If it is impossible, I will take care and manage it.”  But being very unscrupulous himself, he overshot his mark when he sought to propitiate her further by offering to represent as hers acts of charity which she had not performed.  The winter of 1783 was one of unusual severity.  The thermometer at Paris was, for some weeks, scarcely above zero; scarcity, with its inevitable companion, clearness of price, reduced the poor of the northern provinces, and especially of the capital and its neighborhood, to the verge of starvation.  The king, queen, and princesses gave large sums from their privy purses for their relief; but as such supplies were manifestly inadequate, Louis ordered the minister to draw three millions of francs from the treasury, and to apply them for the alleviation of the universal distress.  Calonne cheerfully received and executed the beneficent command.  He was perhaps not sorry, at his first entrance on his duties, to show how easy it was for him to meet even an unforeseen demand of so heavy an amount; and he fancied he saw in it a means of ingratiating himself with Marie Antoinette.  He proposed to her that he should pay one of the millions to her treasurer, that that officer might distribute it, in her name, as a gift from her own allowance; but Marie Antoinette disdained such unworthy artifice.  She would have felt ashamed to receive praise or gratitude to which she was not entitled.  She rejected the proposal, insisting that the king’s gift should be attributed to himself alone, and expressing her intention to add to it by curtailing her personal expenditure, by abridging her entertainments so long as the distress should last, and by dedicating the sums usually appropriated to pleasure and festivity to the relief of those whose very existence seemed to depend on the aid which it was her duty and that of the king to furnish.  For there was this especial characteristic in Marie Antoinette’s charity, that it did not proceed solely from kindness of heart and tenderness of disposition, though these were never wanting, but also from a settled principle of duty, which, in her opinion, imposed upon sovereigns, as a primary obligation, the task of watching over the welfare of their subjects as persons intrusted by Providence to their care; and such a feeling was obviously more to be depended upon as a constant motive for action than the most vivid emotion of the moment, which, if easily excited, is not unfrequently as easily overpowered by some fresh object.

Meanwhile events were gradually compelling her to take a more active part in politics.  Maurepas had been jealous of her influence, and, while that old minister lived, Louis, who from his childhood had been accustomed to see him in office, committed almost every thing to his guidance.  But, as he always required some one of stronger mind than himself to lean upon, as soon as Maurepas was gone he turned to the queen.  It was to her that he now chiefly confided his anxieties and perplexities; from her that