and would not fear to shock her aunts by tempting one of her sisters-in-law to a game at ball, or battledoor and shuttlecock.  But she probably enjoyed still more the power of gratifying the inhabitants of Versailles and the neighborhood.  The moment that her improvements were completed, she opened the gardens to the public to walk in, and gave out-of-door parties and children’s dances, to which all the inhabitants of Versailles who presented themselves in decent apparel were admitted.  She would even open the dance herself with some well-conducted boy, and afterward stroll among the crowd, talking affably to all the company, even to the governesses and nurses, and delighting the parents with the interest which she exhibited in the characters, the growth, and even the names of the children.

There were some who, startled at the unwonted sight of a sovereign so treating her subjects as fellow-creatures, confessed a fear that such familiarity was not without its dangers;[6] but the objects of her condescension worshiped her for it; and for a time at least the great majority of the nation forgot that she was Austrian.  She was now nearly twenty years of age.  Her form had developed into a rare perfection of elegance.  Her features had added to the original brilliancy of her girlish loveliness something of that higher beauty which judgment and sagacity inspire, and which dignity renders only the more imposing; while the same benevolence and purity beamed in every look which were remarked as her most sterling characteristics on her first arrival in the country.  And it is not to her French or German admirers alone that we are reduced to trust for the impression which at this time she made on all beholders.  We have seen that English gentlemen and ladies of rank were frequent visitors to the French court; and from two of these, men of widely different characters, talents, and turns of mind, we have a striking concurrence of testimony as to the power of the fascination which she exerted on all who came within the sphere of her influence.  Burke was the earlier visitor.  Indeed, it was in the last months of the preceding reign, while she was still dauphiness, that she had excited in his enthusiastic imagination those emotions which he afterward described in words which will live as long as the English language.  It was in the spring of 1774 that it seemed to him that “surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.  I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—­ glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.”  No one could be less like Burke than Horace Walpole, a cynical observer, who piqued himself on indifference, and especially on a superiority to the vulgar belief in the merits and attractions of kings and princes.  Yet his report of the charms of Marie Antoinette, as he saw them in the autumn of this year, 1775, reveals