on central fountains, or on alcoves as solid and stiff as the palace itself, and trees cut into all kinds of fantastic shapes, which had previously been regarded as the masterpieces of the gardeners’ invention.  Her happiness was at its height when, at the end of a few months, all was completed to her liking, and she could invite her husband to an entertainment in a retreat which was wholly her own, and the chief beauties of which were her own work.

As yet, therefore, all was happiness, and prospect of happiness.  Even Maria Teresa, whose unceasing anxiety for her daughter often induced her to see the worst side of things, was rendered for a moment almost playful by the reports which reached Vienna of the universal popularity of “Louis xvi. and his little queen!” “She blushed,” she said, “to think that in thirty-three years of her reign she had not done as much as Louis had done in thirty-three days.[4]” But she still warned her daughter that every thing depended on keeping up the happy impression already made; that much still remained to be done.  And the queen’s answer showed that her new authority had brought with it some cares.  “It is true,” she writes, “that the praises of the king resound everywhere.  He deserves it well by the uprightness of his heart, and the desire which he has to act rightly; but this French enthusiasm disquiets me for the future.  The little that I understand of business shows me that some matters are full of difficulty and embarrassment.  All agree that the late king has left his affairs in a very bad state.  Men’s minds are divided; and it will be impossible to please all the world in a country where the vivacity of the people wants every thing to be done in a moment.  My dear mamma is quite right when she says we must lay down principles, and not depart from them.  The king will not have the same weakness as his grandfather.  I hope that he will have no favorites; but I am afraid that he is too mild and too easy.  You may depend upon it that I will not draw the king into any great expenses.”  (The empress had expressed a fear lest the Trianon might prove a cause of extravagance.) “On the contrary, I, of my own accord, have refused to make demands on him for money which some have recommended me to make.”

Some relaxations, too, of the formality which had previously been maintained between the sovereign and the subordinate members of the royal family, and especially an order of the king that his brothers and sisters were not in private intercourse to address him as his majesty, had grated on the empress’s sense of the distance always to be preserved between a monarch and the very highest of his subjects.  And she had complained that reports had reached her that “there was no distinction between the queen and the other princesses; and that the familiarity subsisting in the court was extreme.”  But Marie Antoinette replied, in defense of the king and herself, that there was “great exaggeration in these reports,