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Francine du Plessix Gray's amazingly realized historical book uncovers the untold love story between Swedish aristocrat Matter Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette. The love begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing nobleman first fulfills the mesmerizing 19-year-old dauphine, wife of the reclusive prince who'll soon become Louis XVI. This electric face launches a love affair that will span the span of the French Revolution. As their marriage deepens, Fersen becomes a dedicated companion to the whole royal family. Roaming the halls of Versailles and browsing the private haven of Le Petit Trianon, he discovers the deepest secrets of the court, even learning the startling erotic information on Marie Antoinette's matrimony to Louis XVI. But his new intimacy with Marie Antoinette and her family is disrupted when the events of the North american Revolution tear Fersen away. Changed by the cause, he joins French soldiers in the struggle for American freedom. He profits to find France on the brink of disintegration. Following the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is shifted from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their small children (Marie-Thérèse and the dauphin - whom many suspect is actually Fersen's kid). The failed try out leads to a more grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating last days captive before the ruler and queen face the guillotine. Grieving his lost love in his local Sweden, Fersen begins to sense the consequences of the France Revolution in his homeland. Royalists are now targets, and the sensuous aristocratic world of his children is fast vanishing. Fersen is incapable of realizing that decades of tradition have disappeared, and he gives dearly for his naïveté, dropping his life as a result of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal person in the ruling class. Scion of Sweden's most esteemed nobility, Fersen had become viewed as an opponent of the country he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent rate with which the events of the 18th century transformed Western culture. Expertly explored and deeply imagined, The Queen's Enthusiast is a brand new vision of the France Revolution and the French royal family as informed through the love story that was at its center.
