Marie Antoinette

EUROPE, which carries the fate of the whole world, lives by a life which is in contrast to that of every other region, because that life, though intense, is inexhaustible. There...

I have said that the design of Kaunitz was not so much to impose upon his time a new plan as to further a climax to which that time was tending. Accidents in Europe, in America,...

THE fortnightly despatches from France customarily arrived at Vienna together in one bag and in the charge of one courier. The Empress would receive at once the letters of Mercy...

THE presence of the Du Barry at the Court of Versailles, the fact that this presence preceded the Austrian child’s arrival, that it was first publicly admitted at the first publ...

WHEN the mock-marriage was over and the night passed, and when, with the Thursday morning, the long routine that was to be her life opened upon her, the child could watch with l...

FROM the death of Louis XV. to the close of the summer of 1777 is a period of somewhat over three years. In those three years the fates of the French monarchy and of the Queen w...

THE expectation of an heir, the Queen’s ascendency over her husband, the promise of adventurous war, proceeded with the year. Meanwhile the little business of Bavaria somewhat m...

THE birth of an heir struck, as it seemed, an epoch in the evident transformation of the Monarchy and in the increasing position which Marie Antoinette occupied upon that scene;...

AS the summer of 1784 broadened through May and June it led on the Queen to every grace of life, and at last, as it might have been imagined, to security. The season itself was...

When she could find time in an interval of her occupations to write to her brother Joseph—it was not till a fortnight later—the whole letter, though it dealt in detail with the...

It was more than fourteen years since, a boy of eighteen, Northern, dignified, and grave, his large and steady brown eyes had met hers from far off among the hundreds in the Mas...

To seize all that follows two things must be clearly fixed: first, that the Queen was now separate from all the life around her; secondly, that the accidents of the next fortnig...

THERE existed in France at that moment one force which, in alliance with the Government, could have preserved the continuity of institutions, among other institutions of the Thr...

IT was no longer night; it was near day, the brightening air smelt of morning. The links of the harness-chains clattered a little as the relay horses were hacked against the pol...

In Padua, where the Polignacs had taken refuge with their loot, the Emperor Leopold, returning from Tuscany, was at that moment their host and guest. With them and their circle...

THE noisy, good-natured, and very dangerous mob had gone at last; their final stragglers, gazing, curious and tired, at the pictures and the gilding (the trappings of their Publ...

The sun, well up and brazen, touched the metal about them and sent dancing gleams from pikes and curved hooks bound to staves. Before that uneven crowd the long shadows of morni...

THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching him, she murmured that he was of th...

THE Queen descended from her carriage. She was weak but erect. The close heat of the night and her sleeplessness and her fatigue had caused great beads of sweat to stand upon he...

The fate of the Queen and of the Republic had each come to a final and critical issue when the light broke, dully in either place, over Paris and over the pastures of the fronti...