The Queen's Necklace

by Antal Szerb, Len Rix (Translator)

This book revisits the story of Marie Antoinette’s necklace in order to present a portrait of the age. 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 centerpiece 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.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Hungarian Literature, Historical, 18th Century, Fiction, Hungary, French Revolution

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Antal Szerb was a noted Hungarian scholar and writer. He is generally considered to be one of the major Hungarian writers of the 20th century.

Szerb was born in 1901 to assimilated Jewish parents in Budapest, but baptized Catholic. He studied Hungarian, German and later English, obtaining a doctorate in 1924. From 1924 to 1929 he lived in France and Italy, also spending a year in London, England.

As a student he published essays on Georg Trakl and Stefan George, and quickly established a formidable reputation as a scholar, writing erudite studies of William Blake and Henrik Ibsen among other works. Elected President of the Hungarian Literary Academy in 1933 - aged just 32 -, he published his first novel, The Pendragon Legend (which draws upon his personal experience of living in Britain) the following year. His second and best-known work, Utas és holdvilág, known in English as Journey by Moonlight, came out in 1937. He was made a Professor of Literature at the University of Szeged the same year. He was twice awarded the Baumgarten Prize, in 1935 and 1937.

In 1941 he published a History of World Literature which continues to be authoritative today. He also published a volume on novel theory and a book about the history of Hungarian literature. Given numerous chances to escape antisemitic persecution (as late as 1944), he chose to remain in Hungary, where his last novel, a Pirandellian fantasy about a king staging a coup against himself, then having to impersonate himself, Oliver VII, was published in 1942. It was passed off as a translation from the English, as no 'Jewish' work could have been printed at the time.
Szerb was deported to a concentration camp late in 1944, and was beaten to death there in January 1945, at the age of 43. He was survived by his wife, Klára Bálint, who died in 1992.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so I arrived at a genre for which at the time I had no name: I have called it a 'real history' because it eschews every kind of novelistic embellishment and amplification and because it treats a well-known episode (from the time of Louis XVI)

This is a gloriously eccentric and idiosyncratic book that retells the curious story of the most expensive diamond necklace in the world that was the object of a complicated fraud involving Marie Antoinette and a handful of oddball characters. If it weren't true, it would be jaw-droppingly unbelievable, and Szerb has immense fun and satisfaction in telling it. In between the story itself, he indulges in descriptions of 50-course dinners at the court of Louis XVI, in frivolous fashions, in the careers of magicians who see visions of angels, and of the Ancien Régime just before it was swept away in the Revolution.

But there's also another, covert story that is hidden within this tale: it was written in 1942 and just a few years before Szerb was deported from Hungary and beaten to death in a Nazi concentration camp. It's little throwaway touches about 'charismatic' leaders, about refugees not being sent back, about the workings of history which are a testament to a reality from which this book was a refuge.

I'm not completely convinced that the affair of the Queen's necklace was as much of a tipping point into the Revolution as Szerb claims, but this is a marvellously quirky read that is also the result of the humane and humanistic literary activity that sustained the author in the face of the fascist regime which eventually destroyed him.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antal Szerb published this in 1942 at a time when his previously, irrelevant, Jewish background, suddenly became not only became suddenly central to his life, but was to see his untimely death in 1945. His comment that, ‘the great libraries of Paris – now closed to me for the indeterminate future,’ is tragic to read. However, having been denied such access could not have stopped such a talented writer and so, what we have, is an extremely personal account into the history of ‘the Queen’s necklace,’ with lots of digressions and historical parallels.

Szerb delights in introducing the characters involved and the way in which their linked relationships led to the fraudulent sale of the most expensive necklace in the world; apparently to Marie Antoinette, who, in reality, knew nothing whatsoever about it. The way this fraud, when discovered, was handled, helped lead to the French Revolution in the opinion of Antal Szerb. I am not sure it was quite so central, but certainly it highlighted the unpopularity of the Queen.

It is hard to place this book, but I loved it. I enjoyed Szerb’s voice, his comments and his thoughts - entertaining, thoughtful, personal and intelligent. Szerb mentions the biography of Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig as being a central work of his time. I now wish to read that and, certainly, to read more by Szerb. I have enjoyed all of the books by him which I have read and am saddened that we were denied more, because of the historical circumstances he found himself in.

[Harry Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s fitting how I’ve been putting off writing this review of The Queen’s Necklace, Antal Szerb’s last book; for Szerb, likewise, seemed to have been putting off finishing it. A lifelong Hungarian Catholic whose Jewish ancestry doomed him to underemployment and murder under Nazi occupation, Szerb passed up several opportunities to escape, preferring to share his people’s fate. With the final, fatal crisis approaching in 1943, Szerb sought refuge in the history of eighteenth-century France, dwelling on its most minute details, digressing and diverting along myriad tangents, as though contriving, like Scheherazade, never to reach the end. The Queen’s Necklace is Szerb’s valediction, how he wanted to go: not in bitterness but in erudite frivolity.

Pausing one last time, just before the close, Szerb makes the subtlest of allusions to creeping melancholy:

This age was as beautiful as the most finely worked lace, as a piece of Sèvres porcelain with its timeless charm and fragile delicacy; as the noble oozings of the Tokai grape, full and rich with sweetness; as the autumn air in Hungary, when the reddening leaves are scented with the inexpressible sweetness of death.

Not inexpressible, Antal. You expressed it. Thank you.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining, witty and - as far as I can tell, not being an expert in the subject - accurate story about the infamous necklace affair that had a big influence in Marie Antoinette's life. The book is a kind of a mixture of a novel and a history book; a historical story told in an entertaining storyteller way with both funny little anecdotes and factual background information. Szerb sometimes writes what a person may have been thinking in this or that situation and highlights their personality and motives, but he also tells his sources and doesn't seem to invent things or romanticide. He maintains his fairly objective, academic style and tells about people's positive sides and faults, but he also treats his characters with a bit of sarcasm and a subtle sense of humour, so the story doesn't get boring or dry, either.

I've never been very interested in the French revolution, but I love Szerb's novels and also wanted to know about the era to understand better Michael Kunze's new musical Marie Antoinette. I didn't get hooked to the book like I did with Szerb's previous "real" novels, but I enjoyed reading it.

[➸ Gwen de Sade · Rating 4 out of 5]

What would life be without a little ancient régime gossip?

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a work that in conjuring up the prerevolutionary ancien régime of Bourbon France in all its absurdities is a fitting, if tragic, foreshadowing of the author's own ghastly fate. It is wonderful I wouldn't dream of saying a word against it. All I must do is buy a copy and read it again.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Queen's necklace is an early example of the True Crime genre told by a sophisticated Hungarian in the 1930's.

Although this all happened sometime ago barest plot outline below.


The Archbishop of Strasbourg seeking to gain the favour of Marie Antoinette is fooled into assuring two jewellers that the queen wishes to purchase the worlds most expensive necklace. He then proceeds to hand it over to the mastermind behind the plot an impoverished descendent of the Valois dynasty. Hilarity ensues and plays a part in bringing down the monarchy.

Odd as the above is, the real entertainment is Szerb's breezy style, it feels like you are sitting in a Budapest café with a charming man given to wild and unlikely generalizations e.g. the archbishop is fooled because he is a Breton, Bretons are celts and all celts believe in the fantastic being one such example.

Come for the history, stay for the tale.

[cloudyskye · Rating 4 out of 5]

So proud of myself to have read this in Hungarian! Took me a whole month, but it was worth it. Szerb Antal writes beautifully.
Ages ago, I read Stefan Zweig's "Marie Antoinette" which I liked a lot. Much like Szerb Antal, Stefan Zweig could make an interesting story out of everything.
I also seem to remember a biography of Mozart where as a child he spent some time at Maria Theresia's court and took a liking to Marie Antoinette, announcing that he wanted to marry her. Or something along these lines.
Come to think of it, I still don't feel that I know very much about who the tragic French queen really was. Married at 14, queen at 18, she was certainly not a greedy schemer and plotter, more a rather clueless - but not stupid - pawn among schemers and plotters, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Ali Miremadi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinarily modern work of history, placing the Paris of 1785 in its economic and cultural context through the device of telling the story of a jewellery fraud. Brilliant.

[Kinga · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually don't read non-fiction; it bores me to death, regardless of the subject matter. There are only a very, very few exceptions for me, and one of them for sure is Antal Szerb. That said, you can easily argue that his non-fiction writing completely reads like fiction, and that is so true.

This book is about the famous necklace scandal that directly preceded the French Revolution, and was one of the first worldwide 'celeb' stories ever. Szerb actually writes much more about the circumstances, the social and political environment of the fatal jewelry of Marie Antoinette than the actual case. (I said, 'of' Marie Antoinette, but in fact, she never had anything to do with its scandal. The fact that we associate her name with the necklace, is part of the tragicomic essence of this event.) We read Szerb as if we were reading a highly intellectual gossip column in a philosophy magazine. A gossip column, that while telling us who was doing it with whom, who was wearing what, who was making what waves, we learn at the same time very thoroughly but in the same chatty way from top to bottom the cultural, literary, economic, artisctic and philosophical trends and backgrounds that surrounded all that. I am talking serious deep digging here (from Goethe through Hegel to Tocqueville) but presented in a never-heard-of informal, conversational manner that only Szerb could produce in his writing.

This had to be at least the third or fourth re-reading of this book for me. And not the last one, for sure.

[Roberto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nehéz szülés volt.
Az olvasás.
A megírása, nem tudom.
Néha egészen unalmas volt, néha egész szórakoztató, néha igen cinikus.
Vannak jó részei, és nekem volt egy csomó nem jó része.
A korábbi regények után ez egy kicsit csalódás volt, ugyanakkor a szerzőre jellemző humor megjelent e kötetben is.
Ez tartott életben olvasás közben.

[Andy Plonka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another chance to fill gaps in my education and learn about Marie-Antoinette and the French Revolution. The necklace was a story in itself but told a lot about the class system and how people from different places in society viewed themselves. I feel so much smarter now.

[Harald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unterhaltsame Geschichtsstunde, eine Anekdote der Weltgeschichte und zugleich eine unerhörte Begebenheit mit fataler Wirkung, präzise, schlüssig, mit spöttischem Charme und einem kleinen Augenzwinkern erzählt. Lesen!

[Jozef Melichár · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have doubts about how to classify the genre of this book. It isn’t really a novel, nor is it a history book; it’s something in between or bit of both. Still, it’s an interesting read about a minor affair that may have influenced the French Revolution.

[Tibor Jánosi-Mózes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantasztikus kortörténet!

[SJ Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

my gUy <3

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are two great orders of society: those who have more to eat than they have appetite, and those who never have food enough to satisfy their hunger."

I bought this book when exiting a museum in Hungary because I was intrigued by the description and later pulled in even further because of the introduction by the author. It covers the curious case of fraud with the most expensive diamond necklace in the world involving Marie Antoinette and a colourful cast of oddball characters. I really loved the way Antal Szerb covered this story, and the skill with which he makes a non-fiction historical account readable. Definitely a book I'd recommend!

A last amazing quote that particularly struck me: "That she hated stiff Spanish formality and wanted to be just one person among others, was deeply sympathetic in her. But it is not the business of a Queen to be human. Rather, her duty was to glide through the dazzling, inhumanly magnificent halls of Versailles in […] ‘pale splendour far removed from earth’—unapproachably aloof from her subjects"

[Jennings · Rating 4 out of 5]

A playful, narrative account of a wild but true story at the twilight of the Ancien Regime. I loved the way he told the story like a friend while maintaining the historical accuracy of the events.

[naska · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe im not so bad at history afterall

[Ramiro Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not all novelists are great historians, and very few historians venture into to the realm of the novel. So it takes someone like the Hungarian master novelist Antal Szerb or the acclaimed German storyteller and novelist Stefan Zweig to do both. Both writers, Francophiles at heart, were drawn to the figure of Marie Antoinette and French revolutionary history, and both gave us definitive biographies of this often misunderstood figure. All the episodes of her short and tragic life unfold before our eyes in this short and splendidly written book that reads like a novel: Marie Antoinette’s cloistered and privileged youth in Vienna, where she was brought up to be the consort of the future Bourbon king, the indecisive and naive Louis XVI; the heart-wrenching separation from her German-speaking family and her journey to France to wed the dauphin; her coming of age in the court of Versailles and her rise to fame and preeminence as a power-broker behind the throne; the gathering political storm at the gilded gates of Versailles and the humbling of the house of Bourbon. The royal couple’s imprisonment in Paris, their flight to Varennes, and finally the guillotine. The episode of the stolen necklace is of utmost importance, as Szerb’s account demonstrates, because it caused irreparable damage to the queen’s reputation. The young and beautiful queen, once admired by all, became a “she-wolf” and a “whore” in the space of a few weeks, and this only precipitated the fall of the French monarchy. Only a supremely confident and talented writer like Antal Szerb could have written such a book ten years after the publication of Stefan Zweig’s towering and masterful biography of Marie Antoinette. Zweig published his masterpiece during the interwar period, in 1932, Szerb followed with his in 1942. Marie Antoinette and her world come alive in both accounts and we owe a debt of gratitude to these 2oth century masters of the art of historical narrative.

[Melindam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just don't expect any impartiality from me when it comes to Antal Szerb.

He was such a delightful, quirky writer and his style was full of idiosyncrasies: wit, erudition, and a gentle irony are all there and his voice is as charming as it is personal. I found such joy in his language (in our shared, beloved Hungarian language), in how he moves between the playful and the profound.

My heart always breaks a little whenever I think of the terrible fate he suffered because of his Jewish heritage, of his undeserved and untimely death, and of his courage (he could have escaped persecution, but he chose to stay).

I loved both his fiction and non-fiction books, so why did it take me so long to read this particular one? I truly don't know. Maybe because I wasn't historically interested in this time period that much? Possibly, but who knows?

This was one of those books that had been patiently sitting on one of my bookshelves, waiting and waiting, until I finally arrived where I needed to be to read it.

It was far from perfect (some of his filters naturally feel old-fashioned/outdated, though I'm sure they were perfectly congruous with his time), but because of Szerb's style and interpretation I found it all kinds of delightful.

Published in 1943, The Queen’s Necklace is his take on the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, a scandal that quickened the erosion of public trust in Marie Antoinette and foreshadowed the French Revolution (as he sees it). But as always with him, it’s never just a historical retelling. He weaves in digressions, philosophical reflections, and even a touch of mischief. He’s not afraid to question others' narratives or to make fun at "serious" history.

For English-speakers I can wholeheartedly recommend the excellent EN translation by Len Rix (in fact, I’d recommend any of Szerb’s works in his translation!).

[Liviu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite entertaining "history as novel" recounting of the famous Necklace Affair following the standard sources but with the witty, occasionally sad and almost always interesting comments of the author.

Written in 1941-1942 so not long before his tragic death in the Nazi death camps, the book is a testament to what were perceived as the "European values" at the time and basically that is also its major shortcoming for someone reading it from the 21st century multicultural perspective when Europe is not the "center of the world" any more and statements like:

"In the year 1000 the whole of humanity waited in quivering excitement for the greatest miracle of all, the end of the world, which didn’t."

are quite grating (as for example what we call the year 1000 was not such for the majority of humanity at the time as Europe was quite a smallish and backward place then, hence most of humanity had no clue the end of the world was supposed to come)

Overall very good and eminently readable today, but quite dated in worldview

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel/history (it can be read as either) is quite good - light, clever, engaging, and at once intelligent. Szerb deftly guides the reader through the tangled politics of Marie Antoinette's court with humor and wisdom.

But this moment threw me out of the book, quite extremely -

[On Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons:] "Valmont, who is clearly a forerunner of Richardson's Lovelace..."

I'm afraid, Mr. Szerb, that you have your chronology tangled somewhere there.

[Jamie Makin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Szerb shows himself to be a master prose stylist, detailing historical incident with an ease that makes them seem like they happened within the hour. His slight mocking, knowing tone, brilliantly captures the age and his conversational approach is all the more remarkable considering the times and circumstances he was writing in.
Szerb deserves to be better know, and aided by such a translator as Len Rix, the English reader has never had a better time to discover him.

[Tanya Lolonis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Splendid companion to "Tale of Two Cities"! Szerb opens the unique world of pre-Revolutionary France, its contradictions and the values and sentiments coursing through society. His description of the main protagonists of the great scandal that shaped public perceptions of the aristocracy and monarchy are unusual, enlightening, and highly entertaining. A history that reads like a novel. Brilliant, for anyone who enjoys history.

[Gabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Szerb Antal bölcsen és mérhetetlenül szellemesen meséli el a nyaklánc történetét, elemzi a körülményeket, megemlít magyar kapcsolódási pontokat, mindezt könnyeden és mégsem komolytalanul. Nagyon kellemes olvasmány.

[Nente · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange compilation. This is hardly even fiction, I don't know what to make of it.