either him or her.  He even proposed to repeat his visit on Shrove-Tuesday; but when the evening came he changed his mind, and insisted on the queen’s going by herself with one of her ladies, and the change of plan led to an incident which at the time afforded great amusement to Marie Antoinette, though it afterward proved a great annoyance, as furnishing a pretext for malicious stories and scandal.  To preserve her incognito, a private carriage was hired for her, which broke down in the street close by a silk-mercer’s shop.  As the queen was already masked, the shop-men did not know her, and, at the request of the lady who attended her, stopped for her the first hackney-coach which passed, and in that unroyal vehicle, such as certainly no sovereign of France had ever set foot in before, she at last reached the theatre.  As before, no one recognized her, and she might have enjoyed the scene and returned to Versailles in the most absolute secrecy, had not her sense of the fun of a queen using such a conveyance overpowered her wish for concealment, so that when, in the course of the evening, she met one or two persons of distinction whom she knew, she could not forbear telling them who she was, and that she had come in a hackney-coach.

Her health seemed less delicate than it had been before her confinement.  But in the spring she was attacked by the measles, and her illness, slight as it was, gave occasion to a curious passage in court history.  The fear of infection was always great at Versailles, and, as the king himself and some of the ladies had never had the complaint, they were excluded from her room.  But that she might not be left without attendants, four nobles of the court, the Duke de Coigny, the Duke de Guines, the Count Esterhazy, and the Baron de Besenval, in something of the old spirit of chivalry, devoted themselves to her service, and solicited permission to watch by her bedside till she recovered.  As has been already seen, the bed-chamber and dressing-room of a queen of France had never been guarded from intrusion with the jealousy which protects the apartments of ladies in other countries, so that the proposal was less startling than it would have been considered elsewhere, while the number of nurses removed all pretext for scandal.  Louis willingly gave the required permission, being apparently flattered by the solicitude exhibited for his queen’s health.  And each morning at seven the sick-watchers[7] took their seats in the queen’s chamber, sharing with the Countess of Provence, the Princesse de Lamballe, and the Count d’Artois the task of keeping order and quiet in the sick-room till eleven at night.  Though there was no scandal, there was plenty of jesting at so novel an arrangement.  Wags proposed that in the case of the king being taken ill, a list should be prepared of the ladies who should tend his sick-bed.  However, the champions were not long on duty:  at the end of little more than a week their patient was convalescent.  She herself took off the sentence of banishment which she had pronounced against the king in a brief and affectionate note, which said “that she had suffered a great deal, but what she had felt most was to be for so many days deprived of the pleasure of embracing him.”  And the temporary separation seemed to have but increased their mutual affection for each other.