Beautiful & Doomed

QUEEN OF FRANCE (434 pp.)--Andre Castelot--Harper ($5).

Marie Antoinette is one of the most written-about women in history--and for the best writing reasons. Her story combines two unfailing narrative ingredients: a fairy tale flashing with all the diamond glint of palaces and courtiers, a horror story of human cruelty and blood. The combination is so compelling that the life of the lovely Austrian princess who lived an infuriatingly frivolous life and died an endearingly brave death can be told and retold with remarkably little attention to the social upheaval that doomed her.

This is what Historian Andre Castelot chose to do in Queen of France. His biography of Marie Antoinette scarcely hints at the desperate conditions that bred the French Revolution and doomed the King and Queen. Castelot is interested only in the Queen, whose flawless complexion, royal bearing and gilded extravagance made her the peerless symbol of aristocratic absolutism. For a symbol is all that Marie Antoinette ever was; and even if she had never squandered millions on jewelry, chateaux, make-believe villages and elaborate carnivals, the deluge would still have come, forced from below by sufferings as real and deep as her own pleasures were artificial and shallow.

Playing at Marriage. With fresh insights drawn from heretofore unexamined documents and a scholarly reappraisal of well-known records, Author Castelot has more than justified still another biography of the hapless Queen. His book gives nothing in scholarship to Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette, the staple for U.S. readers for the last 24 years, and (due in part to an excellent translation by Denise Folliot) excels it in readability.

"The Austrian," as the French scornfully called her, was born in Vienna in 1755, daughter of the great Empress Maria Theresa. She first skips into history as a little girl "playing at marriage" in the Schoenbrunn Palace galleries with a little boy prodigy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She was only 14 when her mother and Louis XV sealed their Franco-Austrian alliance by giving her in marriage to the French Dauphin. "Has she any bosom?" asked the aging wolf Louis XV of the emissary who helped arrange the marriage. "Sire, I did not take the liberty of carrying my eyes so far," replied the courtier. "You are a fool," laughed the monarch. "It's the first thing one looks at in a woman."*

The young Louis, unlike his grandfather, was clumsy, timid and stolid. A slight physical deformity made him incapable of sexual intercourse; his only real vice was gluttony, his favorite daytime amusement mixing plaster with the palace workmen. When his gay, pretty bride stepped from her coach and gave him an airy kiss, the 15-year-old "booby" only shifted gawkily from foot to foot; after the nuptials, two days later, he seemed mainly interested in the huge wedding feast. "Don't overload your stomach tonight," warned the old King. "Why not?" replied the Dauphin. "I always sleep better after a good supper."

Too Young to Reign. Four years later, when Louis XV died and the young pair ascended the throne ("We are too young to reign," they sobbed when told of the King's death), the new Louis XVI was still hoping to consummate his marriage and father an heir. In Marie Antoinette he had found a tender, sympathetic wife who, though apparently never in love with him, did all she could to aid his efforts and alleviate his shame. Already half mother, half schoolteacher, adolescent Marie Antoinette began slowly to civilize her royal booby. And when at last a minor surgical operation ended their painful frustration, Louis XVI was not only devoted to his helpmate but stood in awe of her brisk self-confidence.

The simple Louis chafed under the restrictions of the formidable Versailles etiquette. And the lively Queen was bored to death by ceremonials so hopelessly elaborate that it was impossible for her to drink a glass of cold water: the royal glass was obliged to pass through so many hands that it was always tepid when it reached her lips.

She escaped by "forming a coterie of informal favorites, to whom she gave rich rewards and positions and with whom she danced, sported and gossiped, openly mocking the established grandees of Versailles. With young Axel Fersen, officer son of a Swedish general, she began an ardent love affair that lasted with mutual devotion to her dying day. Few details of their intimacy have survived, but of the truth of the romance, for a long time disputed, Castelot leaves no doubt.

Too Kind, Too Royal. The hungry population grew to detest the lively, impudent, extravagant Queen. The birth of a royal heir, though long awaited,/- did nothing to feed men's bellies, and the advancement of the Queen's favorites only worsened a government already too feeble to tackle the nation's economic problems. The clumsy Louis became increasingly ineffectual, too kind to be tough, too royal to be radical, and the weaker he grew the more boldly the Queen assumed his powers. When the Revolution began, many moderates took the side of the King and Queen, did all that was in their power to keep the extremists out of office. It was Marie Antoinette who betrayed these willing helpers, negotiating and parleying with them but despising them at heart and destroying their devotion with her intrigues and ineffectual cunning. One by one the moderates fell from power; then the toughest extremists took over and sealed the fate of the Queen they called "tigress thirsting for blood," "cannibal woman," "implacable harridan who for too long profaned the holy land of liberty with her pestilential breath."

"The slut was audacious and insolent to the end," remarked Hebert, one of the most ferocious of her enemies, when she was driven to the guillotine in a garbage cart. Minutes later the tumbrel, dripping with blood, carried the body to an unmarked plot of grass, where it was dumped onto the ground, and the severed head of Marie Antoinette placed between the legs. Author Castelot does not deny or defend his Queen's audacity and insolence, nor does he try to cover her multitude of sins. But by the end of his book, it is not the echoes of Marie Antoinette's duplicity and follies that ring in the reader's mind. It is the gruesome howls of human beings panting and thirsting for human blood.

*Among innumerable small details turned up by Castelot was a dressmaker's record of the Queen's measurements: waist 23 1/2, bust 43 1/2.

/-This first son died in 1789. A second, regarded by the royalists as Louis XVII after the execution of his father, reportedly died in prison in 1795 (aged ten), although rumors that he had been smuggled to safety sprang up immediately, and later inspired the claims of at least 40 pretenders. The Comte de Provence, younger brother of the guillotined King, was crowned as Louis XVIII after the downfall of Napoleon.

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