When a report of the young girl’s conduct was brought to her the empress was at first mute with indignation.  Then she cried out: 

“Can this girl be a child of mine?  She surely must be a changeling!”

The Austrian ambassador to France was instructed to warn the Dauphiness to be more discreet.

“Tell her,” said Maria Theresa, “that she will lose her throne, and even her life, unless she shows more prudence.”

But advice and remonstrance were of no avail.  Perhaps they might have been had her husband possessed a stronger character; but the young Louis was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife to be a queen.  Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of state, he had only two interests that absorbed him.  One was the love of hunting, and the other was his desire to shut himself up in a sort of blacksmith shop, where he could hammer away at the anvil, blow the bellows, and manufacture small trifles of mechanical inventions.  From this smudgy den he would emerge, sooty and greasy, an object of distaste to his frivolous princess, with her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive daintiness.

It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times repeated, that Louis was lacking in virility.  Certainly he had no interest in the society of women and was wholly continent.  But this charge of physical incapacity seems to have had no real foundation.  It had been made against some of his predecessors.  It was afterward hurled at Napoleon the Great, and also Napoleon the Little.  In France, unless a royal personage was openly licentious, he was almost sure to be jeered at by the people as a weakling.

And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a mixture of pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend locks in his smithy or shoot game when he might have been caressing ladies who would have been proud to have him choose them out.

On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people were the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette.  Some of them, in coarse language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with a polite sneer, affected to defend her.  But the result of it all was dangerous to both, especially as France was already verging toward the deluge which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would follow after him.

In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed.  Louis XV., who had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-born Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most virulent type.  For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed.  Courtiers crowded his sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the moment when the breath would leave his body.  He had lived an evil life, and he was to die a loathsome death; yet he had borne himself before men as a stately monarch.  Though his people had suffered in a thousand ways from his misgovernment, he was still Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his ministers of state for all the shocking wrongs that France had felt.