“Farewell, my dear dauphin.  May you be happy.  I am bathed in tears.[2]”

The dauphin did not falsify the hopes thus expressed by the Empress-queen.  But his was not the character to afford his wife either the advice or support which she needed, while, strange to say, he was the only member of the royal family to whom she could look for either.  The king was not only utterly worthless and shameless, but weak and irresolute in the most ordinary matters.  Even when in the flower and vigor of his age, he had never been able to summon courage to give verbal orders or reproofs to his own children,[3] but had intimated his pleasure or displeasure by letters.  He had been gradually falling lower and lower, both in his own vices and in the estimation of the world; and was now, still more than when Lord Chesterfield first drew his picture,[4] both hated and despised.  The dauphin’s brothers, for such mere boys, were singularly selfish and unamiable; and the only female relations of her husband, his aunts, to whom, as such, it would have been natural that a young foreigner should look for friendship and advice, were not only narrow-minded, intriguing, and malicious, but were predisposed to regard her with jealousy as likely to interfere with the influence which they had hoped to exert over their nephew when he should become their sovereign.

Marie Antoinette had, therefore, difficulties and enemies to contend with from the very first commencement of her residence in France.  And many even of her own virtues were unfavorable to her chances of happiness, calculated as they were to lay her at the mercy of her ill-wishers, and to deprive her of some of the defenses which might have been found in a different temperament.  Full of health and spirits, she was naturally eager in the pursuit of enjoyment, and anxious to please every one, from feeling nothing but kindness toward every one; she was frank, open, and sincere; and, being perfectly guileless herself, she was, as through her whole life she continued to be, entirely unsuspicious of unfriendliness, much more of treachery in others.  Her affability and condescension combined with this trustful disposition to make her too often the tool of designing and grasping courtiers, who sought to gain their own ends at her expense, and who presumed on her good-nature and inexperience to make requests which, as they well knew, should never have been made, but which they also reckoned that she would be unwilling to refuse.

But lest this general amiability and desire to give pleasure to those around her might seem to impart a prevailing tinge of weakness to her character, it is fair to add that she united to these softer feelings, robuster virtues calculated to deserve and to win universal admiration; though some of them, never having yet been called forth by circumstances, were for a long time unsuspected by the world at large.  She had pride—­ pride of birth, pride of rank—­though never did that feeling show itself more nobly or more