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Zweig is probably one of the biographers that I admire most, his great research work is always combined with a serious analysis of the selected characters, all in his pen exudes sensitivity, deep desire to understand the human, his life, his career, his fall, his success. The biography of Marie Antoinette is not an exception and is a wonderful way to get acquainted not only with the Queen but with his entourage and his time.
The book begins with the arrival of Marie Antoinette teenager in France. Its popularity is high among the French people, which puts the beautiful blonde girl in hopes of a peaceful and beneficial royalty, but already foreshadow problems: King Louis XVI is a silent young man, introverted and complexed because due to a physical problem that will not be treated as seven years after her marriage, it can not make love to his wife. Marie Antoinette, daughter to live and sensitive to beautiful things and beautiful people, frustrated by the lack and disappointment, by the gossip of the court that are going well, takes refuge in the mundane and big spending. She is a young, delicate and intelligent woman who will never take the time to exploit its intellectual possibilities when necessary, except when it's too late. Thus Zweig, very influenced by the writings of Freud, sees this suzerain, delicate, intelligent, beautiful and faithful but unfortunately made in the image of his time, even in light of thought, even in its excessive hairstyles roccoco wish to. She will spend a fortune in land Trianon, her little meringue castle outside the grand palace of Versailles, it will cover its basest and most flattering courtiers gold, will hate the people by ignoring it completely (the Queen, light and unconscious, never interested small people of his country) and will take in the nets of a sordid affair, the famous case of the necklace, too long and complicated to summarize here, but still is- there it is, according to Zweig, this plot will be the straw that breaks the camel and carry the queen and the king at the scaffold.
It seems that at every opportunity to take another path, to turn things in his favor, Marie Antoinette, who exercises considerable powers of persuasion on the ambivalent Louis XVI, at every opportunity, therefore, Marie Antoinette chose the wrong track, listen to those that should not. We want to intervene, we are frustrated by the lack of foresight, lucidity. The arrest of the king and his family, their forced stay in the Tuileries, and their imprisonment in the Temple, the sentencing to death of the king, the trial of the "Widow Capet" and the tragic end of Marie Antoinette, betrayed by his relatives and the nobility at large, we live all in a terrible suspense with Zweig, this life surpasses a life of romance, and one wonders how Zweig has been caught to love Marie Antoinette, how we the makes it more friendly than it was, how much of the novel he brings in his analysis of venal character that we studied at school ... And yet, for this biography, Zweig relied heavily on the archives of the Austrian Empire and the correspondence of the only man that Marie Antoinette loved passionately, Count Axel Fersen, noble and right if there is one. Zweig was the first to have access to the correspondence between the queen and her lover, hidden very long correspondence by the descendants of Fersen. It is mainly the correspondence which the reader will understand the analysis of Zweig, his way of seeing the Queen. When we do not doubt, the sensitivity Zweig ready to Queen may seem exaggerated, romanticized. After reading some letters from Marie Antoinette to Count Fersen, one realizes that the exaggeration of Zweig is less, sovereign fallen was a noblewoman of his time, fragile, beautiful, sensitive but too light unconscious and too long for changes that watched France. It is a tragic story we reported Zweig, a life in excess of opulence and excess in horror at the end of everything ... Read ...!