receiving a strange
specimen of the factious spirit which prevailed at the court, and of the
hollowness of the welcome with which the chief nobles had greeted her
arrival. A state ball was given at the palace to celebrate the wedding,
and as the Princess of Lorraine, a cousin of the Emperor Francis, was the
only blood-relation of Marie Antoinette who was at Versailles at the time,
the king assigned her a place in the first quadrille, giving her
precedence for that occasion, next to the princes of the blood. It did not
seem a great stretch of courtesy to show to a foreigner, even had she not
been related to the princess in whose honor the ball was given; but the
dukes and peers fired up at the arrangement, as if an insult had been
offered them. They held a meeting at which they resolved that no member of
their families should attend, and carried out their resolution so
obstinately that at five o'clock, when the dancing was to commence, except
the royal princesses there were only three ladies in the room. The king,
who, following the example of Louis XIV., acted on these occasions as his
own master of ceremonies, was forced to send special and personal orders
to some of those who had absented themselves to attend without delay. And
so by seven o'clock twelve or fourteen couples were collected[6] (the
number of persons admitted to such entertainments was always extremely
small), and the rude disloyalty of the protest was to outward appearance
effaced by the submission of the recusants.

But all the troubles which arose out of the wedding festivities were not
so easily terminated. Little as was the good-will which subsisted between
Louis XV. and the Parisians, the civic authorities thought their own
credit at stake in doing appropriate honor to an occasion so important as
the marriage of the heir of the monarchy, and on the 30th of May they
closed a succession of balls and banquets by a display of fire-works, in
which the ingenuity of the most celebrated artists had been exhausted to
outshine all previous displays of the sort. Three sides of the Place Louis
XV. were filled up with pyramids and colonnades. Here dolphins darted out
many-colored flames from their ever-open mouths. There, rivers of fire
poured forth cascades spangled with all the variegated brilliancy with
which the chemist's art can embellish the work of the pyrotechnist. The
centre was occupied with a gorgeous Temple of Hymen, which seemed to lean
for support