would break off an important discussion of the Council from
indifference, incompetence, or impatience, to go off hunting. Worst of
all, for an autocrat, he had not in his nature one particle of those
qualities that go to make up the man of action, decision, energy,
courage, whole-heartedness. In this he represented the decay of his
race, surfeited with power, victim of the system it {36} had struggled
so long and so hard to establish. At the best he had flashes of common
sense, which, unfortunately for himself, he was never capable of
translating into deeds. He was full of good intentions, of a certain
underlying honesty and benevolence, all rather obscured by his boorish
exterior and manners. Like his ancestors, he ate and drank
voraciously, but, unlike them, he did not care for women. He even
showed some indifference for his wife at first, but later, when she
bore children, he appeared to the public in the character of a good
father of the family. In that and some of his other traits he had
elements of popularity, and he remained in a way popular almost to the
moment of his trial in 1792.

Marie Antoinette of Austria, his wife, was of very different mould; and
in her everything made for unpopularity. She had begun under the worst
auspices. The French public detested the Austrian alliance into which
Madame de Pompadour had dragged France, and had felt the smart of
national disgrace during the Seven Years' War, so that a marriage into
the Hapsburg-Lorraine family after the conclusion of that war, was very
ill received. To make the matter worse a catastrophe marked the
wedding ceremonies, and at a great {37} illumination given by the city
of Paris, a stampede occurred, in which hundreds of lives were lost.
The Austrian princess, _l'Autrichienne_, as she was called from the
first, did not mend matters by her conduct. Until misfortune sobered
her and brought out her stronger and better side, she was incurably
light-headed and frivolous. She was always on the very edge of a _faux
pas_, and her enemies did not fail to accuse her of frequent slips
beyond the edge. The titled riffraff that had adorned the Louis XV-du
Barry court was swept out on the accession of the young Queen, but only
to be replaced by a new clique as greedy as the old, and not vastly
more edifying. Richelieu and d'Aiguillon only made way for Lauzun,
the Polignacs, and Vaudreuil. And if it was an improvement to have a
high-born queen rule Ve