versailles

Her ghost is easy to conjure up. Diamond soled shows, she was said to have had, and the declaration of "Let them eat cake." is taught in elementary school history. They dont teach us the inevitable fate, though, the long walk up the steps, the appointment with Madam Guillotine...that they save for later, when we were older than she was when she first stepped foot in France to become a wife.

Ive been fascinated with Marie Antoinette (called just Antoinette in the book) for years. Why did she say that ignominious line, "Let them eat cake?" Was it meanness, carelessness, or innocence? It could have been the later...for Dauphines and queens alike, there is always cake. It lead me to read Victoria Holt's The Queens Confession, which, not quite like this book, is very much like a confession in that it deals with everything, explaining the reasons for the different evils that have been laid at her feet, telling the truth behind the lies. Davis' Antoinette is not always that forthcoming. Concerned more with reliving her life than justifying it, her ghost often refuses to answer our more puerile curiosities, such as when she talks about her beloved Axel, who was said to have been her lover. She says, "Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?"

I guess what I'm saying is instead of historical narrative that concentrates on telling the facts of the story, we have a piece that concentrates on the beauty and essence of it. It is historically accurate without a doubt, and gives, I think, more details about the people and how they lived than you sometimes get. It sounds a bit like I'm slamming Holt's work...which I'm not. I think it's lovely and well done, but it's of its kind, isn't it? It is as different from Versailles as a short story from a poem.

I am loath to say this, because other reviewers have called it an aria, but the fact that it is an operatic work is inescapable. Lush scenes, the descriptions of Versailles in particular, of the gardens, of the gates, of the marble floors, would rival the sets of even the opera houses that live in dreams. Odd little historical facts, such as the fact that the previous Louis used to walk along the roof and call down chimney flues to his guests add humanity as well as spice to the history. Plays separate the chapters, giving us much more information even as they mirror the plays of that time period...and often serve to tell us whats going on outside of Antoinette's first hand experience, the things that will lead to her downfall. Even the chapters are set like scenes from a play, vignettes of her life, the stories that she longs to tell us, the things she doesnt want to be forgotten.

Do we feel bad for her? Oh, yes. Does she want us to? Certainly not.

What she wants, I think, this ghost who dwelt in marble halls, is to celebrate what she had. To tell us about who she was, in her soul, not the person that gossips and historians want us to know. To remind us of a time when a king who would rather have been a locksmith and a queen who would rather had lead a simple life in her German homeland made the best of what they had, tried to be decent, tried to be good, but were victims, themselves, of bad times and bad politics.

Very real, very tragic and very beautiful, this rich story introduces us to an Antoinette who will live on forever, if only in the dreams of what once was.