st carefully guarded. "She did not," she said, "interfere
in any affair of state; she only coincided in all the wishes and
intentions of the king."

There were, however, matters which were strictly and exclusively within
her own province; and in them she at once began to exert her authority
most beneficially. Her first desire was to purify the court where
licentiousness in either sex had long been the surest road to royal favor.
She began by making a regulation, that she would receive no lady who was
separated from her husband; and she abolished a senseless and inexplicable
rule of etiquette which had hitherto prohibited the queen and princesses
from dining or supping in company with their husbands.[9] Such an
exclusion from the king's table of those who were its most natural and
becoming ornaments had notoriously facilitated and augmented the disorders
of the last reign; and it was obvious that its maintenance must at least
have a tendency to lead to a repetition of the old irregularities.
Fortunately, the king was as little inclined to approve of it as the
queen. All his tastes were domestic, and he gladly assented to her
proposal to abolish the custom. Throughout the reign, at all ordinary
meals, at his suppers when he came in late from hunting, when he had
perhaps invited some of his fellow-sportsmen to share his repast, and at
State banquets, Marie Antoinette took her seat at his side, not only
adding grace and liveliness to the entertainment, but effectually
preventing license, and even the suspicion of scandal; and, as she desired
that her household as well as her family should set an example of
regularity and propriety to the nation, she exercised a careful
superintendence over the behavior of those who had hitherto been among the
least-considered members of the royal establishment. Even the king's
confessor had thought the morals of the royal pages either beneath his
notice or beyond his control; but Marie Antoinette took a higher view of
her duties. She considered her pages[10] as placed under her charge, and
herself as bound to extend what one of themselves calls a maternal care
and kindness to them, restraining as far as she could, and when she could
not restrain, reproving their boyish excesses, softening their hearts and
winning their affections by the gentle dignity of her admonitions, and by
the condescending and hopeful indulgence with which she accepted their
expressions of contrition and their promises