Books: Touching History

THE EMPRESS OF HEARTS—E. Barring-ton—Dodd, Mead ($2.50).

Dumas’ story of the diamond necklace, cause celebre, E. Barrington dismisses for its fictional parts and characters. “It needs no decoration from fiction, and I have told it as it happened . . . merely touching history with imagination and making the true characters live.” Marie Antoinette was a lovely martyr in white dimity and ash-gold hair; Louis, her royal spouse, a wistful dullard who would have made an honest artisan. The worldly cardinal who passionately loved Antoinette nevertheless caused her miserable downfall because he was the dupe of a scheming court slut. This clever minx stole the necklace, implicated the queen in the scandal, but herself rode screaming and scratching to the Bastille.

If the queen is made out more pure than she was, the king more kind, and the cardinal more fool, Author Barrington has nevertheless caught glitter and tragedy in her engrossing tale of the ominous days before the French Revolution.