in public, before a crowd of princes
of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all the miscellaneous throng of
a court. They attended mass in the chapel, where the old king,
surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above that of Madame du
Barri. The royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair without
powder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and the most
unassuming manners. Vice itself, in Burke's famous words, seemed to
lose half its evil by losing all its grossness. And there, too, Burke
had that vision to which we owe one of the most gorgeous pages in our
literature--Marie Antoinette, the young dauphiness, "decorating and
cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering
like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy." The shadow
was rapidly stealing on. The year after Burke's visit, the scene
underwent a strange transformation. The king died; the mistress was
banished in luxurious exile; and the dauphiness became the ill-starred
Queen of France. Burke never forgot the emotions of the scene; they
awoke in his imagination sixteen years after, when all was changed,
and the awful contrast shook him with a passion that his eloquence has
made immortal.

Madame du Deffand wrote to Horace Walpole that Burke had been so well
received, that he ought to leave France excellently pleased with the
country. But it was not so. His spirit was perturbed by what he had
listened to. He came away with small esteem for that busy fermentation
of intellect in which his French friends most exulted, and for which
they looked forward to the gratitude and admiration of posterity. From
the spot on which he stood there issued two mighty streams. It was
from the ideas of the Parisian Freethinkers, whom Burke so detested,
that Jefferson, Franklin, and Henry drew those theories of human
society which were so soon to find life in American Independence. It
was from the same ideas that later on that revolutionary tide surged
forth, in which Burke saw no elements of a blessed fertility, but
only a horrid torrent of red and desolating lava. In 1773 there was
a moment of strange repose in Western Europe, the little break of
stillness that precedes the hurricane. It was indeed the eve of a
momentous epoch. Before sixteen years were over, the American Republic
had risen, like a new constellation into the firmament, and the French
monarchy, of such antiquity and fame and high pre-eminence in European
history, had been sh