The Queen's Necklace

[igenlode]

I found the missing new season of Marie Antoinette on the BBC catch-up service (with five months left to run); unfortunately it looks as though this season is based around the same events as Antal Szerb's The Queen's Necklace, which I have literally just finished reading. So whereas the first series benefited from the fact that I knew very little about events at the French court at that end of Marie Antoinette's life and had no idea which characters were going to be significant, how events would turn out for the protagonists, or what to hope for, in this case I'm immediately recognising the whole set-up with foreknowledge of how it is going to end in advance. The annoying thing being that I knew nothing about the entire necklace affair (vaguely associating it with Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham) until this week, and indeed would have avoided reading the book if I'd had any idea the TV series was going to re-emerge...