Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Viking Press, $3.50]
‘NOT to idolize, not to deify, but to humanize is the supreme task of creative psychological study.’ That is what Stefan Zweig has here attempted ‘in the case of a woman of average character, who owes her long-lasting influence to an incomparable fate, and whose inward greatness was but the outcome of unprecedented misfortunes.’
That he has succeeded to a remarkable degree no one will deny. With the imagination of a poet, the skilled pen of an essayist, and the self-confidence of a psychiatrist, he has produced an exceedingly vivid and interesting picture of one of the most tragic figures in all history. There have been other vivid and interesting pictures of Marie Antoinette, to be sure; but they have tended to be passionately partisan. Adherents of the Revolution, in order to assail the Monarchy effectively, attacked the Queen, and in the Queen the woman, besmirching her character with the mud and blood of Revolutionary Paris. To send her as a scapegoat to the guillotine, no calumny was spared by party hatred. The ‘Austrian Woman’ was declared guilty of every crime: conspiracy, adultery, incest, and nymphomania. But with the return of the Bourbons in 1815 the other side had its say. Panegyric followed panegyric. Memoir writers presumed successfully on royalist sympathy and credulity. The ‘Martyred Queen’ was circled with a romantic halo; her spotless heroism was celebrated in aristocratic prose and verse.
Zweig insists, rightly enough, that in this case, as usual, the truth lies somewhere near the middle — ‘that Marie Antoinette was neither the great saint of royalism, nor yet the great whore of the Revolution, but a mediocre, an average woman.’ To prove his case he uses much of the best available documentary and secondary material, building upon the work of others. But he also rejects much that others have accepted, especially the letters of Marie Antoinette which were forged by Feuillet de Conches and many familiar anecdotes. What he adds, and what gives the distinguishing mark to his biography of Marie Antoinette, is his psychological imagination — mostly of a Freudian sort. ‘ We do not know a human being until the last secrets of the heart have been revealed; and above all we do not understand the character of a woman until we understand her love-life.’ Consequently, when documents are dubious or lacking, ‘imagination, with soaring pinions, can still do useful and in a sense trustworthy work,’ he says; ‘when we are short of materials for proof that would be accepted as valid in a court of law, there still remain boundless possibilities for the psychologist.’ Take, for example, two of his most striking chapters.
‘The Secret of the Alcove’ sets forth all the psychological maladjustments which arose from the fact that for seven years the fifteen-year-old bride was yoked to an ineffective husband. Because Louis XVI would not at once submit to a slight operation for phimosis, she, a full-blooded maturing woman, was thwarted in her natural desires. He was humiliated and became increasingly awkward, vacillating, and complaisant. The opportunity for normal early married life was lost, and the royal spouses drifted apart physically and spiritually. The Queen cast herself into frivolous pleasures which eventually made her hated and undermined the Monarchy.
In the other chapter, ‘Was He or Was He Not,’ Zweig pictures the friendliness of Marie Antoinette just before the Revolution; the arrival of Count Fersen, handsome, chivalric, and devoted, the one friend on whose sympathy and loyalty she could unhesitatingly depend; the inadequacy of her husband, for whom she had done enough by finally providing him with four children; and her own impulsive and impetuous nature. Ridiculing the Victorian ‘purity fanatics,’Zweig concludes on ‘characterological’ grounds, and from his interpretation of the Fersen papers, that the Swedish Count was her accepted lover. The argument is strong, but not convincing.
In other episodes — the Diamond Necklace, the Flight to Varennes, the last days — the account accords more closely with the familiar version. Though Zweig insists in the introduction that Marie Antoinette was not of the stuff that heroines are made of, but merely an average woman, yet he portrays so effectively the tragedy of her life that one closes the volume with the feeling that after all she was something of a heroine.
SIDNEY B. FAY