THE EMPRESS OF HEARTSE. Barring-tonDodd, Mead ($2.50).
Dumas' story of the diamond necklace, cause celebre, E. Barrington dismisses for its fictional parts and characters. "It needs no decoration from fiction, and I have told it as it happened . . . merely touching history with imagination and making the true characters live." Marie Antoinette was a lovely martyr in white dimity and ash-gold hair; Louis, her royal spouse, a wistful dullard who would have made an honest artisan. The worldly cardinal who passionately loved Antoinette nevertheless caused her miserable downfall because he...