If Antoinette's letters had been encrypted, von Fersen may have copied them as he decoded them. Copying letters was common practice at the time for record-keeping, but he could have also copied them for political reasons. With handwriting analysis, they first discovered that many of the letters that were supposedly written by Antoinette were actually copies of her letters written by von Fersen. The main hypothesis in the field was that the censor was likely someone in von Ferson's family - perhaps to preserve their reputation - such as his great-nephew.īut when the researchers further analyzed the ink of the redactions, they came upon a different story. Next, the researchers tried to identify the scribbler. (Image credit: Sylvain Sonnet/Getty Images) Who did it? Dik and his colleagues at Antwerp University were the first to develop the XRF spectroscopy technique about 10 years ago, to scan for hidden images in large surfaces such as paintings.įunerary monuments of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette at the Basilica of St. "A fantastic job.I think the images speak for themselves," said Joris Dik, a professor and head of the Materials Science and Engineering department at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. Curators and historians are now supervising the transcription of the full paragraphs that were revealed. Their method did not work in recovering the censored writing in seven of the documents because both inks had very similar composition, making it "impossible" to read the underlying words, the authors wrote. (Image credit: found that some of the redactions were just words such as "amour" or "love," and some of them were phrases such as "ma tendre amie," or "my tender friend." Some were even longer, such as "pour le bonheur de tous trois" which translates to "for the happiness of all three" and "non pas sans vous," which translates to "not without you." The XRF scanner analyzing Marie Antoinette's letter to von Fersen, dated to September 26, 1791. In the letters, the researchers looked for differences in the ratios of copper to iron and zinc to iron. Of course, that's a highly simplified example and the ink used in the letters and the redactions are made up of a combination of elements. If you scanned this piece of redacted writing for iron, the program would output a bunch of scribbles but if you scanned it for copper, the word "love" would appear. Imagine that you wrote the word "love" in an ink that's made up solely of copper and then you scribbled over it with an ink that's made up solely of iron. They can then create a series of images in which the pixels are only filled in if a certain wavelength - corresponding with a specific element - is present. The XRF scanner directs X-rays onto the image, exciting the atoms that are present in the ink, which then emit unique wavelengths that allow researchers to identify which atoms are present in each pixel. To uncover the writing behind the redactions - tight swirls of dark scribbles complicated by the addition of extra letters to throw off the reader - the researchers used a method called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF). Photo of a redacted passage of a letter dated to January 4,1792 (left) and superimposition of the uncovered language beneath the redactions (right).
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