r very amiability was an offence; her
unaffected simplicity a subject of scorn; and her love of pleasure a
crime.

Had she realised the danger of her position, and adapted herself to its
demands, her story might have been written very differently; but her
tragedy was that she saw or heeded none of the danger-signals that
marked her path until it was too late to retrace a step; and that her
most innocent pleasures were made to pave the way to her doom.

Nothing, for instance, could have been more harmless to the seeming than
Marie Antoinette's friendship for Yolande de Polignac; but this
friendship had, beyond doubt, a greater part in her undoing than any
other incident in her life, from the affair of the "diamond necklace" to
her innocent infatuation for Count Fersen; and it would have been well
for the Queen of France if Madame de Polignac had been content to remain
in her rustic obscurity, and had never crossed her path.

When Yolande Gabrielle de Polastron was led to the altar, one day in the
year 1767, by Comte Jules de Polignac, she never dreamt, we may be sure,
of the dazzling role she was destined to play at the Court of France.
Like her husband, she was a member of the smaller _noblesse_, as proud
as they were poor. Her husband, it is true, boasted a long pedigree,
with its roots in the Dark Ages; but his family had given to France only
one man of note, that Cardinal de Polignac, accomplished scholar,
courtier, and man of affairs, who was able to twist Louis XIV. round his
dexterous thumb; and Comte Jules was the Cardinal's great-nephew, and,
through his mother, had Mazarin blood in his veins.

But the young couple had a purse as short as their descent was long; and
the early years of their wedded life were spent in Comte Jules'
dilapidated chateau, on an income less than the equivalent of a pound a
day--in a rustic retirement which was varied by an occasional jaunt to
Paris to "see the sights," and enjoy a little cheap gaiety.

Comte Jules, however, had a sister, Diane, a clever-tongued, ambitious
young woman, who had found a footing at Court as lady-in-waiting to the
Comtesse d'Artois, and whom her brother and his wife were proud to visit
on their rare journeys to the capital. And it was during one of these
visits that Marie Antoinette, who had struck up an informal friendship
with the sprightly, laughter-loving Diane, first met the woman who was
to play such an important and dangerous part in her life.