jest:
"Voila le deficit!" The little Dauphin's pointing at the cradle was
not to be without its significance--for the little fellow was to die at
the outbreak of the Revolution and his place was to be taken by the
babe on his mother's knee--the small Duke of Normandy was to become
Dauphin in his place, and, in some few years, with his little sister,
was to be made a close prisoner in the Temple. The king and the queen,
separated from their children and each other, were to go out to the
guillotine; the girl was to live through the seething hell of the
Terror as by a miracle, and thereafter unhappily enough as the Duchess
of Angouleme; but the fair boy, heir to one of the noblest heritages in
all this vast world, torn from Marie Antoinette whilst the queen still
lived, a prisoner, was to be handed to the tender mercies of the
infamous Simon, jailor at the Temple, who was to train the frightened
child to drink and swear and sing with piping treble the _camagnole_,
until, hidden away in a tower of the prison, he was to die like a
frightened hunted thing, his shirt not changed for months--die in
darkness and squalor and in a filthy state. The guillotine did no
mightier act of simple godlike vengeance than the day it sheared the
skull from the foul neck of cordwainer Simon.

Marie Antoinette, in this the thirtieth portrait that Vigee Le Brun
painted of her, is no longer the mere careless, gorgeous butterfly of
some ten years ago when the little more than girl-artist first limned
her features in the "Marie Antoinette with a Rose." The ten years that
have passed are ending in solemn seriousness for the thirty-third
birthday of the French Queen. The future is a threat. The people are
demanding rule by Parliament--are singing for it--writing broadsheets
claiming it.

It was about this time of stress and strain and anxiety at Court that,
in 1788, Berger engraved so superbly one of Vigee Le Brun's greatest
portraits, the consummately painted character-study, and exquisitely
dainty colour-harmony of the Marchioness de Sabran.

The elections to the States-General took place amidst indescribable
excitement throughout all France. The winter which went before the
meeting of the States-General was terribly severe; it came on top of a
bad harvest; the price of bread rose to famine pitch. Neckar
generously sacrificed a vast part of his private fortune to buy food
for the hunger-stricken poor of Paris. It was in national gloom