in life.

Many have written of Catharine as a great ruler, a wise diplomat, a
creature of heroic mold. Others have depicted her as a royal wanton and
have gathered together a mass of vicious tales, the gossip of the palace
kitchens, of the clubs, and of the barrack-rooms. But perhaps one finds
the chief interest of her story to lie in this--that besides being
empress and diplomat and a lover of pleasure she was, beyond all else,
at heart a woman.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN

The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view of
Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one brilliant passage
has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring picture of this unhappy
queen.

When we speak or think of her we speak and think first of all of a
dazzling and beautiful woman surrounded by the chivalry of France and
gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And then
there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her despised,
insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more fiendish women;
until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to the guillotine, where
her head is severed from her body and her corpse is cast down into a
bloody pool.

In these two pictures our emotions are played upon in turn--admiration,
reverence, devotion, and then pity, indignation, and the shudderings of
horror.

Probably in our own country and in England this will remain the historic
Marie Antoinette. Whatever the impartial historian may write, he can
never induce the people at large to understand that this queen was far
from queenly, that the popular idea of her is almost wholly false, and
that both in her domestic life and as the greatest lady in France she
did much to bring on the terrors of that revolution which swept her to
the guillotine.

In the first place, it is mere fiction that represents Maria Antoinette
as having been physically beautiful. The painters and engravers have so
idealized her face as in most cases to have produced a purely imaginary
portrait.

She was born in Vienna, in 1755, the daughter of the Emperor Francis
and of that warrior-queen, Maria Theresa. She was a very German-looking
child. Lady Jackson describes her as having a long, thin face, small,
pig-like eyes, a pinched-up mouth, with the heavy Hapsburg lip, and
with a somewhat misshapen form, so that for years she had to be bandaged
tightly to give her a more natural figure.

At fourteen, whe