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The Queen's Necklace
Antal Szerb
出版
Steerforth Press
, 2019-06-25
主題
History / Europe / France
True Crime / Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions
History / Modern / 18th Century
ISBN
1782274472
9781782274476
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=muSQEAAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋
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 centrepiece 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.
In this unusual, witty and often surprising version of the story, the great Hungarian novelist Antal Szerb takes the narrative as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age—including aspects of it seldom considered by more orthodox historians. The author’s vast knowledge is worn very lightly and the book teems with amusing anecdotes, but it is, at heart, a deeply personal work, a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which it was written.