The Queen's Lover: A Novel
Written by Francine Du Plessix-Gray
Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Historical fiction of the highest order, The Queen's Lover reveals the untold love affair between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel Von Fersen and Marie Antoinette
The Queen's Lover begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing Swedish nobleman Count Axel Von Fersen first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year old Dauphine Marie Antoinette, wife of the shy, reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a life-long romance that will span the course of the French Revolution.
The affair begins in friendship, however, and Fersen quickly becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. As he roams through the halls of Versailles and visits the private haven of Petit Trianon, Fersen discovers the deepest secrets of the court, even learning about the startling erotic details of Marie-Antoinette's marriage to Louis XVI. But the events of the American Revolution tear Fersen away. Moved by the colonists' fight for freedom, he is one of the very first to enlist in the French contingent of troops that will fight for America's independence.
When he returns, he finds France on the brink of disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their young children--Marie-Thérèse and the Dauphin Louis-Charles--whom many suspect to be Fersen's son. The failed evasion attempt eventually leads to a grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating final days in captivity before the King and Queen face the guillotine.
Grieving his lost love after he returns to his native Stockholm, Fersen begins to sense the effects of the French Revolution in his own homeland. Royalists are now targets of the people's ire, and the carefree, sensuous world of his youth is fast vanishing. Fersen, who has been named Grand Marshal of Sweden, is incapable of realizing that centuries of tradition have disappeared, and he pays dearly for his naïveté, losing his life at the hands of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal member of the aristocracy.
Scion of Sweden's most esteemed nobility, Fersen came to be seen as an enemy of the homeland he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent speed with which the events of the 18th century transformed European culture. Expertly researched and deeply imagined, The Queen's Lover offers a fresh vision of of the French Revolution and of the French royal family, as told through the love story that was at its center.
Francine Du Plessix-Gray
Joachim Neugroschel has won three PEN translation awards and the French-American translation prize. He has also translated Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, both for Penguin Classics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Francine du Plessix Gray is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of numerous essays and books, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She lives with her husband, the painter Cleve Gray.
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Reviews for The Queen's Lover
5 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I thought the concept of this novel was very intriguing, but I struggled to read it and kept thinking that the story could have been better told. For those who don't know, the Swedish count Axel von Fersen was an alleged lover of the tragic French Queen Marie Antoinette and not unlike the French Queen Axel suffered a tragic end. Fersen's life is certainly worthy of a novel, but I felt this one failed to live up to the task. First of all, the novel is told in the first person from Axel's point of view (with some chapters narrator by his sister Sophie), but I just couldn't imagine a man telling his story and using the kind of language employed in this novel. In addition, as a character Axel emerges as a kind of frivolous dandy and womanizer. He professes to love Marie Antoinette deeply, but also describes other concurrent affairs and mistresses. He also makes a number of political and diplomatic missteps which seem to reveal him as a vain and self-centered man. By the end of this novel, I didn't really care much for Axel von Fersen and I must admit I skimmed through his death scene (it didn't seem like that much of a tragedy).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Based on the actual papers and letters of Count Axel von Fersen, the Swedish diplomat with a romantic attachment to Marie Antoinette, this novel is written in the form of a memoir edited and supplemented by Fersen’s sister Sophie. Sophie’s few chapters allow author Francine Du Plessix Gray to convey information Fersen himself couldn’t or wouldn’t, his own death at the hands of an anti-aristocratic mob for instance, but most of the story is Fersen’s bittersweet memories many years after the events surrounding the French Revolution. It was Fersen who arranged the French royal family’s daring but ultimately unsuccessful escape attempt when revolutionaries forcibly moved them to Paris. Before that he was a regular visitor to Versailles, Marie Antoinette’s opulent but foul-smelling palace home, and he spent happy hours lingering with the queen at her private retreat, La Petit Trianon. Fersen wasn’t in France when Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette were condemned to death and guillotined, those events while still gripping are written at a distance because he’s reporting what he learned rather than what he saw and did, but his outsider’s perspective has the advantage of being more pan-European and it’s fascinating to have a glimpse of how other counties and royal houses are reacting to the upheavals in France. Catherine the Great comes into play a few times, and there is a lot about the changing circumstances of the royal families in Sweden and Austria. The charged ideas and cultural transformations behind French Revolution continued to reverberate through Europe, its effects leading to Fersen’s vicious murder in his native Sweden almost twenty years later.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The life story of Marie Antoinette fascinates many a lover of historical fiction. One of the many questions not completely answered throughout time is whether she had an affair with Count Axel von Fersen of Sweden. This book reads as Count von Fersen's memoir - with some additions from his beloved sister Sophie.Count Axel wrote a long stream of letters and kept a diary so there is quite a record of his thoughts from his lifetime. Marie Antoinette's correspondence did not survive quite as intact so while there are tantalizing teasers as to a relationship between the two there is nothing definitive to prove that one existed. But such are the building blocks of historical fiction.This is definitely Count von Fersen's story and perhaps a third of it (?) encompasses his relationship with Marie Antoinette. The rest details his travels to America to help in the Revolution, a jaunt with Gustavus of Sweden, and his life after Marie Antoinette had been killed. I still cannot decide after having read this book whether I am supposed to like Count von Fersen, despise him or just be disgusted by him. I suppose that is the sign of a good writer - letting her character speak for himself without dressing him up for current times because from all I can discern the count was a man who did not realize that his times were a changin' as the song goes. He stuck to a code that had outlived his society and he paid a severe price for it. He also seemed to have been somewhat of a pig when it came to women and rather proud of his conquests.So, where does that leave me?Educated, interested in learning more, repulsed? Yes, all three of these. Ms. du Plessix Gray spares nothing with her character nor with her writing style to bring this somewhat pivotal individual to life in this book. Whether or not von Fersen slept with Marie Antoinette or not he did have a deep relationship with the royal family and was responsible for the arrangements for their almost escape from France. I learned quite a bit about the count from this book. It was an interesting way to present it. Quite a bit of it is Fersen's own words from his letters and diary entries. It is perhaps, though, misnamed as it is more about Fersen the man than Fersen the Queen's lover.