It can not he supposed that the king knew either the opinion which the empress and the embassador had formed of his capacity and disposition, or the advice which they had consequently given to the queen.  But he very early began to show that he himself also appreciated his wife’s quickness of intelligence and correctness of judgment.  Maria Teresa, in pressing on her daughter her opinion of the general character of the policy which the interest of France required, explained her view of her daughter’s position to be that she was “the friend and confidante of the king.[8]” And June had hardly arrived before he began to discuss all his plans and difficulties with her; while she spared his pride and won his further confidence by avoiding all appearances of pressing for it, as if her advice were necessary to him, but at the same time showing with what satisfaction she received it.  To those who solicited her intervention, her language was most carefully guarded.  “She did not,” she said, “interfere in any affair of state; she only coincided in all the wishes and intentions of the king.”

There were, however, matters which were strictly and exclusively within her own province; and in them she at once began to exert her authority most beneficially.  Her first desire was to purify the court where licentiousness in either sex had long been the surest road to royal favor.  She began by making a regulation, that she would receive no lady who was separated from her husband; and she abolished a senseless and inexplicable rule of etiquette which had hitherto prohibited the queen and princesses from dining or supping in company with their husbands.[9] Such an exclusion from the king’s table of those who were its most natural and becoming ornaments had notoriously facilitated and augmented the disorders of the last reign; and it was obvious that its maintenance must at least have a tendency to lead to a repetition of the old irregularities.  Fortunately, the king was as little inclined to approve of it as the queen.  All his tastes were domestic, and he gladly assented to her proposal to abolish the custom.  Throughout the reign, at all ordinary meals, at his suppers when he came in late from hunting, when he had perhaps invited some of his fellow-sportsmen to share his repast, and at State banquets, Marie Antoinette took her seat at his side, not only adding grace and liveliness to the entertainment, but effectually preventing license, and even the suspicion of scandal; and, as she desired that her household as well as her family should set an example of regularity and propriety to the nation, she exercised a careful superintendence over the behavior of those who had hitherto been among the least-considered members of the royal establishment.  Even the king’s confessor had thought the morals of the royal pages either beneath his notice or beyond his control; but Marie Antoinette took a higher view of her duties.  She considered her pages[10] as placed under her charge,