on any undue
familiarity.[15]

The winter of 1770 was one of unusual severity; and she found resources
for a further enlivenment of the court in the frost itself. Sledging on
the snow was an habitual pastime at Vienna, where the cold is more severe
than at Paris; nor in former years had sledges been wholly unknown in the
Bois de Boulogne. And now Marie Antoinette, whose hardy habits made
exercise in the fresh air almost a necessity for her, had sledges built
for herself and her attendants; and the inhabitants of Versailles and the
neighborhood, as fond of novelty as all their countrymen, were delighted
at the merry sledging-parties which, as long as the snow lasted, explored
the surrounding country, while the woods rang with the horses' bells, and,
almost as loudly and still more cheerfully, with the laughter of the
company.

Her liveliness had, as it were, given a new tone to the whole court; and
though the dauphin held out longer against the genial influence of his
wife's disposition than most people, it at last in some degree thawed even
his frigidity. She ascribed his apathy and apparent dislike to female
society rather to the neglect or malice of his early tutors than to any
natural defect of capacity or perversity of disposition; and often
lectured him on his deficiencies, and even on some of his favorite
pursuits, which she looked upon as contributing to strengthen his shyness
with ladies. She was not unacquainted with English literature, in which
the rusticity and coarseness of the fox-hunting squires formed a piquant
subject for the mirth of dramatists and novelists; and if Squire Western
had been the type of sportsmen in all countries, she could not have
inveighed more vigorously than she did against her husband's addiction to
hunting. One evening, when he did not return from the field till the play
in the theatre was half over, she not only frowned upon him all the rest
of the entertainment, but when, after the company had retired, he began to
enter into an explanation of the cause of his delay, a scene ensued which
it will be best to give in the very words of Mercy's report to the
empress.

"The dauphiness made him a short but very energetic sermon, in which she
represented to him with vivacity all the evils of the uncivilized kind of
life he was leading. She showed him that no one of his attendants could
stand that kind of life, and that they would like it the less that his own
air and rude manners made