By Stefan Zweig

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

I’m not sure what to do about Marie Antoinette.

I realize that there isn’t, strictly speaking, anything to actually be done about her at this point – our decision-tree was pruned dramatically when she was guillotined. But she is one of the more polarizing figures in European history (which does not lack for them), and she was killed during one of its most morally complicated upheavals; it feels incumbent on even a casual consumer of history to have an opinion about her.

Still, making a close read of Marie Antoinette’s life wouldn’t have felt urgent except that one of my favorite writers, Stefan Zweig, wrote a biography of her: ‘Marie Antoinette: the Portrait of an Average Woman’, based largely on Antoinette’s own letters.  It’s a curious project: despite its title, it is a sympathetic biography (let’s not forget that, on the spectrum of things said about Marie Antoinette over the years, ‘average’ is positively kindly), even a love letter of sorts, written by Zweig to a woman who, despite her imperfections, seems to have captured his heart centuries too late.

It’s always interesting watching a biographer try and force an uncooperative subject into their narrative mold. Often, biographies of this sort feel less like historical documents than rhetorical exercises, advocacy rather than education. Reading ‘Marie Antoinette’ felt more than anything like listening to the closing arguments of a good defense lawyer. It was familiar – I had a similar experience a few years ago reading Antonia Fraser’s biography of Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots, which was a long and heroic attempt to make a real dimwit seem like a sophisticated, evolved, and politically subtle monarch.

Likewise, even Zweig’s best efforts can’t hide the fact that Marie Antoinette was a bizarrely spoiled young woman who, for most of her life, spent her limited mental energies entirely on the superficial and, particularly, on herself (the image of her cavorting in her “peasant hut” in Petite Trianon is impossible to forget).  It is also clear that her own stupidity and cupidity contributed to the manner of her death: despite receiving a great deal of very sound advice from a number of qualified people (not least her mother, the forbidding and formidable Maria Teresa of Austria), she persisted in acting in an extravagantly self-destructive way.

But I don’t always listen to my mother, either, and if Marie Antoinette was a self-involved moron, she was also more complicated than I had realized.  She loved her children (not a universal trait among European monarchs), and seems to have had abiding and deep friendships.  At the end of her life, she displayed great bravery and great composure.

She also, at least according to Zweig, had one great and lasting love, Axel Comte de Fersen.  The two of them, the Queen and the Swedish nobleman, loved each other for many years; Fersen even orchestrated the royal family’s attempted escape from the Tuileries.  Fersen never married, writing to his sister, “I cannot belong to the one woman to whom I should like to belong and who loves me, so I will not belong to anyone.”

I certainly do not believe that receiving Great Love makes you a Great Person. But Zweig wisely realizes that Fersen is Antoinette’s best advocate, and devotes a lot of space to their love story. In fact, it is quite difficult to read Fersen’s letters and not feel your heart soften towards the woman who inspired them:

“She for whom I lived, since I have never ceased to love her…she for whom I would have sacrificed everything…she whom I loved so dearly, and for whom I would have given my life a thousand times – is no more.  God, why have you crushed me thus…I do not know how I go on living, I do not know how to support my suffering, which is intense and which nothing can ever efface.  Always she will be present in my memory and I shall never cease to bewail her…The sole object of my interest has ceased to exist; she alone meant everything to me…I care to speak of nothing but her, to recall the happy moments of my life.  Alas, nothing is left of them but memories which, however, I shall preserve so long as my life lasts.”

Fersen was devastated by Antoinette’s execution in 1793, and never really recovered, though he lived for nearly two more decades. He died in 1810, beaten to death by an angry mob that believed he had murdered the heir to the throne of Sweden.

Antoinette is an easy historical villain. She inhabited such extraordinary privilege before her death that it seems almost perverse to work to give her depth, post-mortem. Better to spend that effort investigating the lives of the millions of unremembered poor whose suffering funded her obliviousness. As a moral project, I’m not sure that a defense of Marie Antoinette should be a high priority for anyone. But Zweig is a literary author, not a moralist. And he is so clearly fond of Antoinette, which gives me pause. I respect him too much not to pay attention to his affections.

In the end, I’m not convinced by Zweig, but I am impressed with the exercise. In a way, Zweig’s project is no less romantic than Fersen’s: the construction of a monument to the woman they both seem to have loved, in their ways. If I am not moved by Antoinette herself, I am moved by their love.

And that’s not the worst fate in the world, is it? To be redeemed not by our own actions, but by the devotion of those that know and love us? Not a bad memorial, in the end.