Confessions of Marie Antoinette: A Novel

by Juliet Grey

Overview

A novel for fans of Philippa Gregory and Michelle Moran, Confessions of Marie Antoinette blends rich historical detail with searing drama, bringing to life the first years of the French Revolution and the final days of the legendary French queen.
 
Versailles, 1789. As the burgeoning rebellion reaches the palace gates, Marie Antoinette finds her privileged and peaceful life swiftly upended by violence. Once her loyal subjects, the people of France now seek to overthrow the crown, placing the heirs of the Bourbon dynasty in mortal peril.
 
Displaced to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the royal family is propelled into the heart of the Revolution. There, despite a few staunch allies, they are surrounded by cunning spies and vicious enemies. Yet despite the political and personal threats against her, Marie Antoinette remains, above all, a devoted wife and mother, standing steadfastly by her husband, Louis XVI, and protecting their young son and daughter. And though the queen secretly attempts to arrange her family’s rescue from the clutches of the rebels, she finds that they can neither outrun the dangers encircling them nor escape their shocking fate.

Advance praise for Confessions of Marie Antoinette
 
“Juliet Grey brings her trilogy on Marie Antoinette’s life to a triumphant finale, depicting with sensitivity and compelling vividness the collapse of a bygone glamorous world and the courageous transformation of its ill-fated queen.”—C. W. Gortner, author of The Queen’s Vow
 
“A heartfelt journey with Marie Antoinette in her wrenching last days . . . We see the end looming that is still veiled from her eyes, and knowing her hopes are in vain makes it all the more poignant. Far from the ‘let them eat cake’ woman of legend, Juliet Grey’s Marie Antoinette reveals herself to be a person we can admire for her courage, her loyalty, and her love of her family and her adopted country, France.”—Margaret George
 
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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345523907
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/24/2013
Series:	Marie Antoinette , #3
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	304,102
Product dimensions:	5.34(w) x 7.98(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Juliet Grey is the author of Becoming Marie Antoinette and Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow. She has extensively researched European royalty and is a particular devotee of Marie Antoinette, as well as a classically trained professional actress with numerous portrayals of virgins, vixens, and villainesses to her credit. She and her husband divide their time between New York City and Washington, D.C.

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Excerpted from "Confessions of Marie Antoinette"
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Copyright © 2013 Juliet Grey.
Excerpted by permission of Random House Publishing Group.
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Reading Group Guide

1. It’s almost axiomatic that History demands a scapegoat when something goes wrong. In Marie Antoinette’s case, the “arrogant Austrian,” the “selfish spendthrift,” made the perfect target for the revolutionary demagogues. How often throughout history has the outsider, the “other,” been blamed for the failure, for example, of a nation’s economy? Discuss examples, past and present.

2. Historians have debated for more than two centuries as to whether Marie Antoinette had a love affair with Count Axel von Fersen, and if so, how far it went on a scale of platonic to sexual. Do you think they had a relationship? If so, how intense do you think it was? Do you think Louis knew about it? Do you think he forgave Marie Antoinette? Do you think she forgave herself?

3. During the ill-fated flight to the frontier on the night of June 20–21, 1791, why do you think Louis insisted that Axel leave the royal family at Bondy, even though Axel was the mastermind of the plot to escape? Tragically, there was a domino effect of mishaps and screwups with the plans from that point on. Do you think that if Louis had allowed Count von Fersen to remain on the coachman’s box, the family might have made it to safety?

4. The French nicknamed Louis XVI “Le Désiré” when he began his reign. He ended up deposed and executed. Do you think Louis was a good ruler? Why or why not?

5. If you had lived during the years 1789–1794 would you have been a revolutionary, a royalist, or more like the characterization of the young sculptress Louison Chabry, who was -neither wealthy nor impoverished, and who struggled to comprehend what the massive social and political changes were all about and tried to make sense of them?

6. What do you make of the fact that some of the most bloodthirsty revolutionaries, specifically Jacques Hébert and Maximilien Robespierre, dressed not like the sans-culottes they identified with politically, but like the aristocrats they condemned? Discuss this in conjunction with the numerous condemnations of Marie Antoinette’s ostentatious wardrobe and the accusations of her extravagant expenditures on it.

7. Biographers and historians have claimed that Madame Royale, Marie Antoinette’s daughter Marie Thérèse, whom she nicknamed Mousseline, was as a child, very cold to her mother and as an adult extremely unforgiving of Marie Antoinette’s character. Marie Thérèse’s own memoirs are indeed not very charitable toward her mother. What do you make of this and why do you think Madame Royale felt this way? Do you think her feelings are justified? Do you believe Marie Antoinette loved her daughter as much as she did her sons?

8. In August 1791, in a letter to the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, Marie Antoinette penned a remarkable sentence, which those who believe her to have been insensible of the turmoil around her might find to be surprisingly self-aware. She wrote, “Tribulation first makes one realize what one is.” What does that statement mean to you in light of her life’s journey and where it had led her by this point? How did tribulation both affect and change Marie Antoinette? If you were in her shoes, how might you have coped with the same tribulations?

Editorial Reviews

The third installment of Grey’s Marie Antoinette trilogy, following Days of Splendor, Days of Sorrow, captures the final years of Louis XVI’s reign through the eyes of the legendary Austrian woman who became the French queen and never actually said, “Let them eat cake.” The author’s extensive research shows in her detailed reconstruction of the political machinations that, over time, diminished the King’s powers and turned the once-proud and ostentatious royal family into prisoners, stripped of dignity and privacy. Near the end, even their bread is crumbled before being served, to prevent anyone from smuggling messages inside, but Marie still manages to put on a brave face. As counterpoint, Grey depicts Parisian sculptress Louison Chabry, a real-life figure who encountered the French royals in October 1789 after participating in the renowned Women’s March on Versailles. Amid the increasingly zealous and bloodthirsty revolutionaries, Chabry offers a more reasoned response, balancing her passion for change with compassion for the rulers who she believes are not the despicable tyrants portrayed in the rhetoric of the day. Historians will continue to debate whether Marie Antoinette was friend or foe to the French people, but Grey succeeds in bringing humanity and grace to the controversial queen. Agent: Irene Goodman, the Irene Goodman Agency. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Advance praise for Confessions of Marie Antoinette
 
“Juliet Grey brings her trilogy on Marie Antoinette’s life to a triumphant finale, depicting with sensitivity and compelling vividness the collapse of a bygone glamorous world and the courageous transformation of its ill-fated queen.”—C. W. Gortner, author of The Queen’s Vow
 
“A heartfelt journey with Marie Antoinette in her wrenching last days . . . We see the end looming that is still veiled from her eyes, and knowing her hopes are in vain makes it all the more poignant. Far from the ‘let them eat cake’ woman of legend, Juliet Grey’s Marie Antoinette reveals herself to be a person we can admire for her courage, her loyalty, and her love of her family and her adopted country, France.”—Margaret George

From the Publisher

2013-09-01
The final volume of Grey's Marie Antoinette trilogy (Becoming Marie Antoinette, 2011, etc.) grimly details the queen's sad and, to contemporary eyes, terribly unjust end. As a rabble invades the Palace of Versailles, Louis XVI still believes that his people wish him no harm. But his wife, Marie Antoinette, is more realistic: After years of being defamed by the French, ever since she was brought from Austria to marry Louis, she knows that the revolutionary mob's threats to have her head are no mere rhetoric. From the sacking of Versailles to the royals' removal to the Tuileries "for their own protection," the dismantling of the French monarchy is minutely dissected. Unfortunately, the depiction of outcomes we already know can be less than dramatic if suspense and conflict cannot somehow be generated, and here, they are not. The royal family's ill-fated escape attempt, engineered by Antoinette's paramour Axel von Fersen, is vividly reconstructed, as is every permutation of the revolutionary process as various political factions dispute whether or not the royals should remain in place as constitutional rulers, be banished, or, finally, be tried and executed. Time and again, Antoinette pins her hopes on Axel and on some of the secret loyalists among her guards and jailers, but these hopes are repeatedly dashed as the Parisians prove that their barbaric rampaging trumps the machinations of even the canniest demagogue or courtier. It is excruciating to read about the humiliations Antoinette is forced to endure: the massacre of her faithful retainers, the execution of Louis, and separation from her daughter and her son, the dauphin, who, beaten and starved, is "reeducated" to vilify her. It is almost with relief that readers witness Antoinette's own eventual march to the scaffold. Perhaps the tedium of this novel is partially due to the characterization of the queen herself. Despite all the indignities she suffers, she is never allowed to entertain or voice thoughts that are less than saintly and forgiving. An admirable if stiff portrait of a noble heart.

Kirkus Reviews