The charge against her of extravagance has been already refuted.  Her private palace was furnished from the State lumber rooms, and what was purchased, paid for out of her savings.  As for her favourites, she never had but two, and these were no supernumerary expense or encumbrance to the State.

Perhaps it would have been better had she been more thoroughly directed by the Princesse de Lamballe.  She was perfectly conscious of her good qualities, but De Polignac dazzled and humoured her love of amusement and display of splendour.  Though this favourite was the image of her royal mistress in her amiable characteristics, the resemblance unfortunately extended to her weaknesses.  This was not the case with the Princesse de Lamballe; she possessed steadiness, and was governed by the cool foresight of her father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, which both the other friends wanted.

The unshaken attachment of the Princesse de Lamballe to the Queen, notwithstanding the slight at which she at one time had reason to feel piqued, is one of the strongest evidences against the slanderers of Her Majesty.  The moral conduct of the Princess has never been called in question.  Amid the millions of infamous falsehoods invented to vilify and degrade every other individual connected with the Court, no imputation, from the moment of her arrival in France, up to the fatal one of her massacre, ever tarnished her character.  To her opinion, then, the most prejudiced might look with confidence.  Certainly no one had a greater opportunity of knowing the real character of Marie Antoinette.  She was an eye-witness to her conduct during the most brilliant and luxurious portion of her reign; she saw her from the meridian of her magnificence down to her dejection to the depths of unparalleled misery.  If the unfortunate Queen had ever been guilty of the slightest of those glaring vices of which she was so generally accused, the Princess must have been aware of them; and it was not in her nature to have remained the friend and advocate, even unto death, of one capable of depravity.  Yet not a breath of discord ever arose between them on that score.  Virtue and vice can never harmonize; and even had policy kept Her Highness from avowing a change of sentiments, it never could have continued her enthusiasm, which was augmented, and not diminished, by the fall of her royal friend.  An attachment which holds through every vicissitude must be deeply rooted from conviction of the integrity of its object.

The friendship that subsisted between this illustrious pair is an everlasting monument that honours their sex.  The Queen used to say of her, that she was the only woman she had ever known without gall.  “Like the blessed land of Ireland,” observed Her Majesty, “exempt from the reptiles elsewhere so dangerous to mankind, so was she freed by Providence from the venom by which the finest form in others is empoisoned.  No envy, no ambition, no desire, but to contribute to the welfare and happiness of her fellow creatures—­and yet, with all these estimable virtues, these angelic qualities, she is doomed, from her virtuous attachment to our persons, to sink under the weight of that affliction, which, sooner or later, must bury us all in one common ruin—­a ruin which is threatening hourly.”