Science Fiction, ‘The Decameron’ and Other Letters to the Editor

In the Cosmos

To the Editor:

H. G. Wells certainly belongs in the pantheon of great science fiction writers. However, Charles Johnson’s review of “The Young H. G. Wells” (Dec. 12) goes too far in crediting him, with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, as having “invented the genre of science fiction.”

The Greek mythological story of Icarus may be the earliest surviving science fiction story, in which Icarus’ father, Daedalus, crafts wings for them to escape from Crete, but Icarus flies too close to the sun, melting his wings and perishing. In the
1980 PBS series “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan credited Johannes Kepler’s 1608 “Somnium” with being one of the first works of science fiction, citing its dream sequence in which a demon summoned by Kepler’s mother recounts a trip to the island Levania (the
moon).

Tales of the Golem in medieval European Jewish folklore foreshadowed if not inspired Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” probably the first modern science fiction novel. And Verne himself credited Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 tale of Hans Pfaall’s trip to the moon as an inspiration for his own 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon.”

Stephen A. Silver
San Francisco

The Queen’s Gambit

To the Editor:

Caroline Weber’s self-serving, error-filled review (Dec. 5) of my book, in which she focuses on the minutiae of whether or not Marie Antoinette had an affair, as though “In the Shadow of the Empress” was about that one point and not about Maria Theresa, three of her remarkable daughters and the entire 18th century, demands a response. There’s no way to address all of Weber’s misstatements here so I will confine myself to some of the more egregious examples.

If Weber had read more than the genealogical chart and a footnote on Page 251, she would have seen that Marie Antoinette’s second son was almost certainly conceived during the week that the queen was at the Petit Trianon, planning and throwing a late-night party for the king of Sweden and his entourage, which included Count Fersen. Fersen had at that point been away for 10 months and in addition to coming to the party was known to be a regular visitor to the Petit Trianon whenever he was in town. Louis XVI, on the other hand, was not at the Petit Trianon that entire week, as he followed his regular schedule, which included going to bed alone in his room at the palace of Versailles at precisely 11 every night, as attested to by Madame Campan. So it’s difficult to see how he could have been the father. That’s not gossip or fake news. That’s biology and geography.

With regard to the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, Weber feels the need to demean the specialist I quoted, who has 30 years’ experience at Yale New Haven Hospital dealing with children with just this sort of behavior. The quote my expert used — and she is in fact an expert, no matter what a fashion historian thinks — referred to the DSM-5. The DSM-5 is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. Weber also neglected to note that I cited the Mayo Clinic’s definition of ASD, which is the layman’s version of the DSM-5. Additionally, Weber pretends that I used this diagnosis to say that Louis could not procreate with his wife. That’s just false and she would have known it if she had read the book. What I did say was that Louis had to have the act of consummation explained to him by his brother-in-law, a fact for which there is primary source documentation. And her accusation that no one was able to personally examine Louis XVI is silly as well. Not being able to examine either George III of England or Charles VI of France has not prevented historians from concluding that the first was bipolar and the second schizophrenic.

Finally, to the newly decrypted letters. Yes, The Times quoted someone who cringingly compared the language to a “kissy-face emoji.” But there were plenty of others, including Anne Michelin, co-author of the study, who thought differently. In fact, queens did not regularly use the language of love to single men who were not their husbands. That’s because they knew if they did so that they took the great risk of being charged with adultery and punished, as happened to George I’s wife, Sophie Dorothea, who spent 30 years in isolation under house arrest in the middle of nowhere for having been caught with similar letters.

All Weber has against this mountain of evidence is a two-decades-old quote from a secondary source and a lot of denial. In fact, she cannot come up with a single crumb of legitimate, primary source documentation that refutes anything I wrote, nor will she ever.

Nancy Goldstone
Del Mar, Calif.

Caroline Weber replies:

Nancy Goldstone opens her book with a “Selected Genealogy” that attributes paternity of Marie Antoinette’s two youngest children — including the dauphin Louis-Charles (later Louis XVII) — to the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen, as if this were a matter of established fact, and throughout her narrative she refers to the alleged affair between the French queen and Fersen, as if this, too, were not contested by scholars, at one point asserting that he “would remain the queen’s lover until her death.” If I focused on these aspects of Goldstone’s book in my review, it was because, far from constituting “minutiae,” as Goldstone puts it, I found them symptomatic of her lack of scholarly rigor.

Numerous reputable biographies and histories — including by Hilaire Belloc (1909), André Castelot (1957), Stanley Loomis (1972), Claude Manceron (1974), Desmond Seward (1981), Simon Schama (1989), Evelyne Lever (2000), Antonia Fraser (2001), Munro Price (2014) and John Hardman (2019) — have examined the evidence for an affair and, while entertaining different theories about the extent and nature of the pair’s relationship, all concede that the historical record permits no definitive conclusion. Contrary to what Goldstone alleges, the recent decryption by a team of French researchers of eight pieces of correspondence between Marie Antoinette and Fersen does not alter this fact. As Le Monde reported in June 2020, these letters “confirm the thesis, so long invoked, of an emotional relationship [relation sentimentale], without, however, making any earth-shattering revelation [révélation fracassante] on the subject.” The paper went on to quote a curator at France’s National Archives, who said, “These new documents do not constitute an erotic correspondence, nor even, properly speaking, an amorous one.”

There is one piece of new research that bears directly on Goldstone’s claim about the paternity of the dauphin but which I learned of only after writing my review. This is a study published in 2019 in the International Journal of Sciences by French scientists who compared the DNA on a lock of hair belonging to Louis-Charles to DNA belonging to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In conclusion, the researchers write: “Numerous rumors, since the beginning, doubted about Louis XVI’s paternity of his children. We demonstrate here that Louis-Charles (Louis XVII) is truly Louis XVI’s son.”

As to the charge that I aimed to “demean” Dr. Linda Gray, the Connecticut pediatrician whose answers to Goldstone’s questions about Louis XVI’s behavioral eccentricities became, in Goldstone’s analysis, proof that the king was autistic, I would merely reiterate the point I made in my review, which is that Gray’s responses cannot be taken as a proper professional diagnosis since Louis XVI died almost 230 years ago and was never personally examined by Gray.

The Human Comedy

To the Editor:

Oh my! Why didn’t Dana Spiotta mention “The Decameron” in her laudatory review of Gary Shteyngart’s new book, “Our Country Friends” (Nov. 14)? It would seem an obvious reference for a book concerning a group of young people decamping to the country during a plague. Shteyngart must be familiar with it.

Claudia Carr-Levy
New York

Corrections

A review on Dec. 5 about Alex Danchev and Sarah Whitfield’s “Magritte: A Life,” using information from the book, misstated René Magritte’s age at the time of his death. He was 68, not 69.

♦

The Editors’ Choice column last Sunday misstated Greta Garbo’s age when she arrived in Hollywood. She was 19, not 22.

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