The Queen's Necklace

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Statement found among Antal Szerb’s posthumous papers, and published on the occasion of the first printing of The Queen’s Necklace.

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to hear that some acquaintance has, to his immense surprise, read one of my books of literary history as if it were a novel. For that is exactly what I intended — to rescue the material from the layers of schoolroom dust and give it a living reality, thus moulding people’s tastes by making them want to read not just best-sellers but also the great works of so-called ‘literary history’. The literary historian must, first and foremost, be a propagandist, an advertising executive in the service of the eternal values. But naturally there are two sides to this. People in this country expect scholarly works to be unreadable; from which they are led, quite logically, to the erroneous conclusion that anything that is readable cannot therefore be scholarly. A great many critics have reproved the relaxed, often slightly mocking, tone of my books, insisting that I cannot possibly respect literature if I talk about it in such a cheerfully familiar way. To which I can only respond with a saying of Jules Renard: “You just don’t like ironical people. They make fun of their own deepest feelings. That is like saying: ‘this father cannot love his children because he plays with them’.”

And now I have written a book on a historical subject. Naturally my critics will now complain that I fail to respect history. And properly speaking, they are right. I don’t ‘respect’ it. Why should I? The past was in no way superior to the present, and what the present is like I have no need to tell you. So I may not ‘respect’ it, but on the other hand I do love it. Feelingly, deeply, passionately. The way I love Italy. And tea. And sleep. History is my home. Or rather, perhaps, my country of refuge. So I would say to my reader: if he absolutely insists that a writer should address him in the scholarly manner, from on high, in ex cathedra tones, then he should simply toss this book on the floor. My way is to speak as one human being to another, looking to find kindred spirits and good company.

The book tells the well-known story of Marie-Antoinette’s necklace, or rather, it describes events leading up the French Revolution. It differs from the usual historical biography, first, in that it is not a biography at all, and secondly, and more importantly, in that I do not content myself with narrating events. I also attempt to explain them, together with their antecedents and consequences, placing them in their intellectual and spiritual contexts. In doing so, I attempt, within the framework of my tale — a tale that is both remarkably eventful and yet true to life from beginning to end — to show French society in the age of Louis XVI, along with its literature, prevailing sensibility and notable personalities, and to bring all this together in a living tableau, rich in implication, which provides a picture of the way the French Revolution came about. In terms of form, the book is somewhat experimental, and I am naturally curious to see how it will be received by the public.