be replaced by two of her own diamonds.  He consented, and then reduced the price of the earrings to three hundred and sixty thousand francs; the payment for which was to be made by instalments, and was discharged in the course of four or five years by the Queen’s first femme de chambre, deputed to manage the funds of her privy purse.  I have omitted no details as to the manner in which the Queen first became possessed of these jewels, deeming them very needful to place in its true light the too famous circumstance of the necklace, which happened near the end of her reign.

It was also on this first journey to Marly that the Duchesse de Chartres, afterwards Duchesse d’Orleans, introduced into the Queen’s household Mademoiselle Bertin, a milliner who became celebrated at that time for the total change she effected in the dress of the French ladies.

It may be said that the mere admission of a milliner into the house of the Queen was followed by evil consequences to her Majesty.  The skill of the milliner, who was received into the household, in spite of the custom which kept persons of her description out of it, afforded her the opportunity of introducing some new fashion every day.  Up to this time the Queen had shown very plain taste in dress; she now began to make it a principal occupation; and she was of course imitated by other women.

All wished instantly to have the same dress as the Queen, and to wear the feathers and flowers to which her beauty, then in its brilliancy, lent an indescribable charm.  The expenditure of the younger ladies was necessarily much increased; mothers and husbands murmured at it; some few giddy women contracted debts; unpleasant domestic scenes occurred; in many families coldness or quarrels arose; and the general report was,—­that the Queen would be the ruin of all the French ladies.

Fashion continued its fluctuating progress; and head-dresses, with their superstructures of gauze, flowers, and feathers, became so lofty that the women could not find carriages high enough to admit them; and they were often seen either stooping, or holding their heads out of the windows.  Others knelt down in order to manage these elevated objects of ridicule with less danger.

[If the use of these extravagant feathers and head-dresses had continued, say the memoirs of that period very seriously, it would have effected a revolution in architecture.  It would have been found necessary to raise the doors and ceilings of the boxes at the theatre, and particularly the bodies of carriages.  It was not without mortification that the King observed the Queen’s adoption of this style of dress:  she was never so lovely in his eyes as when unadorned by art.  One day Carlin, performing at Court as harlequin, stuck in his hat, instead of the rabbit’s tail, its prescribed ornament, a peacock’s feather of excessive length.  This new appendage, which repeatedly got entangled among the scenery, gave him an opportunity for a great deal of buffoonery.  There was some inclination to punish him; but it was presumed that he had not assumed the feather without authority.-Note by the editor.]