“King Henry.  Now by thy looks
  I guess thy message.  Is the queen delivered? 
  Say ay; and of a boy.

“Lady.  Ay, ay, my liege, And of a lovely boy.  The God of Heaven Both now and ever bless her.  ’Tis a girl, Promises boys hereafter.”

And a month before the empress had expressed a similar sentiment:  “I trust,” she wrote to her daughter in November, “that God will grant me the comfort of knowing that you are safely delivered.  Every thing else is a matter of indifference.  Boys will come after girls.[2]” And the same feeling was shared by the Parisians in general, and embodied by M. Imbert, a courtly poet, whose odes were greatly in vogue in the fashionable circles, in an epigram which was set to music and sung in the theatres.

  “Pour toi, France, un dauphin doit naitre,
    Une Princesse vient pour en etre temoin,
  Sitot qu’on voit une grace paraitre,
    Croyez que l’amour n’est pas loin.[3]”

Marie Antoinette herself was scarcely disappointed at all.  When the attendants brought her her babe, she pressed it to her bosom.  “Poor little thing,” said she, “you are not what was desired, but you shall not be the less dear to me.  A son would have belonged to the State; you will be my own:  you shall have all my care, you shall share my happiness and sweeten my vexations.[4]”

The Count de Provence made no secret of his joy.  He was still heir presumptive to the throne.  And, though no one shared his feelings on the subject, for the next few weeks the whole kingdom, and especially the capital, was absorbed in public rejoicings.  Her own thankfullness was displayed by Marie Antoinette in her usual way, by acts of benevolence.  She sent large sums of money to the prisons to release poor debtors; she gave dowries to a hundred poor maidens; she applied to the chief officers of both army and navy to recommend her veterans worthy of especial reward; and to the curates of the metropolitan parishes to point out to her any deserving objects of charity; and she also settled pensions on a number of poor children who were born on the same day as the princess; one of whom, who owed her education to this grateful and royal liberality, became afterward known to every visitor of Paris as Madame Mars, the most accomplished of comic actresses.[5]

One portion of the rejoicings was marked by a curious incident, in which the same body whose right to a special place of honor at ceremonies connected with the personal happiness of the royal family we have already seen admitted—­the ladies of the fish-market—­again asserted their pretensions with triumphant success.  On Christmas-eve the theatres were opened gratuitously, but these ladies, who, with their friends, the coal-heavers, selected the most aristocratic theatre, La Comedie Francaise, for the honor of their visit, arrived with aristocratic unpunctuality, so late that the guards stopped them