First let me recapitulate what is to be said against it:—
(1) There is no contemporary trace of it.[[61]]
[61]. The woman Bault, who was wardress of the Conciergerie, says that her husband told her of such a letter, but her evidence is given after Louis XVIII. had published it, and for all those twenty-two years she had said nothing about it. Moreover she talked of its discovery with the usual clap-trap phrases of “The Omnipotence of Heaven showing its ineffable goodness by restoring us this monument in its most admirable way, &c.” And the only contemporary account, while it does mention the lock of hair which the Queen desired given to a friend, says nothing of the letter.
(2) It appears at a moment when forged documents of that sort were of the highest value both to a despotic Government and to the vendors or producers of them.
(3) That moment is no less than twenty-two years posterior to the supposed writing of the letter, and, during all those twenty-two years, of the many who should have seen it, of the three public men (all enemies) through whose hands it must have passed, no one has heard of its existence nor mentioned it in a private correspondence, nor apparently so much as spoken of it in a conversation to a friend.
(4) It is first heard of from a man who would have every interest in forging it and who is known to have been very unscrupulous in political dealings for money.
(5) He makes his offer on the very day when the last witness there could be against him dies.
(6) The document, when it does appear, appears without any pedigree, or chain of witnesses to vouch for it, nor even any tradition. It is vouched for only by the people who had most interest in creating such a relic and is forced upon the public with every apparatus at the command of a despotic Government.
(7) Most important of all, the letter is written in a high and affecting style wholly different from all that we know of Marie Antoinette’s writing, and quite inconsistent with her demeanour at the moment, consonant only with the sanctity which it was at that moment desired to give to the Royal Family.
Nevertheless I believe the document to be without the slightest doubt authentic, and I will give my reasons for this certitude:—