pleased with his dignified manner and with his style of dancing.  I ought to have spoken to him when he was presented to me, and my silence only proceeded from embarrassment, as I did not know him.  It would be doing me great injustice to think that I have any feeling of indifference to my country; I have more reason than any one to feel, every day of my life, the value of the blood which flows in my veins, and it is only from prudence that at times I abstain from showing how proud I am of it....  I never neglect any mode of paying attention to the king, and of anticipating his wishes as far as I can.  I hope that he is pleased with me.  It is my duty to please him, my duty and also my glory, if by such means I can contribute to maintain the alliance of the two houses....[3]”

The empress was but half pacified about the riding and hunting.  She owned that, if both the king and the dauphin approved of it, she had nothing more to say, though she still blamed the dauphiness for forgetting a promise which she understood to have been made to herself.  At the same time, no language could be kinder than that in which she asked “whether her daughter could believe that she would wish to deprive her of so innocent a pleasure, she who would give her very life to procure her one, if she were not apprehensive of mischievous consequences;” her apprehensions being solely dictated by her anxiety to see her daughter bear an heir to the throne.  But she would by no means admit her excuses for giving the Hungarian prince a cold reception.  “How,” she said, “could she forget that her little Antoinette, when not above twelve or thirteen years old, knew how to receive people publicly, and say something polite and gracious to every one, and how could she suppose that the same daughter, now that she was dauphiness, could feel embarrassment?  Embarrassment was a mere chimera.”

But the truth was that it was not a mere chimera.  Mercy had more than once deplored, as one among the mischievous effects of Madame Adelaide’s constant interference and domineering influence, that it had bred in Marie Antoinette a timidity which was wholly foreign to her nature.  And indeed it was hardly possible for one still so young to be aware that she was surrounded by unfriendly intriguers and spies, and to preserve that uniform presence of mind which her rank and position made so desirable for her, and which was in truth so natural to her that she at once recovered it the moment that her circumstances changed.

And a probability of an early change was already apparent.  During the last months of 1772 there was a general idea that the king’s health and mental faculties were both giving away; and all the different parties about Versailles began to show their sense of her approaching authority.  It was remarked that both the ministers and the mistress had become very guarded in their language, and in their behavior to her and her husband.  The Count de Provence took a curious