capades at first would have been thought mild
enough had she not been a "daughter of France"; but they served to shock
the old French king, and likewise, perhaps even more, her own imperial
mother, Maria Theresa.

When a report of the young girl's conduct was brought to her the empress
was at first mute with indignation. Then she cried out:

"Can this girl be a child of mine? She surely must be a changeling!"

The Austrian ambassador to France was instructed to warn the Dauphiness
to be more discreet.

"Tell her," said Maria Theresa, "that she will lose her throne, and even
her life, unless she shows more prudence."

But advice and remonstrance were of no avail. Perhaps they might have
been had her husband possessed a stronger character; but the young Louis
was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife to be a queen.
Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of state, he had only two
interests that absorbed him. One was the love of hunting, and the other
was his desire to shut himself up in a sort of blacksmith shop, where he
could hammer away at the anvil, blow the bellows, and manufacture small
trifles of mechanical inventions. From this smudgy den he would emerge,
sooty and greasy, an object of distaste to his frivolous princess, with
her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive daintiness.

It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times repeated,
that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no interest in the
society of women and was wholly continent. But this charge of physical
incapacity seems to have had no real foundation. It had been made
against some of his predecessors. It was afterward hurled at Napoleon
the Great, and also Napoleon the Little. In France, unless a royal
personage was openly licentious, he was almost sure to be jeered at by
the people as a weakling.

And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a mixture
of pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend locks in his
smithy or shoot game when he might have been caressing ladies who would
have been proud to have him choose them out.

On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people
were the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in coarse
language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with a polite
sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all was dangerous to
both, especially as France was already verging toward the deluge which
Louis XV