ttending the
States-General, the queen was received with the same ominous silence;
no one lifted his voice to cheer her, but the Duc d'Orleans was always
applauded, to her humiliation.

Whatever may have been the faults and excesses of her youth, their
period was over and in their place arose all the noble sentiments so
long dormant. When the king was about to go to Paris as the prisoner
of the infuriated mob, La Fayette asked the queen: "Madame, what is
your personal intention?" "I know the fate which awaits me, but
my duty is to die at the feet of the king and in the arms of my
children," replied the queen. During the following days of anxiety she
showed wonderful courage and graciousness, "winning much popularity
by her serene dignity, the incomparable charm which pervaded her whole
person, and her affability."

Upon the urgent request of the queen the Polignac set departed,
and Mme. de Lamballe endeavored to do the honors for the queen, by
receptions three times a week, given to make friends in the Assembly.
At those functions all conditions of people assembled, and instead
of the witty, brilliant conversations of the old salon there were
politics, conspiracies, plots; instead of the gay and laughing faces
of the old times there were the worn and anxious faces of weary,
discouraged men and women. There was, indeed, a sad contrast between
the gay, frivolous, haughty queen of the early days, and this captive
queen--submissive, dignified, "majestic in her bearing, heroic, and
reconciled to her awful fate."

Her period of imprisonment, the cruelty, neglect, inadequate food and
garments, her torture and indescribable sufferings, the insults of
the crowd and the newspapers, her heroic death, all belong to history.
"The first crime of the Revolution was the death of the king, but
the most frightful was the death of the queen." Napoleon said: "The
queen's death was a crime worse than regicide." "A crime absolutely
unjustifiable," adds La Rocheterie, "since it had no pretext whatever
to offer as an excuse; a crime eminently impolitic, since it struck
down a foreign princess, the most sacred of hostages; a crime beyond
measure, since the victim was a woman who possessed honors without
power."

Because Marie Antoinette played a romantic role in French history, it
is quite natural to find conflicting and contradictory opinions among
her biographers. The most conflicting may be summed up in these
words: the queen's influen