s to weave her most imposing
raiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen had
far more concern in the disaster of the first five years of the
Revolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new document
that comes to light heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choice
of personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitute
a state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst state
criminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie
Antoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much or
how little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, that
may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that
Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only
parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary
against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor
of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more
deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be
compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if
libels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hour
when the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made the
attempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty years
afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events
and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil
genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an
exceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When Burke had that
immortal vision of her at Versailles--'just above the horizon,
decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,
glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and
joy'--we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and her
minister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, but
a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble
intrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulse
the insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood,
broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to th