ions of the
king, to alienate the dauphin from his young wife, and to induce him to
commit himself to the guidance of Madame du Barri. But this part of the
scheme failed. The dauphin was strangely insensible to the personal charms
of Marie Antoinette herself, and was wholly inaccessible to any inferior
temptations; and, as far as the arrangements of the court were concerned,
the success of the mistress's cabal was limited to procuring the dismissal
of the mistress of the robes, the Countess de Grammont, for refusing to
cede to Madame du Barri and some of her friends the place which belonged
to her office at some private theatricals which were held in the palace.

Louis XIV. had taught his nobles the pernicious notion that an order to
withdraw from the court was a penal banishment, and his successor now
banished Madame de Grammont fourteen leagues from Versailles, and for some
time refused to recall his sentence, though Marie Antoinette herself wrote
to him to complain of one of her servants being so treated for such a
cause. She had not, as she reported to her mother, been very willing to
write, knowing that Madame du Barri read all the king's letters; but Mercy
had urged her to take the step, thinking it very important that she should
establish the practice of communicating directly with Louis on all matters
relating to her own household, and that she should avoid the blunder of
his daughters, her aunts, whose conduct toward their father had, in his
opinion, been mischievously timid, and to follow whose example would be
prejudicial both to her dignity and to her comfort.

The aunts too, and especially the eldest, Madame Adelaide, had schemes of
their own, which, they also sought to carry out by underhand methods. The
more conscious they were that they themselves had no influence over their
father, the less could they endure the chance of their niece acquiring
any, though it could not have been said to have been established at their
expense. On the other hand, they had before his marriage had considerable
power with the dauphin, which they had now but little hope of retaining.
They saw also that Marie Antoinette had in a few weeks gained a general
popularity such as they had never won in their whole lives, and on all
these accounts they were painfully jealous of her. They put ideas and
plans into her head which they expected to grate upon their father's taste
or indolence, and then contrived to have them represented or