times difficult. The alliance which Pompadour had CHAP. brought about between France and Austria still sub- XXXVII. sisted, although it no longer had an object, and Louis the Sixteenth's queen, Marie Antoinette, was strongly attached to her mother and brother. The latter was a personage of original views, and of a policy almost always opposed to that of France. Joseph the Second, unable or unwilling to resist Russian ambition, adopted the more prudent though pusillanimous course of allying with it, in order to share its conquests. Thus Austria had procured a portion of unfortunate Poland, and was in full career for acquiring Wallachia at the expense of Turkey, when France interfered, and brought about the peace, which, indeed, left Russia the Crimea, but at least confined Austria within the Carpathians.

The next object of the Emperor Joseph's ambition was Bavaria, the direct race of which being extinct, Munich had passed to the elector palatine. Him Austria could have induced to part with the greater portion of the electorate. But France again interfered, Frederick the Great coming forward too, and levying war rather than permit his great rival to extend its sway over all Southern Germany. The result was the treaty of Teschen in 1779, which secured the integrity of Bavaria.* Again the French government found itself opposed to Joseph the Second with regard to Holland and the Low Countries. The designs and efforts of that emperor to reform in these dominions all those abuses which the philosophers of the day denounced are well known. To weed religion of monasticity, to relieve society from sacerdotal domination, and lift the priesthood itself out of their old routine by forcing education upon them, was his first effort. His next was directed against the privileges and claims of the noblesse and the law functionaries. Had Louis the Sixteenth as boldly entered upon such reforms, some think he

* De Flassan, Hist. de la Diplomatie; Schlosser.

And yet Joseph the

CHAP. might have saved his throne. XXXVII. Second failed. Joseph's views thus far were those of patriotism and philanthropy. In domestic administra

tion he sought to liberate and enlighten his subjects, whilst at the same time he undertook to free Antwerp from the annihilation to which Amsterdam had consigned it. But the Belgians seconded their monarch in no one of these designs. The people of that country, instead of looking to him, pressed round their monks, their clergy, and noblesse, and rose in rebellion against the liberal reforms of Joseph with the same inveteracy, with which their ancestors had striven against the bigot legislation of Philip and of Alva.

Joseph's views for the emancipation of the Scheldt brought him into collision with the Dutch, who during the American war had developed a strong hatred of England, and had fallen completely into the arms of France. Joseph ordered the attempt to be made of opening the Scheldt. The Dutch fired upon the imperial vessels, and the emperor would have replied to such an act of hostility by war, had not Vergennes notified that France would support the Dutch. Troops were collected with this view. But negotiations intervened, and ended by a dispute between Vienna and the Hague as to the amount of indemnity which the Dutch should pay. These did not come up to Joseph's demand of ten millions of florins. They offered onehalf, and Joseph still threatened, when Vergennes offered on the part of France to pay the difference. These five millions, paid by France negligently, and for nothing, were a great cause of reproach to Vergennes, and to Marie Antoinette, of obloquy.*

* An instalment of the money, 100,000 crowns, according to Weber, was forwarded in coin to Vienna, after the revolution had taken place. Stopped at the barrier by the populace, they learned that it was money intended for the queen's brother, the emperor, which enabled calumny to

give the appearance of truth to the report of the large sums which Marie Antoinette sent to her family.

The payment to Austria now was coupled with the interest of seven millions given to Maria Theresa during the war, really for supporting her own quarrel.

XXXVII.

The hatred which the Parisian and French people CHAP. came to entertain of the unfortunate queen, and the malicious stories with which this hatred is still sought to be excused, can with difficulty be accounted for. The personal jealousy of the Duke of Orleans, and the malice of his hangers on, no doubt invented many of these stories, and exaggerated all. Born of a virtuous mother, bred under her eyes, and nurtured in the simplest domestic habits, Marie Antoinette was never taught in her Austrian home to curb or dissemble the exuberance of natural high spirits. But she came from a country where gaiety was associated with innocence, to a court where it had long been made the concomitant of licentiousness and crime. Louis the Sixteenth did not love company, nor join in its excitement. He retired to bed at the hour when everyone else wished and enjoyed society, grave as gay. The female friends of her choice, the Princess of Lamballe, and Madame de Polignac, were virtuous women, and although her peculiar set were rather the young and gay, none but the grossly ignorant and notoriously vulgar imputed impropriety to their mirth. On some occasions, however, the queen carried her love of pleasure so far as to go to the masked balls of the opera; on one occasion, her carriage having broken down, she and her company went thither in a fiacre. The queen herself told the adventure, which malice seized upon, and repeated with its own colouring and additions. Then she sate late of summer nights' terrace of Versailles. On such slight foundations did the public class Marie Antoinette with those female members of the royal family who, in the last century, indulged in laxity and licentiousness. The court of Versailles had acquired the character of a pandemonium, from which it would have required the ugliness of a gorgon, and the asceticism of a saint, to escape. Marie Antoinette had neither. She was beautiful and

CHAP. mirthful.

XXXVII.

The The envy and uncharitableness which the selfish and insolent habits of the French upper class had excited in the lower, greedily caught at the belief that these qualities must be connected with crime.

The great and real fault of Marie Antoinette later was that she used her influence over the king to promote the rash and incapable courtiers instead of the provident and sagacious statesmen. But this was not the case in the early part of Louis' reign. The queen preferred Choiseul to any minister. She at first favoured Necker, and her enmity to the Duke d'Aiguillon and the creatures of Dubarry drew upon her their hatred and venom in addition to that of the Orleans. Still she was stigmatised as the Austrian, and murmurs, instead of plaudits, were heard on every occasion of her visiting Paris, when one miserable act of perversity and folly on the part of a dignitary of the church implicated the queen's character irremediably.

The Rohans had rendered themselves as remarkable in that age by their extravagance as by their eminence and high birth. The Duke of Rohan-Guémené was declared a bankrupt for thirty millions of livres; and whilst the public as well as even the court cried shame, the duchess being obliged to give up the education of her younger children, his cousin, the Cardinal of Rohan, boasted that it was a princely bankruptcy. This personage had been French ambassador at the court of Vienna, and had written rather disparaging accounts of Maria Theresa. He is scarcely to be blamed for this, nor was it his fault that he depicted Maria Theresa as wiping away her tears for Poland with one hand, whilst signing the treaty of partition with the other. The conter of the letters were divulged by Madame Dubarry, and made the Cardinal de Rohan odious to Maria Theresa and to Marie Antoinette.

Superseded at Vienna, and not welcomed at court,

the Cardinal de Rohan was far from contenting himself with the large revenues derived from his archbishopric of Strasburg, and from his place of grand almoner. He directed his efforts to obtain political office and emoluments, and to triumph over the evident aversion of the queen. The path he took was singular for an incredulous age. The cardinal, like the Duke of Orleans, and several others who were far above the weak-mindedness of believing in religious truths, was not proof against the artifice of conjurors and magicians. Such charlatans abounded, and seem to have been in the greatest vogue about this very period, the philosophers of which had, it was boasted, put to flight all the powers of ignorance and darkness. The Cardinal de Rohan put faith in one of these adepts, Cagliostro, who boasted to possess the philosopher's stone. A petition for pecuniary aid addressed to him as grand almoner made Rohan at the same time known to Madame de Lamothe, a Valois by birth, descendant from an illegitimate son of Henry the Second, and long noted as an adventuress. She pleased the cardinal, became his mistress, and at the same time the friend and confident of Cagliostro.

Through Madame de Lamothe, the conjuror learnt the weak points of the cardinal's character, his ambition of place, and his desire to overcome the aversion of the queen. Upon these two weaknesses they played. Madame de Lamothe pretended to be intimate with the queen's private circle. Cagliostro guaranteed her veracity, and foretold the complete success of her operations. The woman affirmed that she made known to the queen not only the cardinal's loyal attachment, but his personal feelings of affection towards her. Marie Antoinette, according to Lamothe, took advantage of this to ask the cardinal for different sums of eighty thousand and of forty thousand livres, on the understanding, no doubt, that her majesty returned and would recompense the

CHAP.

XXXVII.