financier.  She mentions also the appointment of the Baron de Breteuil as the new minister of the king’s household,[4] and her estimate of his character is rendered important by his promotion, six years later, to the post of prime minister.  The emperor also had ample means of judging of it himself, since the baron had succeeded the Cardinal de Rohan as embassador at Vienna.  “I think, with you, that he requires to be kept within bounds; and he will be so more than other ministers by the nature of his office, which is very limited, and entirely under the eyes of the king and of his colleagues, who will be glad of any opportunities of mortifying his vanity.  However, his activity will be very useful in a thousand details of a department which has been neglected and badly managed for the last sixty years.”  And though it is a slight anticipation of the order of our narrative, it will not be inconvenient to give here some extracts from a third letter to the same brother, written in the autumn of the following year, in which she describes the king’s character, and points out the difficulties which it often interposes to her desire of influencing his views and measures.

It may perhaps be thought that she unconsciously underrates her influence over her husband, though there can be no doubt that he was one of those men whom it is hardest to manage; wholly without self-reliance, yet with a scrupulous wish to do right that made him distrustful of others, even, of those whose advice he sought, or whose judgment he most highly valued.

“September 22d, 1784.

“I will not contradict you, my dear brother, on what you say about the short-sightedness of our ministry.  I have long ago made some of the reflections which you express in your letter.  I have spoken on the subject more than once to the king; but one must know him thoroughly to be able to judge of the extent to which, his character and prejudices cripple my resources and means of influencing him.  He is by nature very taciturn; and it often happens that he does not speak to me about matters of importance even when he has not the least wish to conceal them from me.  He answers me when I speak to him about them, but he scarcely ever opens the subject; and when I have learned a quarter of the business, I am then forced to use some address to make the ministers tell me the rest, by letting them think that the king has told me every thing.  When I reproach him for not having spoken to me of such and such matters, he is not annoyed, but only seems a little embarrassed, and sometimes answers, in an off-hand way, that he had never thought of it.  This distrust, which is natural to him, was at first strengthened by his govern—­or before my marriage.  M. de Vauguyon had alarmed him about the authority which his wife would desire to assume over him, and the duke’s black disposition delighted in terrifying his pupil with all the phantom stories invented against the house of Austria.  M. de Maurepas, though