bject of
Madame Adelaide was to throw as many hindrance as possible in the way of
the dauphiness winning popularity by appearing in public, while he also
correctly judged hat it would be consistent both with propriety and with
her interest, as the future queen of the country, rather to seek and even
make opportunities for enabling the people to become acquainted with her.
But to Marie Antoinette any disappointment of that kind was a very
trifling matter. She had vexations which, as she told the embassador, she
could not explain even to him; and they kept alive in her a feeling of
homesickness which, in all persons of amiable and affectionate
disposition, must require some, time to subdue. Even when her brother, the
Archduke Ferdinand, had quit Vienna in the preceding autumn to enter on
the honorable post of Governor of Lombardy, she had not congratulated, but
condoled with him, "feeling by her own experience how much it costs to be
separated from one's family." And what she had found in her own home did
not as yet make up to her for all she had left behind. Even her husband,
though uniformly kind in language and behavior, was of a singularly cold
and undemonstrative disposition; and it almost seemed as if the gayety
which he exhibited at her balls were an effort so foreign to his nature
that he indemnified himself by unpardonable boorishness on other
occasions. The Count de Provence had but little more polish, and a far
worse temper. Squabbles often took place between the two brothers. Though
both married men, they were still in age only boys; and on more than one
occasion they proceeded to acts of personal violence to each other in her
presence. Luckily no one else was by, and she was able to pacify and
reconcile them; but she could hardly avoid feeling ashamed of having been
called on to exert herself in such a cause, or contrasting the undignified
boisterousness (to give it no worse name) of such scenes with the decorous
self-respect which, with all their simplicity of character, had always
governed the conduct of her own relations.

Not but that, in the opinion of Mercy,[1] the dauphin was endowed by
nature with a more than ordinary share of good qualities. His faults were
only such as proceeded from an excessively bad education. He had many most
essential virtues. He was a young man of perfect integrity and
straightforwardness; he was desirous to hear the truth; and it was never
necessary to beat about the bush, or