Last Days
Review of Lost Days, otherwise known as The Damned, and known in some quarters as The Last Days of Marie Antoinette in the Euphoric Eroticism of Revolutionary France
JR HERMAN // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
The publishing event of the year comes this May as William & Mary University Publishing is set to publish Jean Sakura’s new, groundbreaking work, Lost Days, a collection of stories centering around the last days of Marie Antoinette.
Perhaps the work could best be captured by the moment when Antoinette sits at her window in Versailles and thinks of her one true love: the peasant rebel who wants to kill her husband and only believes in the Revolution because it will kill her husband, the one obstacle to his consummating his love with Marie. Though admittedly, they’ve made love many times in scenes Sakura vividly paints alongside violent depictions of the guillotine and Marat dying in his bathtub.
Antoinette asks the birds in the tree outside her room what it means to be worn out by tired romantic dreams. The trees in Versailles sigh under the weight of Antoinette’s heaving heart. The French revolt, and Antoinette watches her husband’s royal guard gun down the peasant rebel who loved her, the only person she ever really loved. To love like this.
Sakura’s work is saturated with these moments of heartrending agony. Her historical fiction is more real than what actually happened; the historical details of Antoinette’s life don’t matter. What matters is the firm foundation of emotion, not the fragile scaffolding of truth. We can’t know what’s true but only feel.
Sakura’s work excels in its subtle drawing out of themes that are as pertinent today as ever. In one scene, Antoinette engages in conversation with her inferior husband about whether Ukraine is a sovereign state or a property of Russia (for those who worry that this scene may lead to Antoinette being canceled, don’t — she is in favor of Ukrainian sovereignty). In another scene, Antoinette prays to God after she sleeps with the dashing peasant rebel in the confessional chamber of the palace and asks how something so profane could occur in a place so sacred, with the profane feeling so sacred. She also asks her chambermaid at one point why really pretty girls are overlooked. These sorts of moments make Antoinette a delightfully relatable heroine, particularly to college English students.
Memory is a fickle thing. As Antoinette lies in her prison cell, she suddenly remembers meadows under the fond sunlight of warm dawn. She remembers how the grass felt under her bare toes. She remembers when she first met Louis and how he was so shy and innocent, how she thought she might love this man who wrote her such simple, sweet notes. But for the life of her, she can’t remember the face of the peasant rebel she loved so. She weeps. To hold him one more time, to defy the world callously brushing her and all mortal ongoings aside. Revolutions be damned — people still die, fall in love, and these two are remarkably bound up.
A nation’s memory is equally as fickle. Myth and biography merge in the case of Marie Antoinette. A life lived on the front stage of history, a libretto of high tragedy and gaudy romance. Sumptuous and delightful to behold.
In the final collection of the story, Antoinette writes a poem. The revolutionary mobs are at the door.
To die
Is only so bad
As to lie
With you, my only lad
Sometimes I wish I could fly
Away, from all that is sad