“One day, at the Chateau of Compiegne, the King came in whilst I was reading to Madame.  I rose and went into another room.  Alone, in an apartment from which there was no outlet, with no book but a Massillon, which I had been reading to the Princess, happy in all the lightness and gaiety of fifteen, I amused myself with turning swiftly round, with my court hoop, and suddenly kneeling down to see my rose-coloured silk petticoat swelled around me by the wind.  In the midst of this grave employment enters his Majesty, followed by one of the Princesses.  I attempt to rise; my feet stumble, and down I fall in the midst of my robes, puffed out by the wind.  ‘Daughter,’ said Louis xv., laughing heartily, ’I advise you to send back to school a reader who makes cheeses.’” The railleries of Louis xv. were often much more cutting, as Mademoiselle Genet experienced on another occasion, which, thirty years afterwards, she could not relate without an emotion of fear.  “Louis xv.,” she said, “had the most imposing presence.  His eyes remained fixed upon you all the time he was speaking; and, notwithstanding the beauty of his features, he inspired a sort of fear.  I was very young, it is true, when he first spoke to me; you shall judge whether it was in a very gracious manner.  I was fifteen.  The King was going out to hunt, and a numerous retinue followed him.  As he stopped opposite me he said, ’Mademoiselle Genet, I am assured you are very learned, and understand four or five foreign languages.’—­’I know only two, Sire,’ I answered, trembling.  ‘Which are they?’ English and Italian.’—­’Do you speak them fluently?’ Yes, Sire, very fluently.’  ‘That is quite enough to drive a husband mad.’  After this pretty compliment the King went on; the retinue saluted me, laughing; and, for my part, I remained for some moments motionless with surprise and confusion.”

At the time when the French alliance was proposed by the Duc de Choiseul there was at Vienna a doctor named Gassner,—­[Jean Joseph Gassner, a pretender to miraculous powers.]—­who had fled thither to seek an asylum against the persecutions of his sovereign, one of the ecclesiastical electors.  Gassner, gifted with an extraordinary warmth of imagination, imagined that he received inspirations.  The Empress protected him, saw him occasionally, rallied him on his visions, and, nevertheless, heard them with a sort of interest.  “Tell me,”—­said she to him one day, “whether my Antoinette will be happy.”  Gassner turned pale, and remained silent.  Being still pressed by the Empress, and wishing to give a general expression to the idea with which he seemed deeply occupied, “Madame,” he replied, “there are crosses for all shoulders.”