to the embassador, “in despair at your departure, especially at a moment when affairs are becoming every day more embarrassing and more painful, and when I have therefore the greater need of an attachment as sincere and enlightened as yours.  But I feel that all the powers, under different pretexts, will withdraw their ministers one after another.  It is impossible to leave them incessantly exposed to this disorder and license; but such is my destiny, and I am forced to endure the horror of it to the very end.[4]” But a fortnight later she tells Madame de Polignac that “for some days things have been wearing a better complexion.  She can not feel very sanguine, the mischievous folks having such an interest in perverting every thing, and in hindering every thing which, is reasonable, and such means of doing so; but at the moment the number of ill-intentioned people is diminished, or at least the right-thinking of all classes and of all ranks are more united ...  You may depend upon it,” she adds, “that misfortunes have not diminished my resolution or my courage:  I shall not lose any of that; they will only give me more prudence.[5]” Indeed, her own strength of mind, fortitude, and benevolence were the only things in France which were not constantly changing at this time; and she derived one lesson from the continued vicissitudes to which she was exposed, which, if partly grievous, was also in part full of comfort and encouragement to so warm a heart.  “It is in moments such as these that one learns to know men, and to see who are truly attached to one, and who are not.  I gain every day fresh experiences in this point; sometimes cruel, sometimes pleasant; for I am continually finding that some people are truly and sincerely attached to us, to whom I never gave a thought.”

Another of her old vexations was revived in the renewed jealousy of Austrian influence with which the Jacobin leaders at this time inspired the mob, and which was so great that, when in the autumn Leopold sent the young Prince de Lichtenstein as his envoy to notify his accession, Marie Antoinette could only venture to give him a single audience; and, greatly as she enjoyed the opportunity of gathering from him news of Vienna and of the old friends of the childhood of whom she still cherished an affectionate recollection, she was yet forced to dismiss him after a few minutes’ conversation, and to beg him to accelerate his departure from Paris, lest even that short interview should be made a pretext for fresh calumnies.  “The kindest thing that any Austrian of mark could do for her,” she told her brother, “was to keep away from Paris at present.[6]” She would gladly have seen the Assembly interest itself a little in the politics of the empire, where Leopold’s own situation was full of difficulties; but the French had not yet come to consider themselves as justified in interfering in the internal government of other countries.  As she describes their feelings to the emperor, “They feel their own individual