with him, “feeling by her own experience how much it costs to be separated from one’s family.”  And what she had found in her own home did not as yet make up to her for all she had left behind.  Even her husband, though uniformly kind in language and behavior, was of a singularly cold and undemonstrative disposition; and it almost seemed as if the gayety which he exhibited at her balls were an effort so foreign to his nature that he indemnified himself by unpardonable boorishness on other occasions.  The Count de Provence had but little more polish, and a far worse temper.  Squabbles often took place between the two brothers.  Though both married men, they were still in age only boys; and on more than one occasion they proceeded to acts of personal violence to each other in her presence.  Luckily no one else was by, and she was able to pacify and reconcile them; but she could hardly avoid feeling ashamed of having been called on to exert herself in such a cause, or contrasting the undignified boisterousness (to give it no worse name) of such scenes with the decorous self-respect which, with all their simplicity of character, had always governed the conduct of her own relations.

Not but that, in the opinion of Mercy,[1] the dauphin was endowed by nature with a more than ordinary share of good qualities.  His faults were only such as proceeded from an excessively bad education.  He had many most essential virtues.  He was a young man of perfect integrity and straightforwardness; he was desirous to hear the truth; and it was never necessary to beat about the bush, or to have recourse to roundabout ways of bringing it before him.  On the contrary, to speak to him with perfect frankness was the surest way both to win his esteem and to convince his reason.  On one or two occasions in which he had consulted the embassador, Mercy had expressed his opinions without the least reserve, and had perceived that the young prince had liked him better for his candor.

The king still kept up the habit of spending the greater part of the autumn at Compiegne and Fontainebleau, visits which Marie Antoinette welcomed as a holiday from the etiquette of Versailles.  She wrote word to her mother that she was growing very fast, and taking asses’ milk to keep up her strength; that that regimen, with constant exercise, was doing her great good; and that she had gained great praise for the excellence of her riding.  On one occasion, when they were at Fontainebleau, she especially delighted the officers of her husband’s regiment of cuirassiers, when the king reviewed it in person.  The dauphin himself took the command of his men, and put them through their evolutions while she rode by his side; he then presented each of the officers to her separately, and she distributed cockades to the whole body.  The first she gave to the dauphin himself,[2] who placed it in his hat.  Each officer, as he received his, did the same.  And after the king had taken his departure, she, with her husband, remained on