calling him “his little Norman,” and, saying “that the name alone would bring him happiness,” created Duke of Normandy.  No prophecy was ever so sadly falsified; no king’s son had ever so miserable a lot; but no forebodings of evil as yet disturbed his parents.  Their delight was fully shared by the body of the people; for the cabals against the queen were as yet confined to the immediate precincts of the court, and had not descended to infect the middle classes.  It was with difficulty when, after her confinement, she paid her visit to Paris to return thanks at Notre Dame and St. Genevieve, that the citizens could he prevented from unharnessing her horses and dragging her coach in triumph through the streets.[4] And their exultation was fully shared by the better-intentioned class of courtiers, and by all Marie Antoinette’s real friends, who felt assured that the birth of this second son had given her the security which had hitherto been wanting to her position.

Meanwhile, she was again led to interest herself greatly in foreign politics, though in truth she hardly regarded any thing in which her brother’s empire was interested as foreign, so deep was her conviction that the interests of France and Austria were identical and inseparable, and so unwearied were her endeavors to make her husband’s ministers see all questions that concerned her brother’s dominions with her eyes.  Throughout the latter part of 1784, and the earlier months of 1785, Joseph, who was always restless in his ambition, was full of schemes of aggrandizement which he desired to carry out through the favor and co-operation of France.  At one moment he projected obtaining Bavaria in exchange for the Netherlands, at another he aimed at procuring the opening of the Scheldt by threatening the Dutch with instant war if they resisted.  But, as all these schemes were eventually abandoned, they would hardly require to be mentioned here, were it not for the proofs which his correspondence with his sister affords of his increasing esteem for her capacity, and his evident conviction of her growing influence in the French Government, and for the light which some of her answers to his letters throw on her relations with the ministers, which had perhaps some share in increasing the annoyance that the affair of “the necklace,” as will be presently mentioned, caused her before the end of the year.  Her difficulties with Louis himself were the same as she had already described to her brother on former occasions.  “It was impossible to induce him to take a strong line, so as to speak resolutely to M. de Vergennes in her presence, and equally so to prevent his changing his mind afterward;[5]” while she distrusted the good faith of the minister so much that, though she resolved to speak to him strongly on the subject, she would not do so till she could discuss the question with him “in the presence of the king, that he might not be able to disfigure or to exaggerate what she said.”  Yet she did not always