For more than two centuries Marie Antoinette has been vilified as the heartless, frivolous queen who spent lavishly while her people starved. Now, in the tradition of The Birth of Venus and The Other Boleyn Girl, this moving novel tells her side of the story.
Imagine that, on the night before she is to die under the blade of the guillotine, Marie Antoinette leaves behind in her prison cell a diary telling the story of her life—from her privileged childhood as Austrian Archduchess to her years as glamorous mistress of Versailles to the heartbreak of imprisonment and humiliation during the French Revolution. Carolly Erickson takes us deep into the psyche of France's doomed queen: her love affair with handsome Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen, who risked his life to save her on the terrifying night the Parisian mob broke into her palace bedroom intent on murdering her and her family; her harrowing flight from France in disguise, her recapture and the grim months of harsh captivity; her agony when her beloved husband was guillotined and her beloved son was torn from her arms, never to be seen again.
Erickson brilliantly captures the queen's voice, her hopes, her dreads, her suffering. We follow, mesmerized, as she reveals every detail of her remarkable, eventful life, from her teenage years when she began keeping a diary to her final days when she awaited her own bloody appointment with the guillotine.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 30, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781593978303
- File size: 151155 KB
- Duration: 05:14:54
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 25, 2005
Historian Erickson (Bloody Mary
; To the Scaffold
; etc.) makes her first foray into fiction with this invented journal kept by the notorious queen who was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution in 1793. Recounting her childhood as Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia, her marriage to feckless Frenchman Louis XVI and her naïve pangs of conscience about hungry peasants clamoring at the gates of Versailles, Erickson delivers a spirited blend of fiction and fact. While Marie Antoinette's love affair with Swedish nobleman Axel Fersen is well-documented, other characters pivotal to Erickson's plot are pure fabrication: swarthy servant Eric, his jealous wife, Amelie, and the queen's confessor, Father Kuthibert. These inventions add color to the story of the ruler inaccurately linked to the phrase "Let them eat cake!" The novel's narrative engagingly reflects Marie Antoinette's progression from privileged adolescent to royal mother of four (though only one daughter and son survived into adulthood), and Erickson's descriptions of pomp and circumstance lend flavor and flair. While France's most infamous queen was clearly more sybarite than saint, Erickson's lively account reveals a woman whose bravery and resilience seem as noteworthy as the bloody details of her demise. -
Presented as a novel, this story of Marie Antoinette provides believable insight into what it might have been like for the Royal Family during the French Revolution. Erickson is an acclaimed biographer, and Maggi-Meg Reed superbly reads the account as Marie Antoinette might have read it to her grandchildren, had she survived. Between the author and the performer, the listener is drawn into the queen's innermost thoughts so that we feel her joys, her fears, and her sufferings while she struggles to maintain her regal disposition. Were this diary real and a part of French history, perhaps Marie Antoinette's legacy might have been considerably different. S.K.P. 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine -
In this fictional biography of Marie Antoinette, written as a diary, we learn of the life and loves of the last queen of France. Erickson, who has also written nonfiction about Marie Antoinette, depicts the turbulent time of the French Revolution through the eyes of privilege. Carrington MacDuffie reads the diary entries with energy and enthusiasm. MacDuffie gives an unaccented voice to Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and most of the other French characters and discernible accents to the rest. From Antoinette's loveless marriage at age 14 to her love affair with Swedish Axel Ferson and her captivity during the Revolution, Erickson shows that Marie Antoinette was a real woman, no matter how infamous. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
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