A FROME woman’s new book explores the relationship between the ill-fated French Queen Marie-Antoinette and a Swedish Count, Count Fersen – suggesting that the relationship was much more than platonic.
Evelyn Farr’s book, ‘Marie-Antoinette and Count Ferson: the untold love story’ is out this month, and delves deep into the relationship using previously unpublished letters and a lot of Evelyn’s own research.
Evelyn says that the relationship was much deeper and influential than the ‘chivalrous platonic romance’ most historians report.
She said, “In this book I have compiled a very detailed chronology for the entirety of their relationship and shown not only that Fersen was in France for most of the 1780s, but how he concealed his love affair with the Queen and exactly when he used to stay with her secretly at Versailles
“The web of deceit is much easier to spot if you examine the whole picture and spot which lies were told to other people to cover their tracks.
“Fersen was the man she loved for 20 years, the most important person in her life and had a major influence on her actions.”
“I like to think of this book as ‘forensic biography’ or a detective story – assembling all the clues in a very cold case, digging out new leads and piecing it all together to present a startling truth that has been suppressed for far too long.
“My approach is entirely new and original. No-one has even attempted such a detailed day-by-day analysis of this relationship before. Compiling the chronology required reading many hundreds of pages of archive material, but it was absolutely key to highlighting the full extent and nature of their love affair and allowed me to go to other documentary sources to reveal the full picture.”
