The Queen's Necklace
Published on 31. August 2012
379 pages
978-1-908968-78-4 (ISBN)
Description
"A sparkling slice of eighteenth-century life” Paul Bailey, Independent In August 1785 Paris buzzed with scandal. It involved an eminent churchman, a notorious charlatan, a female fraudster, a part-time prostitute and the hated Queen herself. At its heart was the most expensive diamond necklace ever assembled-and the web of fraud, folly and self-delusion it had inspired. In Szerb’s last major work, a witty and often surprising account of events, the story is used as a standpoint from which to survey the entire age. Written in war-torn Hungary in the early 1940s, it constitutes a remarkable gesture of defiance against the brutal world in which the writer lived and died.
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Antal Szerb
The Queen's Necklace
Book
06/2011
Pushkin Press
€32.37
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Persons
Antal Szerb was born in Budapest in 1901. Though of Jewish descent, he was baptised at an early age and remained a lifelong Catholic. He rapidly established himself as a formidable scholar, through studies of Ibsen and Blake and histories of English, Hungarian and world literature. He was a prolific essayist and reviewer, ranging across all the major European languages. Debarred by successive Jewish laws from working in a university, he was subjected to increasing persecution, and finally murdered in a forced labour camp in 1945. Pushkin Press publishes his novels The Pendragon Legend, Oliver VII and his masterpiece Journey by Moonlight, as well as the historical study The Queen's Necklace and Love in a Bottle and Other Stories.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Contents
- PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR
- Chapter One: The Necklace
- Chapter Two: The Comtesse
- Chapter Three: The Grand Seigneur
- Chapter Four: The Magician
- Chapter Five: The Bower of Venus
- Chapter Six: Spirits in Glass Pitchers
- Chapter Seven: The Queen
- Chapter Eight: How it Happened
- Intermezzo: Figaro and Count Haga
- Chapter Nine: The Necklace Explodes
- Chapter Ten: The Bastille, the Parlement and the King
- The Verdict
- Epilogue
- TRANSLATOR'S AFTERWORD
- Also Available from Pushkin Press
- About the Publisher
- Copyright
