independence which had succeeded it had, by a sort of natural reaction, sharpened the energy with which she now pursued her various diversions. It is possible, too, that the zest with which she indulged herself may have derived additional keenness from the knowledge that her ill-wishers found in it pretext for misconstruction and calumny; and that, being conscious of entire purity in thought, word, and deed, she looked on it as due to her own character to show that she set all such detraction and detractors at defiance. To all cavilers, as also to her mother, whose uneasiness was frequently aroused by gossip which reached Vienna from Paris, her invariable reply was that her way of life had the king her husband's entire approbation. And while he felt a conjugal satisfaction in the contemplation of his queen's attractions and graces, the qualities in which, as he was well aware, he himself was most deficient, Louis might well also cherish the most absolute reliance on her unswerving rectitude, knowing the pride with which she was wont to refer to her mother's example, and to boast that the lesson which, above all others, she had learned from it was that to princes of her birth and rank wickedness and baseness were unpardonable.
Indeed, many of the amusements Louis not only approved, but shared with her, while she associated herself with those in which he delighted, as far as she could, joining his hunting parties twice a week, either on horseback or in her carriage, and at all times exhibiting a pattern of domestic union of which the whole previous history of the nation afforded no similar example. The citizens of Paris could hardly believe their eyes when they saw their king and queen walk arm-in-arm along the boulevards; and the courtiers received a lesson, if they had been disposed to profit by it, when on each Sunday morning they saw the royal pair repair to the parish church for divine service, the day being closed by their public supper in the queen's apartment.
And this appearance of domestic felicity was augmented by the introduction of what may be called private parties, with which, at the queen's instigation, Louis consented to vary the cold formality of the ordinary entertainments of the court. In the autumn they followed the example of Louis XV. by exchanging for a few weeks the grandeur of Versailles for the comparative quiet of some of their smaller palaces; and, while they were at Choisy, they issued invitations once or twice a week to several of the Parisian ladies to come out and spend the day at the palace, when, as the principal officers of the household were not on duty, they themselves did the honors to their guests, the queen conversing with every one with her habitual graciousness, while the king also threw off his ordinary reserve, and seemed to enter into the pleasures of the day with a gayety and cordiality which surprised the party, and which, from the contrast that it presented to his manner when he was by himself, was very generally attributed to the influence of the queen's example.
And these quiet festivities were so much to his taste that afterward, when the court moved to Fontainebleau, and when they settled at Versailles for the winter, he cheerfully agreed to a proposal of Marie Antoinette to have a weekly supper party; adopting also another suggestion of hers which was indispensable to render such reunions agreeable, or even, it may be said, practicable. At her request he abolished the ridiculous rule which, under the last two kings, had forbidden gentlemen to be admitted to sit at table with any princess of the royal family. But natural as the idea seemed, it was not carried out without opposition on the part of Madame Adelaide and her sisters, who remonstrated against it as an infraction of all the old observances of the court, till it became a contest for superiority between the queen and themselves. Marie Antoinette took counsel with Mercy, and, by his advice, pointed out to her husband that to abandon the plan after it had been announced, in submission to an opposition which the princesses had no right to make, would be to humiliate her in the eyes of the whole court. Louis had not yet shaken off all fear of his aunts; but they were luckily absent, so he yielded to the influence which was nearest. The suppers took place. He and the queen themselves made out the lists of the guests to be invited, the men being named by him, and the ladies being selected by the queen. They were a great success; and, as the history of the affair became known, the court and the Parisians generally rejoiced in the queen's triumph, and were grateful to her for this as for every other innovation which had a tendency to break down the haughty barrier which, during the last two reigns, had been established between the sovereign and his subjects. Nor were these pleasant informal parties the only instances in which, great inroads were made on the old etiquette. The Comte de Mirabeau, a man fatally connected in subsequent years with some of the most terrible of the insults which were offered to the royal family, about this time described etiquette as a system invented for the express purpose of blunting the capacity of the French princes, and fixing them in position of complete dependence. And Marie Antoinette seems to have regarded it with similar eyes; her dislike of it being quickened by the expectations which its partisans and champions entertained that her every movement was to be regulated by it. And its requirements were sufficiently burdensome to tax a far better-trained patience that was natural to one who though a queen, was not yet nineteen. Not only was no guest of the male sex, except the king, allowed to sit at table with her, but no man-servant, no male officer of her household, might be present when the king and she dined together, as indeed usually happened; even his presence could not sanction the introduction of any other man. The lady of honor, on her knees, though in full dress, presented him the napkin to wipe his fingers and filled his glass; ladies in waiting in the same grand attire changed the plates of the royal pair; and after dinner, as indeed throughout the day, the queen could not quit one room in the palace for another, unless some of her ladies were at hand in complete court dress to attend upon her.[5] These usages, which were in reality so many chains to restrain all freedom, and to render comfort impossible, were abolished in the first few months of the new reign; but, little as was the foundation which they had in common sense, and equally little as was the addition which they made to the royal dignity, it is certain that many of the courtiers, besides Madame de Noailles, were greatly disconcerted at their extinction. They regarded the queen's orders on the subject as a proof of a settled preference for Austrian over French fashions. They began to speak of her as 'the Austrian,' a name which, though Madame Adelaide had more than once chosen it to describe her during the first year of her marriage, had since that time been almost forgotten, but which was now revived, and was continually reproduced by a certain party to cast odium on many of her most simple tastes and most innocent actions. Her enemies oven affirmed that in private she was wont to call the Trianon her 'little Vienna,[6]' as if the garden, which she was laying out with a taste that long made it the admiration of all the visitors to Versailles, were dear to her, not as affording a healthful and becoming occupation, nor for the sale of the giver, but only because it recalled to her memory the gardens of Schoenbrunn, to which, as their malice suggested, she never ceased to look back with unpatriotic regret.
In one point of view they were unquestionably correct. The queen did undoubtedly desire to establish in the French court the customs and the feelings which, during her childhood, had prevailed at Vienna; but they were wholly wrong in thinking them Austrian usages. They were Lorrainese in their origin; they had been imported to Vienna for the first time by her own father, the Emperor Francis; when she referred to them, it was as 'the patriarchal manners of the House of Lorraine[7]' that she spoke of them; and her preference for them was founded on the conviction that it was to them that her mother and her mother's family were indebted for the love and reverence of the people which all the trials and distresses of the struggle against Frederic had never been able to impair.
Nor was it only the old stiffness and formality, which had been compatible with the grossest license, that was now discountenanced. A wholly new spirit was introduced to animate the conversation with which those royal entertainments were enlivened. Under Louis XV., and indeed before his reign, intrigue and faction had been the real rulers of the court, spiteful detraction and scandal had been its sole language. But, to the dispositions, as benevolent as they were pure, of the young queen and her husband, malice and calumny were almost as hateful as profligacy itself. She held, with the great English dramatist, her contemporary, that true wit was nearly allied to good-nature;[8] and she showed herself more decided in nothing than in discouraging and checking every tendency to disparagement of the absent, and diffusing a tone of friendly kindness over society. On one occasion, when she heard some of her ladies laughing over a spiteful story, she reproved them plainly for their mirth as 'bad taste.' On another she asked some who were thus amusing themselves, 'How they would like any one to speak thus of themselves in their absence, and before her?' and her precept, fortified by example (for no unkind comment on any one was ever heard to pass her lips), so effectually extinguished the habit of detraction that in a very short time it was remarked that no courtier ventured on an ill-natured word in her presence, and that even the Comte de Provence, who especially aimed at the reputation of a sayer of good things, and affected a character for cynical sharpness, learned at last to restrain his sarcastic tongue, and at least to pretend a disposition to look at people's characters and actions with as much indulgence as herself.
CHAPTER X. Settlement of the Queen's Allowance.-Character and Views of Turgot.-She induces Gluck to visit Paris.-Performance of his Opera of 'Iphigenie en Aulide.'-The First Encore.-Marie Antoinette advocates the Re-establishment of the Parliaments, and receives an Address from them.- English Visitors at the
