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According to this novel, much of what we think we know about Marie Antoinette is false, beginning with that famous line about letting the peasants eat cake. Sena Jeter Naslund's foreword to this "imaginative re-creation" informs us that there's no evidence that this Queen of France ever uttered those words. However, we do know how the story ends, and that grisly fate hangs over the reader's experience of her fantastic life story like a guillotine ready to drop.
As in her earlier novel, AHAB'S WIFE, Naslund employs fascinating historical detail to draw us in and authentic emotion to keep us hooked. In the hands of lesser writers, some historical novels about royalty plumb the scandalous, grasping behavior of nobility merely to shock us, to assure us that while they may be kings, queens and courtiers, their motivations are no better and in fact maybe worse than the rest of us. But Naslund renders Marie Antoinette compellingly human, seeking not to titillate but to enlighten.
This first person narrative begins with the Austrian princess Maria Antonia's rebirth as a French citizen, Marie Antoinette, on a neutral island on the Rhine, where she is handed over to French guardians, never to return to her homeland. She was a girl raised to be a queen. While not among the oldest of her fourteen siblings, she was apparently handy when her mother, the Empress of Austria, desired to cement relations with France and so arranged her marriage at age 14 to 15-year-old Louis Auguste, the Dauphin of France (not before straightening the girl's teeth "with wires," Marie remembers). Her mother has told her how to anticipate "all the events of my life to come," but the savvy reader recognizes this as a young girl's hopeful naiveté. For literature's sake we must be glad of the impossibility of such a task.
"Toinette," as her friends call her, charms everyone, the Dauphin and his grandfather the King included. Her new life at Versailles is sumptuous and exciting, tempered by the knowledge that in her first duty to France --- that of providing heirs to the throne --- she cannot succeed without her husband who, while tender and respectful in bed, for years is reluctant to do what is necessary to impregnate her. Since there seems to be nothing she can do about this, she throws herself into friendships, fashion and gambling. Yet she is thoughtful and, as Naslund presents her, somewhat of a philosopher. Here she is, now a Queen, while stealing a half hour of solitude before her first child is finally born: "I test time by counting to sixty, and yes, those moments are gone, and another minute is here to be counted out. Such is life! Such is life: the passing of moments, none more or less real than another, for all their difference in import. The moment it takes to move my eyes from left to right is as real as a moment of love or fear."
ABUNDANCE spans nearly 25 years of alliances, betrayals and failing political fortunes, and ends as we know it must. If we extend Toinette's ruminations on moments to lives, perhaps this queen's life is not of more import than those of the Parisian fishwives clamoring in the end for her death. But by that time we've come to admire the impetuous, loyal queen, and her bravery compliments this intelligent and moving literary portrait.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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