Fourteen-year-old Maria Antonia, Archduchess of Austria and daughter of the Holy Roman Empress, comes to France to marry its future king and embrace her new country. Changing her name to Marie Antoinette, she plans to speak only French and to treat the French people so well that they will believe her to be an angel.
“She’s like Venus rising from the sea,” one attendant says.
“Like Flora, goddess of flowers,” says another.
“They will adore her,” says everyone.
But suppose the French people and their Dauphin, whom she is to officially wed on May 16, 1770, at Versailles, do not adore her. What will happen then?
That’s the question behind Sena Jeter Naslund’s latest novel, “Abundance.” Using biographies, memoirs, letters and historical documents, Naslund imagines Marie Antoinette’s life as she lived it moment to moment.
Following Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography of Marie Antoinette and the film it inspired (Released in Europe in 2005, the Sofia Coppola film is in U.S. theaters), this novel will garner much attention with its propitious timing and Naslund’s critical reputation.
Commended for two novels derived from fictional characters – “Sherlock in Love” and “Ahab’s Wife” – Naslund was praised for her clever plotting (Booklist) and her “eye for odd telling details.” (The New York Times Book Review)
In “Abundance,” Naslund uses her words as if they were a camera to record life in late 18th century France, particularly among the nobility. Providing an insider tour of France, Naslund takes readers to palaces, estates, gardens and countrysides.
Describing everything from the Tuileries to the Tower to the Trianon to the Palace of Versailles, Naslund depicts walls, ceilings, windows, draperies, furniture, food, mirrors, music and art. Even Marie Antoinette’s last moments are rendered vividly: She kneels on the platform where she will be executed and sees between the planks a man squatting on the balls of his feet, his dirty face upturned and waiting to be bathed in her blood.
But Naslund’s use of details at times works against the plotting of this story, which is told in first-person, present tense as if it were a part of a journal (replete with letters to and from her mother) as kept by Marie Antoinette. Since little happens after her marriage until she is crowned queen, the first half of the story tends to be somewhat slow and sugary as Marie Antoinette progresses through a starry-eyed adolescence. But getting to know the youthful Marie Antoinette makes readers sympathetic to the falsely maligned queen in the book’s second half.
Early on, the warm, impetuous Toinette (as she is called) – flat-chested, pretty though not beautiful, with her Hapsburg nose and chin – is disappointed when she finds the French to be standoffish. Soon she learns that her 15-year-old husband is also standoffish.
Shy, uninterested in sex, overweight, with unattractive facial features, the future king is preoccupied with his hobbies of hunting and working as a blacksmith. At first, the young Dauphine thinks her husband will be responsive when she fully develops into a woman. But he isn’t, and the French blame the queen for not giving them an heir to the throne.
After about seven years, the marriage is consummated, and Marie Antoinette bears the first of four children – a girl, which further disappoints the French. In the next several years, she gives birth to three more children – two boys and another girl, although two of them die. By then, the turbulence leading to the revolution has begun, and the dauphin, now King Louis XVI, has even less time for his wife.
To fill up her days, Toinette sits for her portraits, which she likes; is robed and disrobed by her attendants, which she dislikes; has her hair styled, and her face made up, both of which she enjoys except when her hairdresser adds too much height to her hair and her attendants apply too much rouge to her cheeks. But the queen is not vapid; she takes pity on the poor, adopts a homeless child and offers generous financial support to the needy. With the composer, Christoph Gluck, as her instructor, she plays the harp and studies opera. She loves theater, and takes up needlework when her children are born.
While these activities pass the time, they also increase the novel’s tension. They give ammunition to French commoners, who see l’Austrichienne, their queen, as an extravagant woman who buys expensive diamond necklaces while they do not even have sufficient flour to bake bread.
Gradually the French, who at first loved Marie Antoinette, make her the scapegoat for the nation’s bankruptcy. In actuality, the nobles’ refusal to pay tax causes the country’s financial difficulties, not the queen, who cuts her spending when difficult times ensue.
Her enemies spread rumors that she is having a lesbian relationship with her friends: Princess Lamballe (who sacrifices her own life to be with her queen) and the Duchesse De Polignac (a spendthrift who wrangles vast sums of money from the royal household).
But the rumor-mongers don’t suspect Toinette’s relationship with the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen, which, according to their letters, was much more than a loyal friendship. Inserting quotes from those letters into the story, Naslund pumps up the drama and adds depth to the characters, so as the tragic circumstances unfold, one sees that the queen is not an emotional lightweight. She is a complex individual capable of intense feelings.
Although Marie Antoinette becomes Queen of France during the years leading to the French Revolution, there’s little of politics here. Generally, she does not directly experience affairs of state; they are handled by her husband. But she does experience the effects of those affairs, and like her husband, she is convicted of treason.
This carefully drawn portrait begins as an idealistic Austrian princess discards her heritage to throw herself into the arms of a new country. It ends 23 years later, as a forbearing French queen learns how dangerously fickle those arms can be.
Diane Scharper is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a professor at Towson University. She is editing a collection of memoirs to be published in 2007.
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Abundance
A Novel of Marie Antoinette
By Sena Jeter Naslund
William Morrow, 530 pages, $26.95
