ascades, statues and stiff and pompous decorations; the
preference is for the English garden.[2316] The queen arranges a village for
herself at the Trianon, where, "dressed in a frock of white cambric
muslin and a gauze neck-handkerchief, and with a straw hat," she fishes
in the lake and sees her cows milked. Etiquette falls away like the
paint scaling off from the skin, disclosing the bright hue of natural
emotions. Madame Adelaide takes up a violin and replaces an absent
musician to let the peasant girls dance. The Duchesse de Bourbon goes
out early in the morning incognito to bestow alms, and "to see the poor
in their garrets." The Dauphine jumps out of her carriage to assist a
wounded post-boy, a peasant knocked down by a stag. The king and the
Comte d'Artois help a carter to extract his cart from the mud. People no
longer think about self-constraint, and self-adjustment, and of
keeping up their dignity under all circumstances, and of subjecting the
weaknesses of human nature to the exigencies of rank. On the death of
the first Dauphin,[2317] whilst the people in the room place themselves
before the king to prevent him from entering it, the queen falls at
his knees, and he says to her, weeping, "Ah, my wife, our dear child is
dead, since they do not wish me to see him." And the narrator adds with
admiration; "I always seem to see a good farmer and his excellent wife
a prey to the deepest despair at the loss of their beloved child." Tears
are no longer concealed, as it is a point of honor to be a human being.
One becomes human and familiar with one's inferiors. A prince, on a
review, says to the soldiers on presenting the princess to them, "My
boys, here is my wife." There is a disposition to make people happy and
to take great delight in their gratitude. To be kind, to be loved is the
object of the head of a government, of a man in place. This goes so
far that God is prefigured according to this model. The "harmonies of
nature" are construed into the delicate attentions of Providence; on
instituting filial affection the Creator "deigned to choose for our best
virtue our sweetest pleasure."[2318]--The idyll which is imagined to
take place in heaven corresponds with the idyll practiced on earth. From
the public up to the princes, and from the princes down to the public,
in prose, in verse, in compliments at festivities, in official replies,
in the style of royal edicts down to the songs of the market-women,
there is a c