The Queen's Lover

A Novel

De: Francine Du Plessix Gray

Narrado por: Edoardo Ballerini

Historical fiction of the highest order, The Queen’s Lover reveals the untold love affair between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel Von Fersen and Marie Antoinette

The Queen’s Lover begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing Swedish nobleman Count Axel Von Fersen first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year old Dauphine Marie Antoinette, wife of the shy, reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a life-long romance that will span the course of the French Revolution.

The affair begins in friendship, however, and Fersen quickly becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. As he roams through the halls of Versailles and visits the private haven of Petit Trianon, Fersen discovers the deepest secrets of the court, even learning about the startling erotic details of Marie-Antoinette’s marriage to Louis XVI. But the events of the American Revolution tear Fersen away. Moved by the colonists’ fight for freedom, he is one of the very first to enlist in the French contingent of troops that will fight for America’s independence.

When he returns, he finds France on the brink of disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their young children--Marie-Thérèse and the Dauphin Louis-Charles--whom many suspect to be Fersen’s son. The failed evasion attempt eventually leads to a grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating final days in captivity before the King and Queen face the guillotine.

Grieving his lost love after he returns to his native Stockholm, Fersen begins to sense the effects of the French Revolution in his own homeland. Royalists are now targets of the people’s ire, and the carefree, sensuous world of his youth is fast vanishing. Fersen, who has been named Grand Marshal of Sweden, is incapable of realizing that centuries of tradition have disappeared, and he pays dearly for his naïveté, losing his life at the hands of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal member of the aristocracy.

Scion of Sweden’s most esteemed nobility, Fersen came to be seen as an enemy of the homeland he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent speed with which the events of the 18th century transformed European culture. Expertly researched and deeply imagined, The Queen’s Lover offers a fresh vision of of the French Revolution and of the French royal family, as told through the love story that was at its center.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“If you liked Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall — if you admired Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s close lens in The General in His Labyrinth — you will be richly rewarded by du Plessix Gray’s amalgam of history and drama. Read it for its insights on Versailles; read it for its eye-opening glimpses into an equally venal Stockholm. But read it, when all is said and done, for its heartbreakingly wistful romance."—Marie Arana, The Washington Post

“The voice of history rises up out of the pages of [this] persuasive new novel. [A] lively, incredibly readable, definitely R-rated version of the life and death of Marie Antoinette.” – Alan Cheuse, NPR

“Ms. Gray has created fully developed, flawed and complex characters in a way that would probably not have been possible within the confines of biography. [She] conjures up a world she knows well, in riveting detail. [The Queen’s Lover is] a feat of research and imagination.”—Moira Hodgson, The Wall Street Journal

“Don’t remember anything about the French Revolution from high school? This is one of those books where you’ll learn – or relearn – history effortlessly, as du Plessix Gray spins the affair of Marie Antoinette and a Swedish count into riveting drama.” – Entertainment Weekly

“[A] triumph of scholarship and storytelling... a remarkable book.”—Daily Beast

not what the title suggests

If you???re looking for Phillipa Gregory or a Georgian bodice ripper in a French setting, keep looking. Because I had enjoyed the author???s excellent but dry bio of Simone Weil, I wondered at a historical novel about well, the queen???s lover. It???s more in the line of an imaginative fictionalized bio or novelized history??? and like the best of these, though all story lines may not have always come from a documentary source, you emerge from the listen feeling like you know the characters better than in traditional bio. It's as much about Marie Antoinette and the times as von Ferson himself.

If you love historical fiction rich in period detail this is for you ??? you???ll get a good picture of things like the extent of the Versailles vermin, human and rodent. She seems to get the larger historical lines interwoven well, and correctly too. Instead of trying for a half-here-half-there, half modern kind of language, she tells the tale in modern English with modern idioms. Interest is added because the story is consistently related from von Fersen (and his sister???s) point of view, keeping you on your toes.

The male narrator seemed to have trouble making bits like prepositional phrases flow ??? but that might be as much due to the writer???s style as is the reading.

Was expecting something else

I was expecting this to read more like a story, but it did not. It was more like a news report. Edwardo Ballerini and Tandy Cronyn was excellent readers for this dull and drab news documentary. I didn't enjoy this book.