of black.

The letters between Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen were a bigger challenge, though, because both the original writing and the scribbles were made with iron gall ink. That meant both layers were full of iron and sulfur.

However, as Anne Michelin, Fabien Pottierand, and Christine Andraud just reported in the journal Science Advances, the chemical composition of eighteenth-century inks could vary; “additional metal elements—that are present as impurities in the vitriol (iron sulfate) used to prepare the ink—are also found in diverse amounts.”

In particular, they found that on eight of the letters the upper layer of ink has a lot more copper than the lower layer. By mapping where the less cupric ink lay, they revealed enough of the underlying writing to decipher such phrases from Marie Antoinette as “ma tendre amie” (my tender friend) and “vous que j’aime” (you who I love).

The next question was who had made those changes. The authors write:

The most common hypothesis was that redaction was carried out in the second half of the 19th century by the great-nephew of the Count of Fersen, the Baron of Klinckowström, or perhaps by a different member of the Fersen family, before the publication of this correspondence to preserve their reputation.

However, the analysts were able to match the elemental signature of the scribbles to the ink that Von Fersen used to write his letters. In other words, he probably crossed out those sensitive phrases himself after reading them to protect the queen.

King Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine in January 1793, charged with conspiring with France’s foreign enemies. Marie Antoinette followed nine months later.

Count Von Fersen never married. He became active in Swedish politics, rising to be Marshal of the Realm, the highest non-royal official in the government. In 1810, during a heated public dispute over the royal succession, a mob stomped him to death.