=The Queen's Lover, by Francine Du Plessix Gray= This novel is a fictionalized account of the love-affair between Marie Antoinette and Swedish aristocrat Count Axel Von Fersen, which began at a ball when they were both teenagers, shortly before Marie Antoinette began her ill-starred reign of France. What's great about this book is the historical detail, which includes the social and political landscape not only of 18th century France, but of Europe in general, with even a segue into the American Revolution, in which Fersen served on the side of the colonists. A shortcoming is that the story is told through the eyes of Fersen and his sister, who edits his diaries. As aristocrats, they open themselves up to the charge of being unreliable narrators, not only because their participation, memory, and interpretation of events make their accuracy suspect, but because their very orientation as aristocrats predisposes them to take a stance inimical to the radicals and revolutionaries that would see them deposed. Both Fersen and his sister basically prove themselves to be apologists for the Old Order. According to them, Marie Antoinette was really a sweetheart, maybe a little haughty at times, but not the cold, arrogant, heartless, out-of-touch bitch we've been led to believe. Basically, she was just misunderstood, the victim of unsubstantiated gossip and jealousy. Her husband Louis XVI, we are led to believe, was a guileless, big-hearted socially-awkward oaf, who loved nothing more than having an informal chat with the common man...it was only that he never came in contact with one. Until the Revolution, that is.
And therein lies the main problem with Fersen's apology for the French monarchy. It requires that it be overthrown, that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI be dragged down through the mud before they discover that they're no better than anyone else. If there hadn't been a revolution does anyone doubt that they would have never come to realize this? How grateful Marie Antoinette is for the least kindness shown to her while imprisoned and awaiting execution...how tender and tearful are the scenes of her with her doomed husband, her beloved children...and how little am I convinced that until they were humbled such humility would ever have dawned on them.
Having made one final failed attempt to spirit the king and queen out of France, Fersen makes himself less and less likable as the novel progresses, having retreated to the safety of his psuedo-diplomatic work gadflying around Europe and then, ultimately, settling back in his native Sweden, where he receives word of the beheadings of the king and his beloved "Toinette." Long before—and long after—the heads roll, he spends his time writing letters to his sister and entries in his journal about how he can't live without Marie, she's the love of his life, he'd do anything to save "Her," he'd give his life, etc. but, instead, he has what seems an unending series of affairs, mostly with married women, to console himself that he can't be with the one he really loves, the one he'd die to save. Well, buster, I kept asking the pages as I turned them, talk is cheap. How about getting on a horse and riding to France? You'll have ample opportunity to die trying to save her if you do that. Instead, blah blah blah.
I'm not sure whether or not Du Plessix Gray intended Fersen to be considered an unreliable narrator; it's hard to believe an author as obviously as intelligent as she is didn't, or didn't at least intend the reader to consider it, but there is no internal evidence in the book that she did. "The Queen's Lover" is presented to the reader as a documentary account complete in itself, a defense, basically, of the principle of monarchy and elitism, and, as such, it flies in the face of the general tramp of history, which, believe it or not, is moving, at least in the popular conscience if not in actual political and economic practice, towards egalitarianism. In any event, for a confirmed anarchic radical such as myself, this account by Fersen—and "The Queen's Lover" in general--didn't move me to sympathize with the Queen more than momentarily. If the French Revolution were taking place in the street outside right now I'm still standing among the rabble yelling "Off with her head!"
That said, however, for its history alone, "The Queen's Lover" was a worthwhile read.
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