Okay, I’m on the road this entire week (and the next), so this will be on the fly, but here it goes:

Affair of the Necklace: nothing to complain about. I also believe her that the necklace in question looked terrible even though I haven’t seen it, since this era was not noted for featuring subtle jewelry.

French Revolution in general: also okay for the pov the book takes, though maybe it’s worth pointing out that both Louis and MA were in fact guilty of the main charge in their trials, which wasn’t having been King and Queen but conspiring with foreign armies against France and furthering an overthrow of the government with the help of said foreign armies. Since Louis had taken an oath on the new constitution, this also constituted a breaking of said oath. Now obviously the oath had been taken under pressure, and also the conspiring was done with the very real fear that their lives were at stake. But it still meant that the King and Queen of France were in league with foreign powers and doing their best to help said powers invade France. So, for all that both trials had an predestined outcome, the irony is that as opposed to the general accusations of tyranny and the vile slander of sexual molestation of her own son for MA, this particular charge was true, and the fairest court of the world would have had to find them guilty of it.

Speaking of revolutions: Goldstone is downplaying the Neapolitan Revolution and its brutal put-down as much as she can. And the paranoid atmosphere earlier with all the spying at Charlotte’s investigation is present as a harmless excentricity. Now again, given what happened to her sister, I very much understand Maria Carolina becoming paranoid as hell and becoming hardcore as a result even before events erupted - which of course alienated the progressive Neapolitans from her like at record pace. Goldstone revers to the revolutionaries as “collaborators” (of the French), which is biased framing, for while the short lived Neapolitan Republic was very much supported by the French, the main protagonists were long term progressives and the “best and brightest”’ of the nation. The reason why Charlotte is still massively unpopular in Italy is the charge that Southern Italy never quite recovered from the intellectual bloodletting that followed, once Nelson came through on the royal side. To quote wiki: “Of some 8,000 political prisoners, 99 were executed, including Prince Gennaro Serra, who was publicly beheaded, and others, such as the intellectual Mario Pagano, who had written the republican constitution; the scientist, Domenico Cirillo; Luisa Sanfelice; Gabriele Manthoné, the minister of war under the republic; Massa, the defender of Castel dell'Ovo; Ettore Carafa, the defender of Pescara, who had been captured by treachery; and Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel, court-poet turned revolutionary and editor of il Monitore Napoletano, the newspaper of the republican government. More than 500 other people were imprisoned (222 for life), 288 were deported and 67 exiled. The subsequent censorship and oppression of all political movement was far more debilitating for Naples.”

In her novel about Sir William Hamilton, “The Volcano Lover”, Susan Sontag gives Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel the last word. (The novel is written in third person for the most part, with four first person narration epilogues, and the last one is by Eleonora, waiting for her execution and cursing Emma, Charlotte and the Royals and British in general.) Alexandre Dumas in his mid 19th century written novel about Emma which is very sympathetic to her nonetheless has the repression of the Neapolitan revolution, which she enabled in order to help her friend, as the one sin that haunts her and the guilt that plagues her as her “sinful life” never does. In real life, Whig politician Charles James Fox denounced Nelson in the House of Commons for the admiral's part in "the atrocities at the Bay of Naples", national hero or not.

Again: given all this happened AFTER MA’s execution, it’s all too understandable that Charlotte thought “I’m not going to be executed by the rabble, down with all traitors, it’s kill or be killed!”, and that Emma thought she needed to save her friend from MA’s fate, and that Nelson thought the same thing. But to handwave everything the way Nancy Goldstone does and say “Napoleon killed way more people! Also it was Ferdinand not Charlotte who wanted them to die!” Is pretty partisan, as per usual. One of her sources, Kate Williams’ Emma biography “England’s Mistress” does a better job of putting things into perspective without indulging in whataboutism. Their contemporaries certainly thought it was a big deal.

Joseph’s reforms: yes, more or less true to what the problem was. Though again, the framing is important here, and to repeat what I said before - she leaves out the very first Joseph vs Mimi and Leopold clash in the 1760s, which was about Dad’s money, and Joseph wanting it for the ginormous Austrian war debts, while Leopold wanted it for Tuscany and Mimi just wanted the cash. Note that favourite or no, MT did not side with Mimi there. Whether Mimi, like Leopold, was against Joseph’s reforms because she could see that ramming them down people’s throats en masse was a disaster in the making, and that you had to introduce reforms differently, or whether she simply was way more conservative and didn’t want reforms at all is up to debate.

(Note that the author of the “Five Princesses” book points out that the Princesses were generally conservative, and several, like Eleonore Liechtenstein, deeply devout, and so very critical of many of Joseph’s reforms for this reason even before disaster unfolded. Her book has the ladies as her heroines, too, but she doesn’t try to put them in the right all the time.)

Also: three times, Goldstone says about Leopold’s son Franz (the future II): “He was trained by Joseph”. Which is a hilarious way of trying to blame Franz, who was an arch reactionary who couldn’t stand his uncle and vice versa, on Joseph. “Trained by Joseph” only in the sense that he became part of the army when Joseph was Emperor. But she could have said with way more truth “He was raised by Leopold”. Because he was. He still ruined not just what remained of Joseph’s but all of his father’s works when he became Emperor and took Austria back behind even MT’s own reforms. For which he himself is to blame. “Trained by Joseph’” my ass.

Joseph dying alone: without a family member present, true, but his friend Lacy was (that’s one of the two other male members of the friendship circle Joseph and the princesses formed), who had been there when Joseph’s daughter had died already, and held his hand on this occasion. Also, note that Eleonore Liechtenstein, who had her share of arguments with Joseph throughout their friendship (they were easily the two most thinskinned, temper-having and bullheaded members of the group), and did indeed befriend Mimi in her later years, wrote a far more generous epitaph for him than Goldstone did in a letter to her sister Leopoldine Kaunitz, to wit: We were often infuriated by him, but how much verve, life, enthusiasm and love for justice did he awaken in all of us!”

Lastly: Leopold and Mimi were allies, but he still didn’t send her and Albert back to Brussels unsupervised. He insisted that Metternich Senior (the father of the famous Metternich) was to go with them and do a part of the governing. From which you can deduce Leopold didn’t think the Netherlands revolting was all to blame on Joseph’s reforms and Napoleon and didn’t consider Mimi and Albert geniuses at governing.

ETA: Wait, you also asked about Mozart. While he was indeed in financial trouble when he died, the way of his burial was due to the Josephinian burial reforms, that’s true. (Amadeus doesn’t claim the opposite, btw. If it had been simply a matter of money, Salieri or van Swieten, both of whom are shown following the coffin up to a point, could have paid for a funeral. However, there wasn’t one available. If Salieri himself had died at this point, he would have been buried in the exact same manner.) Now, there was a point to this in that funerals often had been ruinously expensive, especially for poor families, because letting the dearly departed go out in style had become such a point of honor and showing off for all classes. But of course by prescribing the same type of re-usable coffin for everyone, Joseph did FW and Fritz one better and pissed off everyone as well.

Salieri’s father did have a regular funeral, but then Salieri’s father died before Joseph was the one and only Emperor. (Leaving this aside, without looking it up, I’m not even sure Salieri came from the parts of Italy under Austrian rule. For all I know,l he came from the Spanish-ruled parts, or from the parts directly ruled by the Church, or, gasp, the self ruled parts (like Venice, for example).

Kate Williams’ Emma bio is a good one, yes. Re: The Volcano Lover, I only remember bits and pieces, it’s been thirty years, and I would have to reread in order to be sure whether or not to rec it to you. I mean, obviously Susan Sontag writes beautiful prose, but among the bits I remember was that all the characters around Sir William - his first wife, Emma, Nelson, even Eleonora the revolutionary who only gets one chapter - came across more vividly than him, which for a novel that is explicitly about him is odd. The other thing I recall is a minor point: Goethe has a cameo, and he is basically Thomas Mann. Which is understandable in that Susan Sontag met Thomas Mann in person when she was young, he was a major authorial influence on her, and Thomas Mann certainly believed he was Goethe, too. (His novel Lotte in Weimar Is mostly from old Charlotte Buff’s pov, but there is one chapter from Goethe’s, and he refered to it as his unio mystica with Goethe.) The problem is that Thomas Mann and Goethe were actually quite different, and so the brief Goethe portrait rubbed me the wrong way.

(Here’s a Thomas Mann joke for you from my student days: “Thomas Mann and some friends take the train. When it’s time for everyone’s tickets to be checked, TM discovers he’s forgotten his. The steward demands the penalty money. One of the friends says: “But don’t you recognize him, this is Germany’s greatest writer!” Whereupon the student says: “Beg pardon, Herr Goethe, I didn’t recognize you!”).

Emma on film so far - the most famous examples are (YouTube Trailers or scenes linked):

That Hamilton Womam (1941, a Winston Churchill favourite; Emma: Vivien Leigh, Nelson: Laurence Olivier (who notoriously wears the eyepatch on the wrong eye, but that didn't stop the film's popularity). Very romantic take, though Vivien Leigh gets to show off her acting skills in the framing scenes, which are showing middle-aged Emma the alcoholic beggarwoman in Calais who tells the story to a young woman she's arrested with. In the main film, she and Olivier are dashing and romantic (also they were real life lovers at this point, about to divorce their respective spouses and marry each other). And since it's WWII, Napoleon gets to stand in for Hitler (which I feel is unfair to Napoleon but done in a lot of movies of the time) while Nelson gets to make a Churchillian speech in the House of Lords against Appeasements. Maria Carolina is an Italian Mamma type, and the scriptwriters seem to be under the impression "Queen of Naples" means "born in Naples".

Lady Hamilton: a French/German production with Michelle Mercier as Emma. Very very loosely based on Dumas' novel. The novel offers lesbian subtext for Emma and Charlotte (not an Italian), and the film doubles up on that - you can see one of the scenes in the trailer I linked - , but it's basically Eurotrash, a bodice ripper where Michelle Mercier gets to have as many bed scenes as possible.

A Bequest to the Nation, screenplay by Terrence Rattigan. Emma: Glenda Jackson. Nelson: Peter Finch. This one, a deliberately anti-romantic film, set after Sir William has already died, in the last year of Nelson's life, actually has Nelson's wife as the heroine, with Emma and Nelson basically as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as seen in the 1960s by the yellow press - vulgar gloryhounds (and boozers) addicted to each other, not caring about the human damage. (Or rather, Nelson does care a bit, he knows his wife doesn't deserve the treatment, but he's too weak and too addicted to Emma to say no.) Still, Rattigan isn't without sympathy for his version of Emma and he is very good with damaged female characters in general; he does show that her over the top behavior is rooted in her awareness of her past as a powerless teenage prostitute and the fear Nelson will leave her and do what every man (other than the late Sir William) has done, ditch the mistress and stick with the wife. There's a final scene in which Emma and Lady Nelson meet after Nelson's death and reconcile, and the title of course refers to the famous passage in Nelson's last will where he left Emma as a "bequest to the nation" and the nation promptly ignored said bequest in favour of erecting a statue at Trafalgar Square and getting rid of the mistress.

Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier: it's actually a sad story for how it ended. As mentioned, they both married young, then met at the set of "Fire over England" (typical bodice ripper, he's a Sir Walter Raleigh wannabe, she's a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth), fell in love, and eventually left their respective spouses for each other. Hollywood beckoned, Vivien Leigh landed the female role of the decade with Scarlett O'Hara, and Olivier didn't do badly himself with playing Maxim de Winter in Hitchcock's "Rebecca". Having obtained their divorces, they married (to the great relief of the studio bosses), and returned to England, because WWII.

And then various things over the next two decades happened.

1) Vivien Leigh was bi polar, and there was little to no idea of how to handle this back then. Mostly the people around her thought the cycles of giddy heights and deep depression were spoiled star behavior, despite her doctors pointing out it was a genuine mental problem.

2) Olivier was rapidly considered as the best (stage) actor of his generation, but this never quite translated to the movies, including his own Shakespeare films. He's good in several of them, don't get me wrong, but the effect he must have had on a live audience according to evreyone's descriptions just isn't there. Meanwhile, the camera had loved Vivien Leigh. They didn't act together in movies anymore after "That Hamilton Woman", but they acted repeatedly on stage, where the critical lords of the day, especially Kenneth Tynan who was an Olivier fanboy of the first order, trounced her for not being at his level. (This did wonders for her mental condition.) Conversely, if she did act far, far away from him in the movies, like in the film version of "Streetcar named Desire" which she got her second Oscar for, you had director Elia Kazan suspecting Olivier must be secretly coaching her. (Which was rubbish.)

3) She also had miscarriages and got tuberculosis.

4) True fact sounding like a story: Terence Rattigan's screenplay for "The VIPs" - filmed with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard burton - was inspired by something that happened to the Oliviers, with Vivien nearly leaving him for Peter Finch but fog preventing the plane from taking off so Laurence Olivier made it to the airport and could persuade her to stay with him.

6) In the end, though, he left her, for Joan Plowright. (Who'd played his daughter in "The Entertainer".) After a few more years on her own, she died.

7) According to his son Tarquin, in old age Laurence Olivier when watching "That Hamilton Woman" on the telly got tears in his eyes and said "This was real. This was love". (To which Joan Plowright presumably said "Thanks, Larry", I guess. She's a fabulous old woman herself now, as can be seen in the movie "Tea with the Dames" which is streaming on Amazon Prime in my region at last.)

Some more Leigh and/or Olivier related links to old posts of mine:

A Streetcar Named Desire

My week with Marylin

Tea with the Dames

And here's a shipper's vid proving, if nothing else, that they were a gorgeous couple: In my life