Clueless in Versailles

AT a reading of his Civil War novel “The March,” E.L. Doctorow was asked by a teacher in the audience what he thought about his book being used in a history course. Doctorow replied that if he wanted to learn about Russia during Napoleonic times, he would turn to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” far more readily than to a textbook.

I’m with him there. But not all historical fiction is as good as “War and Peace” or “The March.”

The matter is more ticklish when weighing the relative merits of biographies and what Irving Stone, the master of the biographical novel, did in such books as the immensely popular “Lust for Life” (about Vincent van Gogh) and “The Agony and the Ecstasy” (about Michelangelo).

Sena Jeter Naslund’s “Abundance” is an account of Marie Antoinette’s life and times from the French queen’s generally clueless point of view. The question is, what is gained by novelization -- in accessibility, enjoyment, atmosphere, understanding of character? More pointedly, what is lost -- especially compared with, say, Antonia Fraser’s rich and readable 2001 biography, “Marie Antoinette: The Journey”? (If you open up the comparison to other media, you can add Sofia Coppola’s new movie or a recent PBS documentary on the queen, but that’s a much broader question.)

In her wonderfully original 1999 novel, “Ahab’s Wife,” Naslund took a passing mention in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and imagined a free-spirited heroine whose adventurous life encompasses several important 19th century social issues, including slavery and women’s rights. She inverts that process in “Abundance,” where she starts with a famous, amply documented historical figure and tries to make her sad story come alive by giving her a voice. She diverges from the historical record as little as possible, but her decision to bind herself in a straitjacket of history -- shying away from invented ancillary characters or events -- deprives her of fiction’s liberating potential. It’s a potential that T.C. Boyle has tapped so effectively in his novels about 20th century monomaniacs, including “The Inner Circle” (about Alfred Kinsey), and that Tracy Chevalier mined in her novel about Vermeer, “Girl With a Pearl Earring.”

Like Fraser, Naslund presents a sympathetic take on the wife of Louis XVI, a woman blamed by some for the downfall of the French monarchy. The novel begins in 1770, when Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sends her youngest daughter, 14-year-old Maria Antonia, to seal an alliance between Austria and France by marrying 15-year-old Louis-Auguste, the grandson of King Louis XV.

At the Rhine border, partway into her three-week journey, Toinette, as Naslund’s heroine prefers to be called, sheds her Austrian identity, language and clothes to emerge, attired in French finery, as the still girlishly flat-chested but eager-to-please Dauphine Marie Antoinette. Her imperial, imperious mother has prepared her well for her new role, down to details about what to expect on her wedding night.

But her corpulent, somnolent teenage groom deviates from the script by failing to consummate the marriage. It’s a humiliating failure discussed from Versailles to Vienna, as the royals have no privacy. For distraction and amusement, Marie Antoinette throws herself into frivolous partying and gambling, along with exorbitant redecorating and couture.

Amid “the minuet of manners” that is court life, Toinette forms friendships both wise (with the pure but dull Princesse de Lamballe, whose head is later tauntingly paraded before her on a stake) and risky (with the self-interested Duchesse de Polignac). Hungry for the love and approval that her mother withheld from her, she attempts to ingratiate herself with everyone.

Naslund devotes pages to stultifying court protocol and intrigue as filtered through her protagonist’s unenlightened consciousness. Thousands of words are lavished on royal portraits -- unseen here but easily accessed elsewhere, including those painted by Marie Antoinette’s favorite artist, Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun.

Louis XVI emerges as a sweet-tempered and well-intentioned but indecisive monarch who is more interested in hunting and gluttony than in addressing his nation’s mounting unrest. “Abundance” can be read in part as a cautionary tale about what happens when leaders are seriously out of touch with their constituents.

Although Marie Antoinette’s story has a well-known outcome, the novel gains momentum -- and elicits a grim fascination -- after the Revolution, when its heroine becomes France’s doomed but dignified scapegoat. To add spice to the first several hundred pages, Naslund plays up Toinette’s obsession with consummating her marriage. Time after time, she gets her hopes up, only to have to report her failure to her disapproving mother yet again. The empress urges in letters, “More caresses, my dear, more caresses!” In the end, it takes seven years -- and some instruction from Marie Antoinette’s brother Emperor Joseph II of Austria -- to right the situation. Four children follow, although only the eldest, Marie-Therese, survives to adulthood -- and an unhappy one, at that.

In an attempt to make a connection to classic tragedy, Naslund hits the themes of theater and role-playing hard, dividing the book into five acts. For Toinette, all the world is indeed a stage. “I play the role so well that I believe in it myself,” she comments about her early attempts to charm her dull husband with delighted chatter. When the royal family faces the rioting masses at Versailles, the balcony is “our stage,” and Toinette thanks her children afterward for “playing their parts so well.” Disguising themselves as commoners when they attempt to flee, she wonders, “How can I play my role -- that is to say -- how can one maintain her identity, without the proper costume?”

Naslund’s queen pays lip service to wanting a simple life, yet she sees nothing ironic about spending a fortune to create a faux “peasant play-village” when real peasants are starving. She justifies her taste for jewel-encrusted Sevres porcelain as a desire to support the industry. Similarly, she sees nothing wrong with the fact that court expenses are 6% of France’s annual budget.

It’s tricky to tell a complex story from the point of view of a character, however sympathetically portrayed, who is lacking in self-awareness, never mind political understanding. Because this story is so familiar, we yearn either for inventive new angles or for the details and perspectives provided in a full-fledged biography. Reading “Abundance” is like being led through a museum by a sweet, well-meaning docent who just doesn’t understand the fuss about abstract art. *