f seeing her every day, who could write in such a
manner."

There is no trace in these letters of the levity and giddiness of which
Mercy so often complains, and which she at times did not deny. On the
contrary, they display an earnestness as well as a good sense and an
energy which are gracefully set off by the affection for her mother, and
the pride in her brother's firmness and address which they also express.
With respect to the conduct of Louis at this crisis we may perhaps differ
from her; and may think that he rarely showed so much self-reliance, the
general want of which was in truth his greatest defect, as when he
preferred the arguments of Vergennes to her entreaties. But if her praises
of the emperor are, as she herself terms them, vanity, it is the vanity of
sisterly and patriotic affection, which can not but be regarded with
approval; and we may see in it an additional proof of the correctness of
an assertion, repeated over and over again in Mercy's correspondence,
that, whenever Marie Antoinette gave the rein to her own natural impulses,
she invariably both thought and acted rightly.

In one of the extracts which have just been quoted, the queen alludes to
her own condition; and that, in any one less unselfish, might well have
driven all other thoughts from her head. For the event to which she had so
long looked forward as that which was wanted to crown her happiness, and
which had been so long deferred that at times she had ceased to hope for
it at all, was at last about to take place--she was about to become a
mother. Her own joy at the prospect was shared to its full extent by both
the king and the empress. Louis, roused out of his usual reserve, wrote
with his own hand to both the empress and the emperor, to give the
intelligence; and Maria Teresa declared that she had nothing left to wish
for, and that she could now close her eyes in peace. And the news was
received with almost equal pleasure by the citizens of Paris, who had long
desired to see an heir born to the crown; and by those of Vienna, who had
not yet forgotten the fair young princess, the flower of her mother's
flock, as they had fondly called her, whom they had sent to fill a foreign
throne. Her own happiness exhibited itself, as usual, in acts of
benevolence, in the distribution of liberal gifts to the poor of Paris and
Versailles, and a foundation of a hospital for those in a similar
condition with herself.[13]

In the course of the sp