BOOKS.
MARIE ANTOINETTE.* WE observe that the original of this book has been com- mended by the French Academy, and it would be hard to find in modern French literature a work that is better worth trans- lating than is this. It is more than three years since it was published in Paris ; but the translation, if it took time, is a .careful and good one.
Regiments of writers have maligned the French Queen, other regiments have extolled her even to the skies where saints are supposed to dwell. Some to maintain their repute- tation for justice have damned her with faint praise, and in Radical histories of the Revolution have ostentatiously re- frained from writing of her. Most of her panegyrists, while they praised the later years of her life, left much to the imagination as regarded the dissipations of her youth.' This is the hundredth year since her death. Truth has been sifted, and we can better focus the Queen as she was throughout her From the spiteful attacks of Soulavie, Lauzun, and Besenval, Marie Antoinette has been for some time protected by both direct and indirect evidence in her favour. Her life from the hour she crossed the Rhine at Strasburg has been laid bare as no other Queen's existence ever was. Her daily foibles and her daily trials, whether public or private, are recounted in Count Mercy d'Argenteau's correspondence with her mother, who had appointed him the official spy on all her daughter did. Those among her contemporaries who saw her in her wildest spirits and most reckless moods, and heard all Court anecdotes as soon as they had birth, acquit the Queen of serious fault. We commend to our readers the Prince de Ligne's opinion, and the elaborate advice put on paper for his sister by the Emperor Joseph II., advice which, while pointing out her errors, reveals how superficial they were,—the mere float- ing dross of true metal in the crucible. To appreciate rightly Marie Antoinette's early life, however, the ima- - * The Life of Mario Antoirietto, By Maximo de la Roehoterie. Translated from the Preach by Cora Hamilton Boll, 2 vols. London: Osgood, Moilvaine, and Co. ginative faculty which can marshal in due proportion the facts of history is necessary. We must with some attentive study try to reconstruct the Revolutionary era, and the ideas prevalent when the Austrian girl of fifteen came on the Versailles scene, the brilliant and sparkling malaria in which the young Queen danced as a mote that seemed to have no law save its good pleasure ; then later, her growth to full stature of womanly heroism in the Tuileries and on the scaffold. M. de la Rocheterie supplies us with good material for knowledge of the Queen ; yet if we would truly understand the mistakes of her early married life, we should do well to study Taine's Auden kiginte, from which we may guess her eager wish to escape from the laws of the monstrous machine of Versailles law and order. Ordinary readers, who are chiefly attracted by events that followed 1789, and by the tragedy of the Queen's imprisonment and death, think them- selves charitable when they balance her early frivolities by her later heroism. Her politics are set down as retrograde and obsolete, and only forgiven when we think of the dignity of her defence before the Revolutionary Trib anal, and of her via crucis to the Place de la Revolution. Yet, on some occasions, Marie Antoinette judged more sensibly than professional Ministers,—the tools of this or that Court faction. Admitting that the Queen, in the days when she thought the Monarchy secure, had allowed her friendships to influence her, and that she had underrated the danger of the time, an interesting study might be made of the part she took, with its mistakes but noble intentions, in furthering reform, in regard for the poor, in righteous reaction against the tyrannies and selfishness of the nobles. What was she but a piece in the game of Louis XV. politics, and of Choiseul and Kaunitz P The game was unpopular, for it reversed French tradition, and she shared its unpopularity ; but it should be followed if we would understand her after-position, for which she is too generally considered herself responsible. What a difficult initiation into Court life was hers, when, before the ceremony of her marriage, she was invited to sup with Madame du Barry at La Muette by Louis XV. ! We are not of those who would make her future husband, the "ill-bred boy" of 1770, a scapegoat for Marie Antoinette's mistakes ; though no doubt his loutish indif- ference to the warm-hearted and impulsive girl added to the dangers which beset her. He had sterling qualities, which were unfortunately unsuited to the stage he trod so heavily, and in the state of his Kingdom they invited disaster. It was not the young Austrian's fault that she was never really popular in France. Her first friend, Choiseul, was not long in a posiiion to strengthen the alliance he had promoted. Socially, as wife of the Dauphin, Marie Antoinette supplanted Mesdames Tante& in their leadership of society, and not even their piety could soften their ill-constructions of the gay and somewhat thoughtless child. They grew jealous of their father's affection for her. However shameless Louis X V.'s private life, and however vulgar his companions, the old King could appreciate his son's wife better than could most of his Court. He liked to drink his morning coffee in her room. He might even have escaped from Du Barrydom had not Madame Adelaide mischievously checked the influence of the young girl. We need not follow the details of Marie Antoinette's conduct towards the favourite; her mother was for temporising, intrigue and counter-intrigue abounded; but history justifies the high-spirited Dauphiness. Then followed the King's death, though not in the circumstances of tragic neglect emphasised by Carlyle. There were to be a new heaven and a new earth for France, and the first impulse of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when the news of their accession reached them, was to fall on their knees and pray, "0 God, guard us, we are too young to reign !" A millennium was expected. An the quack philosophers of the new era were each to have an innings. The young Queen had no home-ties to control her soaring spirits. Equality was preached by the wits ; she was but too ready to throw off etiquette and try other Rousseau recipes for faller life. The history of what may be called her frivolities has been ransacked; and to it belong the innumer- able anecdotes of masked balls and unlimited lansquenet, of impertinent men and extravagant friendships, of linen dresses, English gardens, dairying, and general rebellion, always, however, with the King's sanction, against Versailles proprieties. Nursed by Bourbon relations, from the Comte de Provence to the Prince de Conde, by spiteful courtiers bred in the traditions of previous reigns, and by the crowd who took their fashions from Versailles, these anecdotes gathered round her in a fatal legend. The worst construction was put on her smiles and on her tears, on an unfurnished room that adjoined her apartments, on the overturn of her carriage which obliged her to employ the nearest cab. She liked diamonds, she liked amusement and liberty, as do most of the charming women of our own day ; but whatever her whims, she never failed to be regular in her practices of piety, or to repress insolence that presumed on her kindness. Of her, Mercy could write with his critical honesty,—" In all that concerns morality, there has never been in the conduct of the Queen the slightest act which has not borne the imprint of a soul, virtuous, upright, and inflexible in all the principles which make for honesty of character." No one questions the excellence of Madame de Lamballe. She was with Marie Antoinette in the sleighing parties which startled Paris ; her salon was frequented by the Duo d'Orleans and his Palais Royal following. The Queen gradually withdrew from it as well as from that of the Princesse de Guemenee, governess of the Children of France, where there was heavy play. M. de la Rocheterie justifies the Queen's friendship for Madame de Polignac. Unfortunately, Madame de Polignac was allied to a family insatiable of money and rank, and Marie Antoinette had one serious fault long since noted by her mother, She knew not how to refuse. And the 220,000 a year procured through her for the horde of Polignacs was a weighty item in her final indictment. Poor Queen ! in the first years of her married life she had not been given the domestic affection for which she craved. She spent on the friends of her choice the love which lay in her for children which were yet unborn to her, and for the ties of a home which for more than a century had not existed at Versailles. From the time when her children were born she devoted herself to them, overbearing many traditions of etiquette in her personal care of their health and education. Even Petion, on the return from Varennes, could not help observing how wise were the Queen's ideas on the subject. This book is interesting throughout ; and it is interesting in its relation of the daily circumstances of Marie Antoinette's life, the petty by-paths in which a lees frank and generous nature might have missed her way, as, indeed, she is ignorantly suspected of having missed it. -What shadow of blame now rests on Marie Antoinette when the affair of the diamond necklace is remembered P What fatuous falsehoods are not now ascribed to the courtiers who maligned her ? Yet a faint ecent of immorality hangs about her, and injustice is still meted out to her because we are ignorant and unimaginative, and do not reconstruct her character or her circumstances, as now M. de la. Rocheterie enables us to do. It was, indeed, in 1786 that Marie Antoinette awoke to her position. When Cardinal de Rohan was tried, she knew herself to be betrayed and insulted by the nobles who supported him. She understood that the Comte de Pro- vence's nickname, " rAutrichienne," had "caught on," a nick- name that secured her death. She had fancied herself the central rose of a pleasance. After the decision of the Paris Court, she listened to the murmurs of the multitude outside in new surprise at what they might mean. She took more part henceforward in the selection Of Ministers and their measures, —she but earned the new name of Madame Deficit. She was equal to a great part if she had been trained to one ; but she knew no other machinery than the monstrous corruption of Versailles. Nor could she make a Henry IV, of the King. Much that is little known of her effort to turn the prevalent spirit of reform into right channels, to adapt new cloth from America and elsewhere to the tattered garments of Louis XIV„ is to be found in the book. She was ready to be Liberal if she could, even at the cost of a life's prejudices. After the sack of the Bastille and the first emigration, "she," said Mirabean, "was the only man amongst the King's advisers." M. de Is Rocheterie clears some details of the Palais Royal plot, on October 5th, 1789, commonly called the "Insurrection of Women." Every page of his second volume adds to the interest the Queen acquires as the legend of the Trianon drops from her shoulders. The author treats with sobriety the dreadful scenes of the Temple and the Conciergerie. He is careful to advance no assertion without giving his authorities, and he is careful to paint truly the Queen's growth in personal piety and humility as she gains her inalienable crown of heroic. death. But for occasional inadvertences, probably misprints, we have nothing but praise to give to the translator of this excel- lent and exhaustive work. The translator has been scrupulous to use English words, when it might have been almost en- cusable to retain the French. Her translation is literal yet free of Gallicisms, whether of grammar or style. In the opening lines of the book is a curious error. Marie Antoinette was born on All Souls', and not on All Saints', Day. The English edition is enriched by twenty portraits, while the original has but two. On the other hand, it might have been well in so serious a contribution to history as this, if the translator could have seen her way to give the notes and references which add so much weight to the facts, and so- often direct the proper inferences from them. We could have better spared the English translations of the squibs and doggerel of the time. French wit such as these possess becomes grotesque in English dress. No Life of Marie Antoinette that has yet been published is as good as is that of M. de la Rocheterie. The translator is not in this case the proverbial "traitor." It appears appro- priately in the centenary of the Queen's death.
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