A ROSE IN THE VERSAILLES

This is one of the greatest works in the
"girl's and lady's comics. As this was, too,
animated in TV and put on the stage of
"Takarazuka" opera theater, there is no one
but knows it in Japan. Even a person who deos
not read comics realized the existence of
female comics-writers by this memorial work
for the first time.
Its influences in the following "girl's and
lady's comics" are immeasurable.
There were some of the readers who would
have liked to study Europian history in an
university, or to be a comics-writer themselves.
Others would have been strongly impressed
with a tragic fate of the heroin "Oskal."

[Commentary]
According to the author's explanation, there are two heroines and a hero
in this story. The Queen Marie Antoinette who was guillotined in the French
Revolution, 1793 and a female regimental commander for the Imperial Guards,
Oskal and a Swedish young noble, Velsen who seemed to be a lover of Antoinette.
But judging from the title " A Rose in the Versailles ", this is not only
a biography of Marie Antoinette, which is written fundamentally based on the
historical facts and which is patially fictionalized, but also a poem in
praise for the French Revolution which is drawn through Oskal's activities
for the Revolution.
A female soldier "Oskal" and her honest follower "Andre" are fictional
characters without doubt, but Oskal is the other self of the author and
is representative of her own viewpoint to the Revolution. In this sense we
could say that Oskal is the true heroine.
Thoght the existence of Velsen is important for the readers who read
this work as a kind of love story, it is not what the author would like
to express in this comics, I guess.
The best part of the work, after all, is the scene of a Oskal's heroic
death in the battle against the prison "Bastille". Here Oskal cries to her
soldiers.

   " Now! Make up your mind�I Do you shoot the public as an instrument
    of the king and the nobles ?  Or do you take part in this brilliant
    great undertaking as a free citizen with the public ? "
                   �iVolume8�uCalled by God�E�E�v(p69�j

When Oskal was shooted by an enemy just before fall of the Bastille,
He murmured breathing her last.

   " Freedom�E�E, Equality�E�E, Friendship�E�E

    May this sublime ideal be a steady foundation stone for the human beings, 
    for ever ! "