PS Edition Excerpt The following interview is excerpted from the additional content found in the PS Edition of Abundance: A Conversation With Sena Jeter Naslund Q: What drew you to writing a novel about Marie Antoinette? A:  The story of Marie Antoinette has fascinated and frightened me since I was a child.  To me, it was a reverse fairy-tale--not a story about a deserving poor girl who became a princess but one about a princess who lost her position and power.  I knew that if such a reversal could occur in the life of a queen, then no person was safe.  For me, this vulnerability represented the basic human condition.  Then the question became for me "How can we face adversity, even death?"  I thought I might learn something from imagining the Marie Antoinette story.  Also, the sheer splendor of her world--both its beautiful artificiality and its earthy realism--fascinated me.  Like Marie Antoinette, I too have loved flowers, music, theatre; like her, my family and friends mean more to me than I can say. Q: Why did you name this novel of Marie Antoinette, Abundance? A:  Marie Antoinette lived in a world of splendor and abundance, both in Austria and at Versailles and at other royal chateaux in France, such as Fontainbleu and Saint-Cloud. Ironically, that kind of abundance turned to ashes, figuratively speaking. But as Marie Antoinette matured--she was only fourteen when she first arrived in France--she developed another sort of abundance--a generosity and graciousness of spirit. It's that sort of "abundance"--the richness of her spirit--that made her a sympathetic person and one I wanted to write about. Also, one can see in eighteenth-century paintings and statuary allegorical female figures of Peace and of Abundance. Often the two concepts were depicted together, with "Peace Bringing Back Abundance," as in a painting by Marie Antoinette's friend Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun. When Marie Antoinette's mother sent her to marry the future Louis XVI of France, it was with the hope that the marriage would create peace between these historically hostile countries, and that in the wake of a reign of peace would come abundance, or plenty, to both the common people and the nobility of Europe. Instead, the marriage led to revolution and the Reign of Terror. Q: What were the causes of the French Revolution? A: Of course, many historians have filled rooms full of books trying to answer that question. Because Abundance is written from the point of view of Marie Antoinette, who did not fully understand the causes of the revolution, I couldn’t include the kind of analysis, breadth, and detail a person can read in history books, such as Simon Schama's Citizens. The novel does encompass several important causes of the revolution, those of which Marie Antoinette was aware: the terrible economic condition of France inherited from the reign of Louis XV, including the national debt and the lack of funds in the royal treasury; the hardship and harshness of life for the common people, particularly the inequitable tax system which placed most of the burden on the poor while largely exempting both the nobles and the church; the refusal of the nobility to cooperate with Louis XVI in trying to institute reform. Q: So you think Marie Antoinette was aware of the harshness of life for the peasants? A: I think her awareness was limited, but she certainly had many kindly impulses toward the poor. Here are a few examples. When she first came to France as a fourteen-year-old bride, she was entitled to revenue from a traditional tax called "the queen's belt." Saying that she did not want to add to the tax burden of the poor, she refused to let the tax be levied. In one of her letters to her mother, she expressed extreme appreciation of the love the people showered on her and her husband, especially considering their hardships: she vowed in the letter that both she and her husband would work hard for the welfare of the people and never forget the generosity of their outpourings of love. She alone among the royals would not allow royal hunting parties to ride over and ruin the fields of the peasants. During the record-breaking cold winters, she and the King had bonfires built at the crossroads to warm poor travelers. When the economy grew worse, she scaled down expenditures in her own household. Q: Then how did Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette come to be so despised? A: Despite her initial success in charming the French people with her grace and beauty, her popularity began to fall rapidly when her marriage to the future Louis XVI was not consummated and the royal couple failed to produce an heir to the throne for many years. During this time, highly pornographic pamphlets began to circulate about Marie Antoinette, depicting her as leading a scandalous sex life with both men and women, while ignoring her royal spouse. None of this was true, but her reputation suffered miserably. At the death of Louis XV, France had already been in terrible financial trouble for many years. Violent uprisings--the so-called flour wars--were occurring throughout France just before the new twenty-year-old king's coronation in 1775. When Louis XVI decided to support the American Revolution financially, he further increased the national debt of France. He tried to persuade the nobility to alleviate the tax burden that fell mainly on the poor, but the nobility refused to give up their tax exemptions. Certainly reform of the social and economic system of France was long overdue. As Antonia Fraser points out in her biography, Marie Antoinette was a kind of scapegoat, a foreigner and a woman, on whom to pin a great deal of blame she didn't deserve. Q:  What are your ideas about what fiction can capture or reveal that biography or history cannot? A: Every form has its own powers.  Fiction takes us inside, through imagination, in the way that an objective reporting or picturing of external actions or behavior cannot.  I have always seen the imagination as a great spiritual and moral force because it helps to take us beyond the bounds of ego.  But all the ways of knowing are complementary to each other.  Lately Marie Antoinette has been the object of films: while films picture appearances, novels augment those visual impressions by transporting us inside the character: we can look out through the eyes of another person and also know that person's secret thoughts and feelings, which are beyond the reach of the camera.  Fiction can make history seem more alive and thus more kin to life as we know it.