TY  - BOOK
AU  - Szerb,Antal
AU  - Len Rix (Tr)
TI  - QUEEN'S NECKLACE
SN  - 9781906548612
U1  - F 
PY  - 2009////01/01
CY  - London
PB  - Pushkin
KW  - Fiction
KW  - Other Foreign Literature
KW  - France
KW  - Hungarian(Magyar)literature
KW  - Marie Antoinette, Queen, consort of Louis XVI, King of France, 1755-1793
KW  - Diamond Necklace Affair (France : 1785)
KW  - Revolution (France : 1789-1799)
KW  - Aristocracy (Political science)
KW  - Courts and courtiers
N1  - In August 1785, Paris buzzed with a scandal that had everything—an eminent churchman, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. Its centrepiece was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled, and the tangle of fraud, folly, blindness and self-delusion it provoked. The humiliation the affair brought on the royal family contributed to their appalling deaths in the Revolution just four years later.
In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age—including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is, at heart, a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written
ER  -