After a few words of my own on the family of Her Highness, I shall leave her to pursue her beautiful and artless narrative of her parentage, early sorrows, and introduction to Her Majesty, unbroken.

The journal of the history of Marie Antoinette, after this slight interruption for the private history of her friend, will become blended with the journal of the Princesse de Lamballe, and both thenceforward will proceed in their course together, like their destinies, which from that moment never became disunited.]

SECTION VI.

[Maria Theresa Louisa Carignan, Princess of Savoy, was born at Turin on the 8th September, 1749.  She had three sisters; two of them were married at Rome, one to the Prince Doria Pamfili, the other to the Prince Colonna; and the third at Vienna, to the Prince Lobkowitz, whose son was the great patron of the immortal Haydn, the celebrated composer.

The celebrated Haydn was, even at the age of 74, when I last saw him at Vienna, till the most good-humoured bon vivant of his age.  He delighted in telling the origin of his good fortune, which he said he entirely owed to a bad wife.

When he was first married, he said, finding no remedy against domestic squabbles, he used to quit his bad half and go and enjoy himself with his good friends, who were Hungarians and Germans, for weeks together.  Once, having returned home after a considerable absence, his wife, while he was in bed next morning, followed her husband’s example:  she did even more, for she took all his clothes, even to his shoes, stockings, and small clothes, nay, everything he had, along with her!  Thus situated, he was under the necessity of doing something to cover his nakedness; and this, he himself acknowledged, was the first cause of his seriously applying himself to the profession which has since made his name immortal.

He used to laugh, saying, “I was from that time so habituated to study that my wife, often fearing it would injure me, would threaten me with the same operation if I did not go out and amuse myself; but then,” added he, “I was grown old, and she was sick and no longer jealous.”  He spoke remarkably good Italian, though he had never been in Italy, and on my going to Vienna to hear his “Creation,” he promised to accompany me back to Italy; but he unfortunately died before I returned to Vienna from Carlsbad.

She had a brother also, the Prince Carignan, who, marrying against the consent of his family, was no longer received by them; but the unremitting and affectionate attention which the Princesse de Lamballe paid to him and his new connexions was an ample compensation for the loss he sustained in the severity of his other sisters.