The Dark Tower

Darleen R. Golke is a high-school teacher-librarian in Winnipeg,
Manitoba.

Marie Thérиse Charlotte de France, daughter of King Louis XVI and
Queen Marie Antoinette, endured imprisonment during the blood bath of
the French Revolution. Of her immediate family, she alone survived.
Written in diary format, this novel is based on The Journal of Madame
Royale, the official record of Marie Thérиse’s ordeal. Nicknamed
Mousseline by the family, the princess observes that “the whole story,
the real story, exists only in my innermost thoughts.”

The reader meets an 11-year-old Mousseline beset by “sorrow” but
reasonably secure with the family at Versailles in June 1789. However,
the momentous changes resulting from the emerging new social order
intrude upon the royal lives. By fall the family is required to move to
the Tuileries Palace in Paris as virtual prisoners. In mid-1792, they
are formally imprisoned in the Tower, a place where the revolutionary
themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity do not apply. Louis, Marie
Antoinette, and royal household members who did not flee France in turn
bow before the guillotine, while Charles dies of neglect and
mistreatment. Only Mousseline survives the terror.

Her response to the turmoil as France moves from feudalism to
capitalism evolves from puzzlement to outrage and fear, and, finally, to
a grim acceptance of her fate. She comes of age during her imprisonment.
In December 1795, Mousseline, now 17, gains her freedom through a
prisoner exchange and flees to Austria.

In a brief epilogue, Stewart somewhat awkwardly sketches the remaining
years of Mousseline’s life as “stitches of memory, stitches of
time.” Fans of historical fiction will appreciate this glimpse of the
French Revolution as viewed through the eyes of a princess whom history
appears to have forgotten. Recommended.