The Queen's Lover

April 23, 2012
Du Plessix Gray, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer for 1998’s At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, delivers a French Revolution–era tale of love, treachery, and death, reminiscent of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. This well-researched historical follows Count Axel von Fersen, a Swedish nobleman, as he meets a young Marie Antoinette, falls in love, is swept away to war in America, and returns to the Continent to discover the patrician world he once knew—and those he loved within it—facing imminent ruin. Structured as the memoirs of the late von Fersen, as compiled (with occasional supplementary chapters) by his sister Sophie, the drama of the story is mediated (and slightly diminished) by the form. However, the emotional tumult of the count’s strained affair with Marie Antoinette, as well as the cultural unrest in America, Sweden, and France, are nevertheless bold and moving. Fans of history—both true and fictional—will revel in du Plessix Gray’s vivid evocation of turbulent times, though readers accustomed to in-the-moment action may lament the narrative remove of the faux memoir. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit.

July 1, 2012
Du Plessix Gray attempts to fictionalize the love of Marie Antoinette's life, without much success. Axel von Fersen, a Swedish count, first meets the young Austrian princess Marie Antoinette, recently wed to the future king of France, at the Paris Opera. The handsome courtier and the graceful, sensitive dauphine instantly form a lifelong bond. Fersen, a diplomat and soldier, embarks with Lafayette's armies to aid the American colonists in their revolutionary war, and his letters to his beloved sister Sophie detail these adventures. But eventually Fersen, after an exhausting grand tour in the service of Sweden's flamboyant King Gustavus, reunites with Antoinette. The queen's marriage, celibate for years due to a minor sexual dysfunction, is finally consummated and Antoinette is now a mother. As Louis XVI occupies himself with hunting and gluttony, Antoinette and Fersen tryst at her private lodge, Le Petit Trianon, and in secret quarters in the palace of Versailles. Soon, the revolt of the French populace ends this idyll. Fersen attempts to help the king and queen flee the revolution by smuggling the royal family out of Paris. Unfortunately, their escape is aborted, thanks in large part to the naivete of Louis and the tardiness of Antoinette. As Fersen takes refuge in Belgium, the king and queen are held in progressively more restrictive settings until they are condemned to die. Although this is an absorbing and vivid expose of the many missteps that led to the downfall of Louis and a sympathetic portrayal of the young queen and her noble endurance of the sadistic treatment that preceded her execution, it is not a novel. The narration, shared by Sophie and Fersen, hews too slavishly to events documented by contemporaneous accounts. All is summary; there are virtually no scenes imagining the characters' lives; they never transcend their historically verifiable roles. Not even the last section, a grim recitation of Sweden's own anti-royalist upheavals (leading to Fersen's slaughter by an angry mob), realizes its dramatic potential. An accurate but lifeless retelling.

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January 1, 2012

This queen is Marie Antoinette, and her lover is Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen. The rigorous and penetrating du Plessix Gray should do for Louis XVI's France what Hillary Mantel did for Henry VIII's England in Wolf Hall, that is, make real art, distinctively her own, of an already fascinating time, place, and cast of characters.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2012
The preface to Gray's new novel purports to have been written by the sister of Count Axel von Fersen, a Swedish nobleman known to history primarily as the famous, grand, handsome lover of France's ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette. The sister posits that what follows her preface is the journal kept by her brother, which invites us into his personal life, specifically, and importantly, into his dealings with the French royal family, especially his relationship with the queen. The sister also admits to interjecting commentary on her own, chapters that would have been too painful for him to compose, which, of course, is Gray's creative device for rounding out, for the reader's interest and full understanding, Fersen's adventures with additional information he would not have known. Readers will pay closest attention to how and in what situations Fersen views the queenbut also, and not incidentally, to his reactions to the king. He sees through the former's reputation for emptiness and the latter's for dullness to give us a balanced view of what transpired within the mirrored halls of Versailles. By also making us privy to all his political escapades back in his native Sweden, and there were plenty, the story broadens into a wider picture of European monarchy in transition. (For more background on the writing of this book, see the Story behind the Story.)(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)