New research debunks Coppola view of Marie Antoinette

Why the sudden interest in France's last memorable queen?

Marie Antoinette, air-headed Austrian princess and then much traduced French queen, was born 250 years ago last year. The anniversary has generated aHollywood film starring Kirsten Dunst and several exhibitions.

From today, the Archives in Paris will be showing for the first time most of the personal and public documents related to Marie Antoinette held by the French state. They range from her marriage certificate (as thick as a telephone directory) to her death warrant and the last, moving and courageous letter she wrote just before she was sent to the guillotine on 16 October 1793.

`Abundance' a fictional portrait of Marie Antoinette

By Wendy Smith
Tribune Newspapers: Newsday
Published October 12, 2006


After enlarging her canvas and her cast of principal characters in "Four Spirits" -- her vivid novel of the civil rights movement -- author Sena Jeter Naslund returns in "Abundance" (Morrow, 560 pages, $26.95) to the first-person perspective that brought her literary prominence seven years ago.

But while "Ahab's Wife"' looked shrewdly at the world through the eyes of an intelligent, independent woman, the doomed French queen who speaks here reveals herself on nearly every page as fatally blind to the realities of the financially and morally bankrupt society into which she has married.

And no wonder, because Marie Antoinette is barely 14 as the novel begins in 1770, when she's packed off to wed Dauphin Louis Auguste as a pawn in the political maneuvers of her mother, Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

Naslund's fictional portrait follows the lead of sympathetic biographers.

Toinette (as she prefers to be called) is faithful to her stolid husband, kind to poor people (on those rare occasions when she encounters them) and not as extravagant as contemporary slanders make out -- though she does develop a weakness for gambling during the humiliating seven years when her husband doesn't fully consummate their marriage.

At first he's not interested at all; later he doesn't know how to bring matters to a successful conclusion; he has been King Louis XVI for more than three years by the time he finally manages to perform his royal marital duty.

Even at 14, Toinette knows what's expected of her. But she's too young to know what to do when the ironclad scenario -- wedding night followed by pregnancy followed by the birth of another Louis -- is derailed.

Naslund does a nice job in the early chapters of using Toinette's voice to tell us more than she herself knows.

The naive girl is manipulated by everyone from Louis' spinster aunts to the Austrian ambassador, all of whom view her as a means to their ends. Bewildered by Louis' sexual disinterest and terrified by her mother's cold disapproval of her "failure," she retreats into a world of fantasy, spending a fortune to create a life of pretend simplicity at Versailles.

The problem with "Abundance" is that Marie Antoinette is simply not very interesting.

The callous, spendthrift, sexually insatiable harpy depicted in angry pre-revolutionary pamphlets, at least, is a fascinating monster; the woman who prattles about her white muslin dresses is rather dull.

The book gains a certain grim energy after the Bastille falls and the queen's fantasy life makes a brutal connection with reality, but this comes after 400 pages that all too faithfully re-create the airless world of protocol and privilege that encloses the French aristocracy.

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