f the court added their
cheers and applause to those of the populace who escorted her coach to the
gates on its return to Versailles.

She was now, for the first time since her arrival in France, really and
entirely happy, without one vexation or one foreboding of evil. The king's
attachment to her was rendered, if not deeper than before, at least far
more lively and demonstrative by the birth of his daughter; his delight
carrying him at times to most unaccustomed ebullitions of gayety. On the
last Sunday of the carnival, he even went alone with the queen to the
masked opera ball, and was highly amused at finding that not one of the
company recognized either him or her. He even proposed to repeat his visit
on Shrove-Tuesday; but when the evening came he changed his mind, and
insisted on the queen's going by herself with one of her ladies, and the
change of plan led to an incident which at the time afforded great
amusement to Marie Antoinette, though it afterward proved a great
annoyance, as furnishing a pretext for malicious stories and scandal. To
preserve her _incognito_, a private carriage was hired for her, which
broke down in the street close by a silk-mercer's shop. As the queen was
already masked, the shop-men did not know her, and, at the request of the
lady who attended her, stopped for her the first hackney-coach which
passed, and in that unroyal vehicle, such as certainly no sovereign of
France had ever set foot in before, she at last reached the theatre. As
before, no one recognized her, and she might have enjoyed the scene and
returned to Versailles in the most absolute secrecy, had not her sense of
the fun of a queen using such a conveyance overpowered her wish for
concealment, so that when, in the course of the evening, she met one or
two persons of distinction whom she knew, she could not forbear telling
them who she was, and that she had come in a hackney-coach.

Her health seemed less delicate than it had been before her confinement.
But in the spring she was attacked by the measles, and her illness, slight
as it was, gave occasion to a curious passage in court history. The fear
of infection was always great at Versailles, and, as the king himself and
some of the ladies had never had the complaint, they were excluded from
her room. But that she might not be left without attendants, four nobles
of the court, the Duke de Coigny, the Duke de Guines, the Count Esterhazy,
and the Baron de Besenval, in somet