antial gift of a pension. But the Swede who soon outran
all his compatriots in the race for the royal favor of both king and queen
was the Count Axel de Fersen, a descendant, it was believed, of one of the
Scotch officers of the great Macpherson clan, who, in the stormy times of
the Thirty Years' War, had sought fame and fortune under the banner of
Gustavus Adolphus. The beauty of his countess was celebrated throughout
both Sweden and France, and his own was but little inferior to it. If she
was known as "The Rose of the North," his name was rarely mentioned
without the addition of "The handsome." He was a perfect master of all
noble and knightly accomplishments, and was also distinguished for a
certain high-souled and romantic[7] enthusiasm, which lent a tinge to all
his conversation and demeanor; and this combination won for him the marked
favor of Marie Antoinette. The calumniators, whom the condition and
prospects of the royal family made more busy than ever at this time,
insinuated that he had touched her heart; but those who knew best the
manners of life and characters of both denounced it as the vilest of
libels. The count's was a loyal attachment, doing nothing but honor to him
who felt it, and to the queen who inspired it; and it was marked by a
permanence which distinguishes no devotion but that which is pure and
noble, as he showed ten years later by the well-planned and courageous,
though unsuccessful, efforts which he made for the deliverance of the
queen and all her family.

That Marie Antoinette, who from early youth had shown an intuitive
accuracy of judgment in her estimate of character, should, from the very
first, honorably distinguish a man capable of such devotion to her service
was not unnatural; but there was another circumstance in his favor, which
he shared with the other foreign nobles, English and German, who in these
years were well received by the queen. Their disinterestedness presented a
striking contrast to the rapacity of the French. Every French noble valued
the court only for what he could obtain from it. Even Madame de Polignac,
whom the queen specially honored with the title of her friend, exhibited
an all-grasping covetousness, of which, with all her efforts to shut her
eyes to it, Marie Antoinette could not be unconscious; and her perception
of the difference between her French and her foreign courtiers was marked
by herself in a few words, when the Comte de la Marck, who was himself