CHAPTER XXIV

A FRIEND OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

There is scarcely a spectacle in the whole drama of history more pathetic than that of Marie Antoinette, dancing her light-hearted way through life to the guillotine, seemingly unconscious of the eyes of jealousy and hate that watched her every step; or, if she noticed at all, returning a gay smile for a frown.

Wedded when but a child, full of the joy of youth, with laughter bubbling on her pretty lips and gaiety dancing in her eyes, to a dull-witted clown to whom her fresh young beauty made no appeal; surrounded by Court ladies jealous of her charms; feared for her foreign sympathies, and hated by a sullen, starving populace for her extravagance and her pursuit of pleasure, the Austrian Princess with all her young loveliness and the sweetness of her nature could please no one in the land of her exile.  Her very amiability was an offence; her unaffected simplicity a subject of scorn; and her love of pleasure a crime.

Had she realised the danger of her position, and adapted herself to its demands, her story might have been written very differently; but her tragedy was that she saw or heeded none of the danger-signals that marked her path until it was too late to retrace a step; and that her most innocent pleasures were made to pave the way to her doom.

Nothing, for instance, could have been more harmless to the seeming than Marie Antoinette’s friendship for Yolande de Polignac; but this friendship had, beyond doubt, a greater part in her undoing than any other incident in her life, from the affair of the “diamond necklace” to her innocent infatuation for Count Fersen; and it would have been well for the Queen of France if Madame de Polignac had been content to remain in her rustic obscurity, and had never crossed her path.

When Yolande Gabrielle de Polastron was led to the altar, one day in the year 1767, by Comte Jules de Polignac, she never dreamt, we may be sure, of the dazzling role she was destined to play at the Court of France.  Like her husband, she was a member of the smaller noblesse, as proud as they were poor.  Her husband, it is true, boasted a long pedigree, with its roots in the Dark Ages; but his family had given to France only one man of note, that Cardinal de Polignac, accomplished scholar, courtier, and man of affairs, who was able to twist Louis XIV. round his dexterous thumb; and Comte Jules was the Cardinal’s great-nephew, and, through his mother, had Mazarin blood in his veins.

But the young couple had a purse as short as their descent was long; and the early years of their wedded life were spent in Comte Jules’ dilapidated chateau, on an income less than the equivalent of a pound a day—­in a rustic retirement which was varied by an occasional jaunt to Paris to “see the sights,” and enjoy a little cheap gaiety.