treats
me at all times with the most perfect affection."

Her reflections on the impulsiveness and impatience of the French
character, and of the difficulties which those qualities placed in the
path of their rulers, justify the praises which Mercy had lavished on her
sagacity, for it is evident that to them the chief troubles of her later
years may be clearly traced. And it is difficult to avoid agreeing with
her rather than with her mother, and thinking the most entire freedom of
intercourse between the king and his nearest relations as desirable as it
was natural. Royalty is, as the empress herself described it, a burden
sufficiently heavy, without its weight being augmented by observances and
restrictions which would leave the rulers without a single friend even
among the members of their own family. And probably the empress herself
might have seen less reason for her admonitions on the subject, had it not
been for the circumstance, which was no doubt unfortunate, that the royal
family at this time contained no member of a graver age and a settled
respectability of character who might, by his example, have tempered the
exuberance natural to the extreme youth of the sovereigns and their
brothers.

Not that Marie Antoinette was content to limit the number of those whom
she admitted to familiarity to her husband's kinsmen and kinswomen. Still
fretting in secret over the want of any object on whom to lavish a
mother's tenderness, she sought for friendship as a substitute, shutting
her eyes to the fact that persons in her rank, as having no equals, can
have no friends, in the true sense of the word. Nor, had such a thing been
possible anywhere, was France the country in which to find it. There
disinterestedness and integrity had long been banished from her own sex
almost as completely as from the other; and most of those whom she took
into favor made it their first object to render that favor profitable to
themselves. If she professed in their society to forget for a few hours
that she was queen, they never forgot it; they never lost sight of the
fact that she could confer places and pensions, and they often discarded
moderation and decency in the extravagance of their solicitations; while
she frequently, with an overamiable facility, surrendering her own
judgment to their importunities, not only granted their requests, but at
times even adopted their prejudices, and yielded herself as an instrument
to gratify their an