Farewell, My Queen: A Novel

Touchstone, 2004. Very Good. It was once the job of Madame Agathe-Sidonie Laborde to read books aloud to Marie-Antoinette. Now exiled in Vienna, she looks back twenty-one years to the legendary opulence of Versailles and meticulously reconstructs July 14 , 15, and 16 of 1789. When Agathe-Sidonie is summoned to the Queen's side on the morning of the 1 4th, Versailles is a miniature universe, sparkling with every outward appea rance of happiness and power, peopled with nobles of minutely calibrated ra nk, and run according to a hundred-year-old ritual called the Perfect Day. But with the shocking news that someone has woken the King in the night, or der begins to disintegrate and word of the fall of the Bastille seeps into court. Soon Versailles's beauty is nothing more than a shell encasing risin g panic and chaos. Agathe-Sidonie watches as the Queen's attempts to flee a re aborted; her most intimate friend betrays her; and the King, appearing t o sleepwalk through this crisis, never alters his routine of visiting the A pollo Salon several times a day to consult a giant crystal thermometer. From the tiniest garret to the Hall of Mirrors, where Marie-Antoinette stands alone and terrified in the dark, Chantal Thomas shows us a world on the edge of oblivion and an intimate portrait of the woman who, like "fire in motion," was its center.