(1) To forge a letter of Marie Antoinette’s is peculiarly difficult. There have been many such attempts. They have been discovered with an ease familiar to all students of her life.
This difficulty lies in the great irregularity of her method of writing, coupled with the exact persistence of certain types of letter. She never in her life could write a line straight across a page. She never made two “d’s” exactly the same, and yet you never can mistake one of her “d’s.” She never crossed a “t” quite in the same manner twice, and yet you can always tell her way of crossing it. The absence of capitals after a full stop is a minor point but a considerable one. She always brought the lower loop of the “b” up to the up stroke, so that it looks like an “f”; she always separated her “l’s” from the succeeding letter.
Let the reader compare the document of which I am speaking, reproduced in facsimile opposite page 395, and her letter of the 3rd of September 1791 to Joseph II. (opposite page 297), and he will see what I mean. The first is reproduced on a four-fifths scale, the second in facsimile, but the points I make can easily be followed upon them. Note the first “d” in the first line of the letter written in prison, the second “d” and the third “d” all in the same line. Next look down to the seventh line and note the “d” in “tendre,” and see how the first three “d’s” though irregular are of the same type, and how the fourth, though much less hooked, is obviously written by the same hand. Look down two lines lower to the “d” in “plaidoyer”; it has a complete hook and is quite different from the other letters, and three lines lower, in the word “deux,” the hook has a sharp angle apparent nowhere else on the page. Now if you turn to the “d’s” in her letter to her brother of the 3rd of September 1791, you will find exactly the same characteristics. Not one “d” like another, yet all obviously from the same hand; the “d” in the second line with a full hook to it, the two “d’s” in the twelfth line much vaguer.
So with the “t’s,” they are crossed in every kind of way with a short straight line, a long curved one, a little jab followed by a straight, now with a slope downward, now with a slope upward, but all evidently from the same hand, and their very variety makes it impossible for them to be a forgery. The “l’s,” written separately from the letter following each, are obvious everywhere, so is that irregularity of line of which I have spoken. Let the reader look at the third line of the letter of the 3rd of September 1791 (opposite page 297) and at the seventh line of the letter written in prison, and ask himself whether it would have been possible to copy such native irregularity.
The identity of handwriting is apparent even from these two documents. It is absolutely convincing to any one who has seen much of her penmanship.
(2) To the faults in grammar and in spelling I should pay little attention—those things are easily copied; but it is worth remarking that on the third line of the letter written in prison she spells the infinitive of “montrer” without the final “r” as though it were a participle, while in the letter written to her brother in 1791 she makes no such error. She puts an “e” in “Jouis,” and so forth. All these discrepancies are a proof of the authenticity of the letter. She spelt at random, and her grammar was at random, though she got a little more accurate as she grew older. It would, on the contrary, be an argument against the authenticity of the letter if particular mistakes, discovered in a particular document of hers, were repeated in this last letter from the Conciergerie.
(3) The letter was immediately exposed to public view; the paper was grown yellow, the writing was apparently old, the ink in places faded, the creases deep and worn. Now all these accidental features could no doubt be reproduced by a modern forger with the advantage of modern methods, modern mechanical appliances, modern chemical science and photography. They could not have been achieved by a forger of 1816.
It seems to me, therefore, a document absolutely unassailable. The arguments against it are of the same sort which modern scepticism perpetually brings against every form of historical evidence that does not fit in with some favourite modern theory. I must believe the evidence of my senses, and I am compelled to admit that a woman, every expression of whose soul was different from this, and whose whole demeanour before and after writing the letter betrayed a mental condition quite inconsistent with the writing of it, was granted for perhaps an hour (in spite of a full day’s fast, the fear of imminent death and the breakdown of her health and of all her power), an exaltation sufficient to produce this wonderful piece of prose, and a steadfast control of language and a discovery of language miraculously exceptional to her character and experience.
No other conclusion is possible to a student unless, like any Don, he prefers a sceptical hypothesis to the testimony of his eyes and the judgment of his common sense.