Blog this item

The Fatal Friendship

Marie Antoinette, Count Fersen and the Flight to Varennes

By Stanley Loomis

(5)

| Others | 9780706700473

Like The Fatal Friendship?
Join aNobii to see if your friends read it, and discover similar books!

Book Description

Fifty million Frenchmen thought Marie Antoinette was frivolous and stupid. One Swedish nobleman knew better. This is the fascinating and tragic story of the intimacy that developed between Count Axel Fersen and the young Marie-Antoinette, and of the tragic consequences this relationship would reap.

1 Review

3 people find this helpful

...woah! I need a while to recover and digest, since I finished this very moment. First word that comes to my mind is heartbreaking: a work of fancy couldn't have been better, it wouldn't have had the same sense of doom.<br />I wasn't as struck by finishing a book since I read Atonement, with ... (continue)

...woah! I need a while to recover and digest, since I finished this very moment. First word that comes to my mind is heartbreaking: a work of fancy couldn't have been better, it wouldn't have had the same sense of doom.<br />I wasn't as struck by finishing a book since I read Atonement, with two massive differences: Ian McEwan's masterpiece (in my opinion, at least) is a work of fiction, and in Loomis' essay there isn't any twist, since we all know how the story ends. Yet The Fatal Friendship is as engaging as a novel.<br />I bought this book out of curiosity after reading Riyoko Ikeda's manga Versailles no bara and now it is definitely among my favourites. Maybe it's not the definitive biography about Marie Antoinette (actually it's the only one I've read, but my next purchase will be Antonia Fraser's and I plan to read others), but it is indeed an impressive account of a friendship (or maybe something more) that lasted a lifetime and beyond, a relation that can't but enchant with its dramatic, even tragedy-like implications.

Is this helpful?

Ilasma said on Mar 21, 2009 | 1 feedback