lies. What is to become of all the rest, who may not have
the luck to see a royal bride pass their way? It is not a few royal
smiles and gold pieces, here and there, that will save the royal, or the
noble, or the poor, while the law and the customs of the great oppress
and destroy a hundred to pamper one. If this young Dauphiness were to
do this deed over again every hour of the year, she could not do more
than put off for a little while the storm that will burst upon her and
all of us, when the poor can endure no more."

VOLUME TWO, CHAPTER ONE.

ROYALTY.

It is a common belief, among those who have not learned to be wiser,
that to be a king, or one of the king's family, is the same thing as to
be perfectly happy. It is probable that all persons living in a country
where there is a royal family have thought so at some time of their
lives. The poor man who lives under the harsh orders of some superior,
fancies the king with his crown on his head, ordering all things as he
likes. Hard-working servant-girls think of the queen as driving about
in her carriage all the morning, and going to the play every evening.
Children, when tired of their lessons, or sent from some favourite book
on an errand to the cellar, or a walk in the cold, imagine the royal
princes and princesses doing what they like, and putting upon others
whatever is disagreeable. Unless some circumstance should bring home to
their minds the truth that royalty does not exempt from sickness and
death, and from the troubles of the heart and mind, such persons may go
on for the greater part of their lives envying royal personages who,
perhaps, would gladly be peasants, or in any rank but the highest, the
evils of which many a sovereign has found to be more than could be
borne.

The poor people of France, at the time of the story you have just read,
were as ignorant as I have described about royalty and its privileges.
There was also something worse than ignorance in their minds about the
inhabitants of the splendid royal palaces of Paris and Versailles. It
has been shown how poor and how oppressed some of the country people
were; this poverty and oppression, accompanied with ignorance, caused,
in some parts of the kingdom, and especially in Paris, passions of fear
and hatred which were then terrible to witness, and are now, after
seventy years, dreadful to think of. One anecdote will show the mind
and temper of some of the people of Paris about t