nion, and for the satisfaction it will give the nation." It
is impossible for any language to show more completely how, above all
things, she made the good of the country her first object. And she was the
more inclined to approve of all that was being done in this way from her
conviction that Necker was both honest and able; an opinion which she
shared with, if she had not learned it from, her mother and her brother,
and which was to some extent justified by the comparative order which he
had re-established in the finance of the country, and by the degree in
which he had revived public credit. She was not aware that the real
dangers of the situation had a source deeper than any financial
difficulty, a fact which Necker himself was unable to comprehend. And she
could not foresee, when it became necessary to grapple with those dangers,
how unequal to the struggle the great banker would be found.

It may, perhaps, be inferred that she did suspect Necker of some
deficiency in the higher qualities of statesmanship when, in the spring of
1780, she told her mother that "she would give every thing in the world to
have a Prince Kaunitz in the ministry;[16] but that such men were rare,
and were only to be found by those who, like the empress herself, had the
sagacity to discover and the judgment to appreciate such merit." She was,
however, shutting her eyes to the fact that her husband had had a minister
far superior to Kaunitz; and that she herself had lent her aid to drive
him from his service.

CHAPTER XV.

Anglomania in Paris.--The Winter at Versailles.--Hunting.--Private
Theatricals.--Death of Prince Charles of Lorraine.--Successes of the
English in America.--Education of the Duc d'Angouleme.--Libelous Attacks
on the Queen.--Death of the Empress.--Favor shown to some of the Swedish
Nobles.--The Count de Fersen.--Necker retires from Office.--His Character.

It is curious, while the resources of the kingdom were so severely taxed
to maintain the war against England, of which every succeeding dispatch
from the seat of war showed more and more the imprudence, to read in
Mercy's correspondence accounts of the Anglomania, which still subsisted
in Paris; surpassing that which the letters of the empress describe as
reigning in Vienna, though it did not show itself now in quite the same
manner as a year or two before, in the aping of English vices, gambling at
races, and hard drinking, but rather in a copying of the fashion