alienate the dauphin from his young wife, and to induce him to commit himself to the guidance of Madame du Barri.  But this part of the scheme failed.  The dauphin was strangely insensible to the personal charms of Marie Antoinette herself, and was wholly inaccessible to any inferior temptations; and, as far as the arrangements of the court were concerned, the success of the mistress’s cabal was limited to procuring the dismissal of the mistress of the robes, the Countess de Grammont, for refusing to cede to Madame du Barri and some of her friends the place which belonged to her office at some private theatricals which were held in the palace.

Louis xiv. had taught his nobles the pernicious notion that an order to withdraw from the court was a penal banishment, and his successor now banished Madame de Grammont fourteen leagues from Versailles, and for some time refused to recall his sentence, though Marie Antoinette herself wrote to him to complain of one of her servants being so treated for such a cause.  She had not, as she reported to her mother, been very willing to write, knowing that Madame du Barri read all the king’s letters; but Mercy had urged her to take the step, thinking it very important that she should establish the practice of communicating directly with Louis on all matters relating to her own household, and that she should avoid the blunder of his daughters, her aunts, whose conduct toward their father had, in his opinion, been mischievously timid, and to follow whose example would be prejudicial both to her dignity and to her comfort.

The aunts too, and especially the eldest, Madame Adelaide, had schemes of their own, which, they also sought to carry out by underhand methods.  The more conscious they were that they themselves had no influence over their father, the less could they endure the chance of their niece acquiring any, though it could not have been said to have been established at their expense.  On the other hand, they had before his marriage had considerable power with the dauphin, which they had now but little hope of retaining.  They saw also that Marie Antoinette had in a few weeks gained a general popularity such as they had never won in their whole lives, and on all these accounts they were painfully jealous of her.  They put ideas and plans into her head which they expected to grate upon their father’s taste or indolence, and then contrived to have them represented or misrepresented to him, though he disappointed their malice by regarding such things as childish ebullitions natural to a girl of her age, and was far more inclined to humor than to reprove her.  With the same object, they tried to induce her to interfere in appointments in which she had no concern; but she remembered her mother’s advice, and on this point kept steadily in the path which that affectionate adviser had marked out for her.  They even ventured to make disparaging observations on her manners, as inexperienced and unformed, to the dauphin himself,