I probably said this when I wrote about The Third Tower, but I ordered three Antal Szerb books from the UK early on in quarantine after deciding the odds of me coming across any of his books besides Journey by Moonlight by chance were extremely low. Now I'm asking myself why I didn't just order all his books that are available in English. (The third book I ordered was Oliver VII and I believe there are just two others out there.) Yesterday, as I was reading The Queen's Necklace, I found myself thinking I should learn Hungarian so I could read more of his writing, and also just more about him: there's not a lot of information out there in English. Even more than that, I felt as I was reading that there was maybe something lost in the translation, or something added. The Queen's Necklace is non-fiction. Szerb (or his translator, though I think we can assume it's a literal translation) defines the genre as "real history." It's an account of the scandal surrounding the theft of an extremely valuable necklace that two Parisian jewelers designed with the hope that Marie Antoinette would buy it. This is, apparently, a well known story and the events in the book are in retrospect considered among the turning points in the lead up to the French Revolution, but it was totally new to me. I know a lot more about what happened after the French Revolution than what happened before it. The Queen's Necklace doesn't pretend to be a straight history; Szerb's voice is strong throughout. Midway through the book, he inserts a 50+ page "Intermezzo" where he goes off on tangents about the Swedish revolution, The Marriage of Figaro, the contemporary translation of Hamlet into French (which took many liberties with the story), the invention of the hot air balloon, among other topics.
Szerb is clearly extremely well read on his topic, and The Queen's Necklace seems to exist in conversation with his source material, in particular his contemporary Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette (subtitle: The Portrait of an Average Woman); but also the memoir of Mme Campan, Marie Antoinette's femme du chambre, for whom Szerb seems to have a particular affection; and Franz Funck-Brentano, whose L'affaire du collier Szerb credits for the raw material for the story, though he disagrees loudly with Funck-Brentano's interpretation of the events; and Goethe, who wrote a play about the events described in the book. And reading it, one is never let to forget for long that he was writing for a Hungarian audience. There are numerous asides making comparisons to Hungarian history and any connection to Hungary (the Count Esterhazy, who was part of Marie Antoinette's circle; the Hungarian Jesuit father György Alajos Szerdahely, who wrote a poem about the events in the book) is pointed out. I'll also add that this book gave me an appreciation for the Rococo that I'd never before considered.
Reading this, with Szerb's voice so present, alive, and funny in the text, it's really hard to wrap my head around the fact that he wrote this well into World War II, at a time when, as an ethnic Jew, he was already barred from travel and from his line of work. One pictures him holed up in a library surrounded by books about France of 150 years ago, as a distraction perhaps from the world outside, though he makes connections to the present day again and again. I can't help but think also of Walter Benjamin, who didn't leave France when he could have, but stayed behind to continue his own research into French history, though Benjamin was already dead when Szerb was at work on The Queens Necklace. Stefan Zweig, too, was dead by the time The Queen's Necklace was published. Zweig did manage to get out of Europe, but he and his wife took their own lives in exile in Brazil in 1942. Szerb didn't survive the war either. A year after the publication of The Queen's Necklace he was murdered in a concentration camp. That imminent future feels impossible while you're reading the book, making the truth of it all the more painful.
