of her communicativeness, and from this time forward she never repeated the error.  After the lesson she had received, none of her female attendants, not even the Duchesse de Polignac, to whom she would have confided her very existence, could, had they been ever so much disposed, have drawn anything upon public matters from her.  With me, as her superintendent and entitled by my situation to interrogate and give her counsel, she was not, of course, under the same restriction.  To his other representations of the consequences of the Queen’s indiscreet openness, the Abbe Vermond added that, being obliged to write all the letters, private and public, he often found himself greatly embarrassed by affairs having gone forth to the world beforehand.  One misfortune of putting this seal upon the lips of Her Majesty was that it placed her more thoroughly in the Abbe’s power.  She was, of course, obliged to rely implicitly upon him concerning many points, which, had they undergone the discussion necessarily resulting from free conversation, would have been shown to her under very different aspects.  A man with a better heart, less Jesuitical, and not so much interested as Vermond was to keep his place, would have been a safer monitor.

“Though the Archbishop of Sens was so much hated and despised, much may be said in apology for his disasters.  His unpopularity, and the Queen’s support of him against the people, was certainly a vital blow to the monarchy.  There is no doubt of his having been a poor substitute for the great men who had so gloriously beaten the political paths of administration, particularly the Comte de Vergennes and Necker.  But at that time, when France was threatened by its great convulsion, where is the genius which might not have committed itself?  And here is a man coming to rule amidst revolutionary feelings, with no knowledge whatever of revolutionary principles—­a pilot steering into one harbour by the chart of another.  I am by no means a vindicator of the Archbishop’s obstinacy in offering himself a candidate for a situation entirely foreign to the occupations, habits, and studies of his whole life; but his intentions may have been good enough, and we must not charge the physician with murder who has only mistaken the disease, and, though wrong in his judgment, has been zealous and conscientious; nor must we blame the comedians for the faults of the comedy.  The errors were not so much in the men who did not succeed as in the manners of the times.

“The part which the Queen was now openly compelled to bear, in the management of public affairs, increased the public feeling against her from dislike to hatred.  Her Majesty was unhappy, not only from the necessity which called her out of the sphere to which she thought her sex ought to be confined, but from the divisions which existed in the Royal Family upon points in which their common safety required a common scheme of action.  Her favourite brother-in-law, D’Artois, had espoused the side of D’ORLEANS, and the popular party seemed to prevail against her, even with the King.