to say, he was the only member of
the royal family to whom she could look for either. The king was not only
utterly worthless and shameless, but weak and irresolute in the most
ordinary matters. Even when in the flower and vigor of his age, he had
never been able to summon courage to give verbal orders or reproofs to his
own children,[3] but had intimated his pleasure or displeasure by letters.
He had been gradually falling lower and lower, both in his own vices and
in the estimation of the world; and was now, still more than when Lord
Chesterfield first drew his picture,[4] both hated and despised. The
dauphin's brothers, for such mere boys, were singularly selfish and
unamiable; and the only female relations of her husband, his aunts, to
whom, as such, it would have been natural that a young foreigner should
look for friendship and advice, were not only narrow-minded, intriguing,
and malicious, but were predisposed to regard her with jealousy as likely
to interfere with the influence which they had hoped to exert over their
nephew when he should become their sovereign.

Marie Antoinette had, therefore, difficulties and enemies to contend with
from the very first commencement of her residence in France. And many even
of her own virtues were unfavorable to her chances of happiness,
calculated as they were to lay her at the mercy of her ill-wishers, and to
deprive her of some of the defenses which might have been found in a
different temperament. Full of health and spirits, she was naturally eager
in the pursuit of enjoyment, and anxious to please every one, from feeling
nothing but kindness toward every one; she was frank, open, and sincere;
and, being perfectly guileless herself, she was, as through her whole life
she continued to be, entirely unsuspicious of unfriendliness, much more of
treachery in others. Her affability and condescension combined with this
trustful disposition to make her too often the tool of designing and
grasping courtiers, who sought to gain their own ends at her expense, and
who presumed on her good-nature and inexperience to make requests which,
as they well knew, should never have been made, but which they also
reckoned that she would be unwilling to refuse.

But lest this general amiability and desire to give pleasure to those
around her might seem to impart a prevailing tinge of weakness to her
character, it is fair to add that she united to these softer feelings,
robuster virtues calculate