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ARIE ANTOINETTE was born at Vienna, November 2d, 1753, the daughter of Francis of Lorraine, Emperor of Germany, and of Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and Empress of Germany. Persons whose curiosity or credulity may incline them to regard what, after the event, are brought up as ominous coincidences, may be struck with the circumstance noticed by her biographers, that the birth of the ill-fated Queen of France occurred on the same day with that which is darkly marked in the calendar as that of the destruction of Lis. bon by the earthquake, an event which long excited a fearful interest in the European community. It was indeed a troubled world into which Marie Antoinette was born. After unprecedented queenly efforts which have gained her a distinguished name among the royal heroines of the world, Maria Theresa, having vigorously defended her Austrian dominions and maintained a resolute struggle with Frederic the Great, had seen her husband raised to the rank of Emperor, and the long European contest in which she had been engaged terminated by the treaty

of Aix La Chapelle recognizing her succession and leaving her with the exception of Silesia in enjoyment of her coveted territories. After a brief interval, the Seven Years' War, in which Austria was associated with France and Russia against Prussia, had fol lowed, closing in 1763, and two years later, by the death of her husband Francis I., her son Joseph succeeding him as Emperor, she was left during the life-time of the latter free to repair the injuries of war by devoting herself to the peaceful welfare of her legiti mate subjects, a task, with the bold work of reform which it required, hardly less hazardous as to its results than the contests of the battle-field. If Austria had gained nothing by the wars just concluded, France had lost much in the cession to England of Canada and her other North American colonies. To regain the lost prestige of France her minister for foreign affairs, the Duke de Choiseul, clung all the closer to his favorite policy, the alliance with Austria, and to advance the interests of the nation in this direction, early projected a marriage between Louis, the grandson of Louis XV., and heir to the French throne,

and Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Maria Theresa. When this affair was brought about by negotiation, Louis was a youth of fifteen, and his intended bride a year younger, and the marriage had been contemplated for some time before, as we learn from a letter written by the Empress Queen to her young son-in-law just before the nuptials, in which she says, "I have brought her up with this design; for I have long foreseen that she would share your destiny."

What that education had been we may gather from the revelations in the Memoirs of the Queen by her intimate friend Madame Campan. According to her account it had been much neglected. She tells of the pretences put forth in the Austrian court of the princesses answering addresses in Latin, when in reality they did not understand a single word of the language, and of a drawing being shown as the work of Marie Antoinette to the French Ambassador sent to draw up the articles for her marriage contract, when she had not put a pencil to it. She had acquired in her youth, however-no no mean attainment good knowledge of Italian, having been taught by no less a person than the Abbé Metastasio, many of whose great works were produced during his prolonged residence at Vienna. Of music, that necessary accomplishment of a court, she appears before her arrival in France to have learnt little. French, she spoke fluently without writing it correctly, though some extraordinary means had been taken to secure this branch of her education. Her mother, the Empress Queen, had

provided for her two French actors as teachers, one for pronunciation, the other for taste in singing; but as objection was made in France to the latter on account of his bad character, an ecclesiastic, the Abbé de Vermond, was chosen, whose influence over his pupil is described as unfavorable in subsequently leading her to treat with contempt the requirements of the French court.

The preliminary arrangements of betrothal, involving a great deal of state ceremony having been duly gone through with, the time came to conduct the archduchess to Paris to accomplish the marriage. The journey took place early in May, 1770. Leaving Vi enna in an imposing procession, with loud expressions of regret on the part of the populace, she was received on the frontier of France near Kehl, in a splendid pavilion erected for the occasion, on a small island in the Rhine. The building consisted of a large saloon with two inner rooms, one of which was assigned to the princess and her companions from Vienna, the other to the titled personages who were to compose her court attendants in Paris, the Countess de Noailles, her lady of honor; the Duchess de Cossé, her tire woman; four ladies of the bedchamber; a gentleman usher, and among others, the Bishop of Chartres, her chief almoner. Here a peculiar ceremony was observed. The princess, according to prescribed etiquette was dis robed of all that she had worn on the journey, that on entering the new kingdom she might retain nothing be longing to a foreign court. When partially undressed she came forward and

threw herself into the arms of the Countess de Noailles, soliciting in the most affectionate manner her guidance and support. She was then invested in the brilliant paraphernalia becoming her position at the French court. Among the witnesses of these festivities on the Rhine was one observer, whose record of the scene, from the part he was afterwards to play in the world, is one of the memorable incidents of history. This was the poet Goethe, then a youth of twenty who had recently come to pursue his university studies at Strasburg. Sensitive then as ever to the claims and as sociations of art, he tells us how he was shocked to see in the costly decorations of the pavilion, the cartoons of Raphael, worked in tapestry, thrust into the side chambers while the main saloon was hung was hung with tapestries worked after pictures of modern French artists. Nor was this all. The subjects of the latter struck him as singularly incongruous. "These pictures were the history of Jason, Medea and Creusaconsequently a story of a most wretched marriage. To the left of the throne was seen the bride struggling against a horrible death, surrounded by persons full of sympa thetic grief; to the right stood the father, horror-struck at the murdered babes at his feet; whilst the fury in her dragon car, drove through the air. "What!' I exclaimed, regardless of bystanders; 'can they so thoughtlessly place before the eyes of a young queen, on her first setting foot in her dominions, the representation of the most horrible marriage perhaps that ever was consummated! Is there among the

architects and decorators no one man who understands that pictures represent something that they work upon the mind and feelings-that they produce impressions and excite forebod ings? It is as if they had sent a ghastly spectre to meet this lovely, and as we hear most joyous, lady at the very frontiers!'"* At that time there was in the gayety of the scene and the French court little encouragment for foreboding, and if any attention was paid to the remonstrances of Goethe, it was probably only to smile at the eagerness of the youthful dilettante art student. He was a thinker, however, accustomed to penetrate beneath the surface and not be imposed upon by the shows of things. He yielded willingly everything of admiration which could be demanded for the interesting sight of the young princess whose "beauteous and lofty mien, as charming as it was dignified,” he after wards recalled, but he could not fail to brand in his satiric verse the artifice by which a show of prosperity was kept up in the removing far from sight of the gay company, the halt, the lame and the blind, who might have thronged the way. In some lines writ ten in French he contrasted the advent of our Saviour, who came relieving the sick and deformed, with that of the princess at which the unfortunate sufferers were made to disappear.

Journeying towards the capital the princess was met at Compiegne by the reigning monarch with his grandson, the dauphin to whom she was betroth ed, and by whom she was conducted to Versailles, where the marriage took Life of Goethe, by Lewes, Am. Ed., Vol. I., p. 97.

the imperial family; he ridiculed the etiquette of the house of Bourbon incessantly; the young dauphiness was constantly invited by his sarcasms to get rid of it, and it was he who first induced her to suppress an infinity of practices of which he could discern neither the prudence nor the political aim." The court was ruled by etiquette, and that of the most tedious and oppressive character. Nothing was to be done except in a prescribed way with the most rigid formalities. The dauphiness, gay and impulsive, and natural in her actions, was perpetually rebuked by the chief lady of her attendants, or rather the leading person appointed to guard her move ments, the virtuous and ever punctilious Countess de Noailles, a duenna worthy of the old court of Spain, where these personal restrictions were carried to their utmost possible excess. The lively dauphiness gave this lady the title of Madame l' Etiquette, and whenever opportunity presented, sought relief from her oppressive ceremonial. Her life was really an imprisonment governed by oppressive court usages, which all, in a certain way, the king and his mistresses included, submitted to, while they were avowedly violating every law of propriety and morality on which the customs were founded. It is pleasing to read, as we often may, in the accounts of the early life of Marie Antoinette, how her generous nature at times found vent for itself in extraordinary acts of kindness and charity. Once, when she was hunting in the forest of Fontainebleau, an old peasant was wounded by the stag. On the instant, jumping from

her open carriage, she placed the injured man in it with his wife and children and had the family taken back to their cottage. Some little time after she was found in her room with this old man, in the humblest manner staunching the blood which issued from a wound in his hand with her handkerchief, which she had torn up for the purpose. He had received some hurt in moving a heavy piece of furniture at her request. On another later occasion, a little country boy, four or five years old, of a pleas ing appearance, with large blue eyes and fine light hair, narrowly escaped being tramped upon by getting under the feet of her horses, as she was driven out for an airing. The child was saved, and its grandmother came out of her cottage by the roadside to receive it; when the queen-for the incident occurred after she had come to the throne-stood up in the carriage and claimed the boy as her own, put in her way by Providence. Finding his mother was not alive, she undertook to provide for him herself, and bore him home on her knees, the boy violently kicking and screaming the whole time. A few days afterwards he was to be seen in the palace, his woollen cap and wooden shoes exchanged for the court finery of a frock trimmed with lace, a rose-colored sash with silver fringe, and a hat decorated with feathers. He was looked after till he grew up and displayed some character, joining the republican army to obviate any prejudice which might exist against him as the queen's favor ite, and meeting his death at the bat tle of Jemappes.

Acts like these show the impulses of