King-Cog

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF Louis XVI--Saul K. Padover -- Appleton-Century ($3.75).

Synonym for royalty's sins and sufferings in the French Revolution has long been meddlesome Marie Antoinette. But it was her gluttonous, well-meaning husband, Louis XVI--to his courtiers "that great hog"--whose consistent blunders, according to Author Padover, mark the consistent advances of the Revolution, and make him the king-cog of the revolutionary turnover. Much new archive material documents this competent appraisal of an unheroic fat man trying to keep his head in a high historical wind. Inescapable is the conclusion that the bolshevik bourgeois and proletarians of 1793 "liquidated" the one French king who was more bourgeois than Bourbon, with a wide stripe in him of poor but honest artisan.

Louis' gluttony was gargantuan: Author Padover calls it "glandular." A "normal" meal for him would consist of four cutlets, a fat chicken, six eggs, a slice of ham. Sometimes he gorged himself insensible, would then mutter remorseful words of "slop-pail grossness." At decisive moments he was often too gorged to act.

In the Louvre, Author Padover unearthed a forgotten drawing by P'ainter-Revolutionist David, who voted for his king's death. It showed hunted Louis and his family crammed into the little cage in the Assembly, Louis wolfing a chicken behind the bars while the shocked rabble point. Mortified Marie Antoinette ate no food that day. When the Bourbons were restored, David, then a successful society artist, hastily rubbed out the chicken.

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