be called royal residences in
miniature; seats to which the king and queen retired when desirous of
laying aside their rank and state. The Little Trianon was a beautiful
palace, about eighty feet square. It was built by Louis XV. for Madame
du Barri. Its architectural style was that of a Roman pavilion, and it
was surrounded with gardens ornamented in the highest attainments of
French and English art, diversified with temples, cottages, and
cascades. This was the favorite retreat of Maria Antoinette. This she
regarded as peculiarly her home. Here she was for a time comparatively
happy. Though living in the midst of all the jealousies, and
intrigues, and bickerings of a court, and though in heart deeply
pained by the strange indifference and neglect which her husband
manifested toward her person, the buoyancy of her youthful spirit
enabled her to triumph, in a manner, over those influences of
depression, and she was the life and the ornament of every gay
scene. As her mind had been but little cultivated, she had but few
resources within herself to dispel that ennui which is the great foe
of the votaries of fashion; and, unconscious of any other sources of
enjoyment, she plunged with all the zest of novelty into an incessant
round of balls, operas, theaters, and masquerades. Her mind, by
nature, was one of the noblest texture, and by suitable culture might
have exulted in the appreciation of all that is beautiful and sublime
in the world of nature and in the realms of thought. She loved the
retirement of the Little Trianon. She loved, in the comparative
quietude of that miniature palace, of that royal home, to shake off
all the restraints of regal state, and to live with a few choice
friends in the freedom of a private lady. Unattended she rambled among
the flowers of the garden; and in the bright moonlight, leaning upon
the arm of a female friend, she forgot, as she gazed upon the moon,
and the stars, and all the somber glories of the night, that she was a
queen, and rejoiced in those emotions common to every ennobled spirit.
Here she often lingered in the midst of congenial joys, till the
murmurs of courtiers drew her away to the more exciting, but far less
satisfying scenes of fashionable pleasure. She often lamented
bitterly, and even with tears, her want of intellectual cultivation,
and so painfully felt her inferiority when in the society of ladies of
intelligence and highly-disciplined minds, that she sought to surr