The "Widow Capet" resurrected

As he knows do it every time he tackles a biography - artist, writer, historical personage - Zweig displays a literary power to wake the dead. Under his pen incomparable passion and rigor, psychology and height of view, he shakes the basket of the history and the past suddenly reappears before our eyes forgetful. And, as always, his passion is totally contagious: one believes initiate a history book, a factual biography, we find ourselves engulfed in a vortex. We start by shelling a few pages, and then we are surprised to devour the 500 pages pad in a few days, a little stunned, even troubled.

It must be said that these immortal pages unfolds one of the most important chapters of world history: the fall of the Old Regime and the Revolution, bloody prelude to the world we all live today. In this wild tumult that borders more than once pure barbarism, a character, a woman will play alone and despite her, by his own life, this reversal of history: Marie Antoinette.

Any Zweig's biography becomes a kind of crescendo of pain, loss and loneliness. The "Queen of rococo" pass the wildest pleasures the most terrible suffering, the glut or total destitution, in an escalation that, like the Revolution, seems endless. And frivolous, for whom it was at first little sympathy as she seems to be little more than an ancestor of Paris Hilton, acquires an aura; its depths are revealed, the girl gives way to the woman, the player to the mother, and ingenuous expensive - if not downright silly - the Trianon, the incomparable martyrdom of the Revolution. Awakening is unfortunately too late: all the bad decisions have already been taken, bad voices were heard, and Archduchess can not stop the ruthless wheel of fortune.

Meanwhile, the episodes follow one another: the tragicomic scenes with the cataleptic Louis XVI, kind of spectrum that will never live for sleeping, hunting and feasting, even at the threshold of death (his "diary" is a nonchalance monument); the affair of the necklace, so incredible that no novelist could have imagined; and especially the passion of love with Axel Fersen, where magnificent lovers outweigh the tragic memory of the beloved into the afterlife.

Masterful fresco story of the end of a world and tearing decline of a life devoted to extreme, this is one of the greatest successes of Stefan Zweig as a biographer and writer.