stead of meeting with counsel and support from her husband and his
brothers, she had to guide and support Louis himself, and even to find him
so incurably weak as to be incapable of being kept in the path of wisdom
by her sagacity, or of deriving vigor from her fortitude; while the
princes were acting in selfish and disloyal opposition to him, and so, in
a great degree, sacrificing him and her to their perverse conceit, if we
may not say to their faithless ambition. She had to think for all, to act
for all, to struggle for all; and to beat up against the conviction that
her thoughts, and actions, and struggles were being balked of their effect
by the very persona for whom she was exerting herself; that she was but
laboring to save those who would not be saved. Yet, throughout that
protracted agony of more than four years she bore herself with an
unswerving righteousness of purpose and an unfaltering fearlessness of
resolution which could not have been exceeded had she been encouraged by
the most constant success. And in the last terrible hours, when the
monsters who had already murdered her husband were preparing the same fate
for herself, she met their hatred and ferocity with a loftiness of spirit
which even hopelessness could not subdue. Long before, she had declared
that she had learned, from the example of her mother, not to fear death;
and she showed that this was no empty boast when she rose in the last
scenes of her life as much even above her earlier displays of courage and
magnanimity as she also rose above the utmost malice of her vile enemies.

* * * * *

Marie Antoinette Josephe Jeanne was the youngest daughter of Francis,
originally Duke of Lorraine, afterward Grand Duke of Tuscany, and
eventually Emperor of Germany, and of Maria Teresa, Archduchess of
Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, more generally known, after the
attainment of the imperial dignity by her husband in 1745, as the Empress-
queen. Of her brothers, two, Joseph and Leopold, succeeded in turn to the
imperial dignity; and one of her sisters, Caroline, became the wife of the
King of Naples. She was born on the 2d of November, 1755, a day which,
when her later years were darkened by misfortune, was often referred to as
having foreshadowed it by its evil omens, since it was that on which the
terrible earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins reached its height. But, at
the time, the Viennese rejoiced too sincerely at every event w