meaning simply “I am here on the footing of all those whose nobility is of a later date than 1400.”  The Marly excursions were exceedingly expensive to the King.  Besides the superior tables, those of the almoners, equerries, maitres d’hotel, etc., were all supplied with such a degree of magnificence as to allow of inviting strangers to them; and almost all the visitors from Paris were boarded at the expense of the Court.

The personal frugality of the unfortunate Prince who sank beneath the weight of the national debts thus favoured the Queen’s predilection for her Petit Trianon; and for five or six years preceding the Revolution the Court very seldom visited Marly.

The King, always attentive to the comfort of his family, gave Mesdames, his aunts, the use of the Chateau de Bellevue, and afterwards purchased the Princesse de Guemenee’s house, at the entrance to Paris, for Elisabeth.  The Comtesse de Provence bought a small house at Montreuil; Monsieur already had Brunoy; the Comtesse d’Artois built Bagatelle; Versailles became, in the estimation of all the royal family, the least agreeable of residences.  They only fancied themselves at home in the plainest houses, surrounded by English gardens, where they better enjoyed the beauties of nature.  The taste for cascades and statues was entirely past.

The Queen occasionally remained a whole month at Petit Trianon, and had established there all the ways of life in a chateau.  She entered the sitting-room without driving the ladies from their pianoforte or embroidery.  The gentlemen continued their billiards or backgammon without suffering her presence to interrupt them.  There was but little room in the small Chateau of Trianon.  Madame Elisabeth accompanied the Queen there, but the ladies of honour and ladies of the palace had no establishment at Trianon.  When invited by the Queen, they came from Versailles to dinner.  The King and Princes came regularly to sup.  A white gown, a gauze kerchief, and a straw hat were the uniform dress of the Princesses.

[The extreme simplicity of the Queen’s toilet began to be strongly censured, at first among the courtiers, and afterwards throughout the kingdom; and through one of those inconsistencies more common in France than elsewhere, while the Queen was blamed, she was blindly imitated.  There was not a woman but would have the same undress, the same cap, and the same feathers as she had been seen to wear.  They crowded to Mademoiselle Bertin, her milliner; there was an absolute revolution in the dress of our ladies, which gave importance to that woman.  Long trains, and all those fashions which confer a certain nobility on dress, were discarded; and at last a duchess could not be distinguished from an actress.  The men caught the mania; the upper classes had long before given up to their lackeys feathers, tufts of ribbon, and laced hats.  They now got rid of red heels and embroidery; and walked about our streets in plain cloth, short thick shoes, and with knotty cudgels in their hands.  Many humiliating scrapes were the consequence of this metamorphosis.  Bearing no mark to distinguish them from the common herd, some of the lowest classes got into quarrels with them, in which the nobles had not always the best of it.—­Montjoie, “History of Marie Antoinette.”]