The chief governesses, being under no fear of inspection from Maria Theresa, aimed at making themselves beloved by their pupils by the common and blamable practice of indulgence, so fatal to the future progress and happiness of children.  Marie Antoinette was the cause of her governess being dismissed, through a confession that all her copies and all her letters were invariably first traced out with pencil; the Comtesse de Brandes was appointed to succeed her, and fulfilled her duties with great exactness and talent.  The Queen looked upon having been confided to her care so late as a misfortune, and always continued upon terms of friendship with that lady.  The education of Marie Antoinette was certainly very much neglected.  With the exception of the Italian language, all that related to belles lettres, and particularly to history, even that of her own country, was almost entirely unknown to her.  This was soon found out at the Court of France, and thence arose the generally received opinion that she was deficient in sense.  It will be seen in the course of these “Memoirs” whether that opinion was well or ill founded.  The public prints, however, teemed with assertions of the superior talents of Maria Theresa’s children.  They often noticed the answers which the young Princesses gave in Latin to the harangues addressed to them; they uttered them, it is true, but without understanding them; they knew not a single word of that language.

Mention was one day made to the Queen of a drawing made by her, and presented by the Empress to M. Gerard, chief clerk of Foreign Affairs, on the occasion of his going to Vienna to draw up the articles for her marriage-contract.  “I should blush,” said she, “if that proof of the quackery of my education were shown to me.  I do not believe that I ever put a pencil to that drawing.”  However, what had been taught her she knew perfectly well.  Her facility of learning was inconceivable, and if all her teachers had been as well informed and as faithful to their duty as the Abbe Metastasio, who taught her Italian, she would have attained as great a superiority in the other branches of her education.  The Queen spoke that language with grace and ease, and translated the most difficult poets.  She did not write French correctly, but she spoke it with the greatest fluency, and even affected to say that she had lost German.  In fact she attempted in 1787 to learn her mother-tongue, and took lessons assiduously for six weeks; she was obliged to relinquish them, finding all the difficulties which a Frenchwoman, who should take up the study too late, would have to encounter.  In the same manner she gave up English, which I had taught her for some time, and in which she had made rapid progress.  Music was the accomplishment in which the Queen most delighted.  She did not play well on any instrument, but she had become able to read at sight like a first-rate professor.  She attained this degree of perfection