Marie Antoinette's censored letters decoded using X-rays
ABC News
Researchers have used X-rays to decode Marie Antoinette's censored letters to a Swedish count.
This is an Inside Science story.
It was late 1791 or early 1792, in a palace on the right bank of the Seine River in Paris. The world was about to change -- drastically. France was on the cusp of revolution as different factions struggled for control. The country's queen, Marie Antoinette, was closely watched and monitored after an attempted escape to Varennes, France, failed. But she still managed to sneak out letters to her friend and rumored lover, the Swedish count Axel von Fersen.
For 150 years, researchers wondered what secrets those letters held. Von Fersen had made copies of them, but words and passages within the copies were heavily redacted by an unidentified censor who had blacked them out with ink.
Now the world has a peek into the romantic lives of Antoinette and von Fersen. In a paper recently published in the journal Science Advances, researchers revealed the letters' once hidden words and phrases. The scientists used a technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, which can detect the chemical signatures of different inks without damaging documents. The letters show a deep friendship between Antoinette and von Fersen, but stop short of confirming that they were romantically entangled.