In January of 1792, less than two years before she lost her head to the guillotine, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen composed a secret letter.

“I love you madly,” the woman more commonly known as Marie Antoinette wrote from the Tuileries Palace, where she languished under house arrest. “There is never a moment in which I do not adore you.” (See the PDF)

The letter’s sentimental declarations were later blacked out, and for good reason. Its recipient was not her husband, King Louis XVI, but her alleged longtime lover, the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen.