till he silenced them by the warmth of his praises alike of her beauty and of her disposition; and they were so afraid of any addition to her popularity with the nation at large, that, when the city of Paris and the states of Languedoc presented her with an address, they recommended her to make no reply, assuring her that on similar occasions they themselves had never given any answers.  Luckily, she had a better adviser, who on this occasion was the Abbe de Vermond.  He told her truly that in this matter the conduct which the older princesses had pursued was a warning, not a pattern:  that they had made all France discontented; and at his suggestion Marie Antoinette gave to each address “an answer full of graciousness, with which the public was enchanted.”

Thus in the first year of her marriage, by her kindness of heart, guided by the advice of Mercy and the abbe, to which she listened with the greatest docility, she had won general affection, and had made no enemies but those whose enmity was an honor.  She was, as she wrote to her mother, perfectly happy, though, had she not wished to make the best of matters, she was not, in fact, wholly free from disappointments and vexations, some of which continued for years to cause her uneasiness and anxiety, though others were comparatively trivial or temporary, while one was of an almost comical nature.

She had conceived a great desire to learn to ride.  Her mother had been a great horsewoman; and, as the dauphin, like the king, was passionately addicted to hunting, which hitherto she had only witnessed from a carriage, Marie Antoinette not unnaturally desired to be mistress of an accomplishment which would enable her to give him more of her companionship.  Unluckily Mercy disapproved of the idea.  It is impossible to read his correspondence with the empress, and in subsequent years with Marie Antoinette herself, without being forcibly impressed with respect for his consummate prudence, his sound judgment in matters of public policy, and his unswerving fidelity to the interests of both mother and daughter.  But at the same time it is difficult to avoid seeing that he was too little inclined to make allowance for the youthful eagerness for amusements which was natural to her age, and that at times he carried his supervision into matters on which his statesman-like experience and sagacity had hardly qualified him to form an opinion.  He was proud of his princess’s beauty; and, considering himself in charge of her figure as well as of her conduct, he had made himself very uneasy by the fancied discovery that she was becoming crooked.  He was sure that one shoulder was growing higher than the other; he earnestly recommended stays, and was very much displeased with her aunts for setting her against them, because they were not fashionable in Paris.  And when the horse exercise was proposed, he set his face against it; he wrote to Maria Teresa, who agreed with him in thinking it ruinous to the complexion, injurious to the shape, and not to be safely indulged in under thirty years of age[8]; and, lest distance should weaken the authority of the empress, he enlisted Madame de Noailles and Choiseul on his side, and Choiseul persuaded the king that it was a very objectionable pastime for a young bride.