The Queen's Necklace
Alexandre Dumas
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Sept. 26, 2015)
The Queen’s Necklace is a novel by Alexandre Dumas that was published in 1849 and 1850 (immediately following the French Revolution of 1848). It is loosely based on the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, an episode involving fraud and royal scandal that made headlines at the court of Louis XVI in the 1780s. This novel presents an idealized portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette, but it also shows the decadence of the nobility of the time, with its ending seeming to suggest the ”beginning of the end” of the nobility. The first chapters of the novel, which feature a dinner hosted by the old Marshal of Richelieu, were inspired by a text by Jean-François de La Harpe called The Prophecy of Cazotte. In this passage, the Count of Cagliostro predicts the various guests (Lapérouse, the Countess of Barry, Condorcet and Gustav III of Sweden, the count of Haga), the tragic end that awaits them, and the execution of Louis XVI. This foreshadowing throws light on the tragic plot, as the reader already knows that the efforts of the protagonists, including the queen, to prove their innocence is doomed to failure.
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