Books: Again, Marie Antoinette

MARIE ANTOINETTE—Stefan Zweig—Viking ($3.50).

Apparently because 1933 is the 40th anniversary of Marie Antoinette’s death, this is her second biography in twelve weeks. Katharine Anthony’s life (TIME, Feb. 20) was only a vignette compared to Biographer Zweig’s life-size portrait. Zweig is not interested in Marie because she was a queen who came to a bad end, but because she was “the average woman of yesterday, today, and tomorrow . . . and therefore (one might fancy) unsuited to become the heroine of a tragedy. . . . But tragedy arises no less when a momentous position, a crushing responsibility, is thrust upon a mediocrity or a weakling. Indeed, tragedy in this form makes a strong appeal to our human sympathies. . . . Marie Antoinette, the mediocrity, achieved a greatness commensurate with her destiny.”

Zweig agrees with Katharine Anthony that Count Fersen was Marie’s lover in fact, and gives strongly circumstantial evidence to prove it. But many an anecdote that has been accepted as historical Zweig pronounces completely untrustworthy. Whatever her last words may have been, they were not, says Zweig, an apology for stepping on her executioner’s toes. (“An anecdote too good to be true!”) Documents in her case, he says, have been further confounded by one Baron Feuillet de

Conches, long regarded as an expert on the period and now known to have been a forger. About Louis XVI’s lack of virility (“In the 18th Century natural things were still regarded with naturalness”) Zweig is perfectly explicit, thinks it a strong reason for Louis’s inert downfall.

For a brief study of Marie Antoinette, Katharine Anthony’s book remains excellent, but Zweig’s version dwarfs it. The Book-of-the-Month Club has chosen it for April.