Courtesy William Morrow
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette
By Sena Jeter Naslund (William Morrow)
Review by Barry Hillenbrand, October 2006
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While interest in even the most renowned kings gradually fades away in the decades after their reigns, tales of great queens are told and retold—and then retold again. Think of the seemingly endless flow of books, movies, and plays that chronicles the lives of queens like Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, or even staid old Queen Victoria.
And when it comes to crass notoriety, the queen of queens is undoubtedly the ill-fated Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI and the foreign-born queen of France, guillotined in 1793 at the height of the French Revolution. During Marie Antoinette's lifetime, pamphleteers, the 18th-century equivalent of bloggers, documented every foible of her life. So graphic were these accounts—her supposed affairs with Princesse de Lamballe and Count Axel von Fersen, for example—that unexpurgated versions of some of them were not published until the 1950s, and even as recently as September 2006, PBS television producers fuzzed up 18th-century political cartoons of Marie Antoinette and her lovers to deflect FCC fines for violating indecency codes.
Since her death, the torrent of publications about her has continued with barely a pause for breath. The latest is Sena Jeter Naslund's Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette. It's pretty breathless. The book is not quite a bodice-ripper, although it's filled with heaving breasts, deep sighs, and barely controlled passions. This is clearly a book designed more for women than men. Naslund wrote the book as a novel using the first-person voice of Marie Antoinette. This freed Naslund of the constraints of the extensive historical record and allowed her to probe the introspective, albeit fictionalized, thoughts of the queen as she tries to navigate the intrigues of the Palace of Versailles.
The portrait of Marie Antoinette that we come away with is not that of the arrogant, self-indulgent woman who appears in the works of the pamphleteers and the antiroyalist historians eager to justify the excess of the Revolution. This Marie Antoinette is a naive and eager-to-please young woman who is tenderhearted and compassionate. She does not ignore the poor, nor does she suggest they simply eat cake. True, she spends extravagantly on clothes and jewels, but her husband generously showered her with gifts of palaces and paid her dress bills without complaint. And, besides, royals in the 18th century were expected to live with abundance. Who worried about money?
As Naslund writes it, Marie Antoinette is a victim extraordinaire. She was the victim of her Austrian mother, the formidable Marie Thérèse, Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, who sends Marie, an innocent teenager, off to France to wed an unknown husband and cement an important political alliance. And she is a victim of Louis, also a teen, who turns out to be an odd but sweet man and devoted to her. But he is ineffectual as both a husband and a king. It takes years—and many chapters of Naslund's book—before he figures out how to consummate the marriage. He never gets a grip on ruling.
Marie Antoinette was also the victim of the dream world of her class. How was she to know that she should pay more attention to reading the political writings of the philosophes than ordering more dinnerware from Sèvres? The deluge comes even before she realizes it is raining, and she and her family are swept cruelly away in the flood.
But she survives writ very large in books. Shelf upon shelf of books. Naslund's book is a good, emotionally fraught pick for those who like their historical fiction heavy on the fiction and lighter on history. For those who prefer real historical biography, Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette: The Journey is much closer to the facts and an equally readable choice.
Barry Hillenbrand, retired after 34 years as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine, lives in Washington, D.C., and travels in France every March.
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