There is no trace in these letters of the levity and giddiness of which Mercy so often complains, and which she at times did not deny.  On the contrary, they display an earnestness as well as a good sense and an energy which are gracefully set off by the affection for her mother, and the pride in her brother’s firmness and address which they also express.  With respect to the conduct of Louis at this crisis we may perhaps differ from her; and may think that he rarely showed so much self-reliance, the general want of which was in truth his greatest defect, as when he preferred the arguments of Vergennes to her entreaties.  But if her praises of the emperor are, as she herself terms them, vanity, it is the vanity of sisterly and patriotic affection, which can not but be regarded with approval; and we may see in it an additional proof of the correctness of an assertion, repeated over and over again in Mercy’s correspondence, that, whenever Marie Antoinette gave the rein to her own natural impulses, she invariably both thought and acted rightly.

In one of the extracts which have just been quoted, the queen alludes to her own condition; and that, in any one less unselfish, might well have driven all other thoughts from her head.  For the event to which she had so long looked forward as that which was wanted to crown her happiness, and which had been so long deferred that at times she had ceased to hope for it at all, was at last about to take place—­she was about to become a mother.  Her own joy at the prospect was shared to its full extent by both the king and the empress.  Louis, roused out of his usual reserve, wrote with his own hand to both the empress and the emperor, to give the intelligence; and Maria Teresa declared that she had nothing left to wish for, and that she could now close her eyes in peace.  And the news was received with almost equal pleasure by the citizens of Paris, who had long desired to see an heir born to the crown; and by those of Vienna, who had not yet forgotten the fair young princess, the flower of her mother’s flock, as they had fondly called her, whom they had sent to fill a foreign throne.  Her own happiness exhibited itself, as usual, in acts of benevolence, in the distribution of liberal gifts to the poor of Paris and Versailles, and a foundation of a hospital for those in a similar condition with herself.[13]

In the course of the spring, Paris was for a moment excited even more than by the declaration of war against England, or than by the expectation of the queen’s confinement, by the return of Voltaire, who had long been in disgrace with the court, and had been for many years living in a sort of tacit exile on the borders of the Lake of Geneva.  He was now in extreme old age, and, believing himself to have but a short time to live, he wished to see Paris once more, putting forward as his principal motive his desire to superintend the performance of his tragedy of “Irene.”  His admirers could easily secure him a brilliant reception