He is pompous, egomaniacal, and such a snob that there are places where you feel Gray struggling to tell his tale with a straight face. My problem was with Fersen, a cad worthy of comparison with Don Giovanni. Gray’s depiction of the royal couple’s last months - from the botched flight from Versailles and Louis’s trial and beheading, followed by the subsequent nine months before Marie’s execution - prove the amplitude of the historical novel at its best. “It is strange that the mildest monarch who ever sat on the French throne, one who was precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom one can not charge with one criminal or cruel act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants who ever disgraced the annals of human nature.” With a very light hand Gray enhances the Fersens’ narrative with some salient quotations, such as the observation from a friend’s wife that Marie Antoinette’s manner “had a kind of affability which did not allow us to forget she was a queen yet persuaded us that she’d forgotten all about it.” Or, when Louis was brought to trial and we learn that Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador, wrote to Thomas Jefferson: Gray does a wonderful job of allowing us a peek into their personal lives, and they come across as believable, human, flawed, and, in the end, lovable, especially Louis, who was careless about his person, naive but genuinely kind, and interested in scholarly pursuits. What surprised me was my own sympathy for Marie and Louis. It similarly details the conditions that led to the downfall of Louis and his queen.īecause this novel is not only about these French monarchs but also about this Swedish aristocrat, the last part of the book reveals more about Fersen’s feckless pursuit of love, his fall from grace in Sweden, and his own ghastly fate. The narrative tracks Fersen through his journey with Lafayette’s forces to aid the American revolutionaries, his adventures for Sweden’s King Gustavus, his eventual reunion with Marie, and his assumption of the role of loyal family friend. Gray, a biographer and novelist, based the book on Fersen’s journals and correspondence, and she seeds it with quotations from his papers.
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