MARIE ANTOINETTE.

BY JOSEPH F. TUTTLE.

WE have somewhere seen a sketch, whether | I. and Maria Theresa, Emperor and Empress of fictitious or real, so beautiful that we do not hesi-Austria, and was born Nov. 2d 1755. She is tate to appropriate it as well as memory will said to have had great beauty and a brilliant serve. Mozart, the most brilliant prodigy of his intellect. Carefully educated, according to her age, when but six years old was summoned to high prospects, she made as great attainments as Vienna to astonish the Austrian court with his could be expected of a flattered princess. Moving precocious attainments. Gaily dressed, the young in courtly circles, and mingling freely among the courtier was introduced into a spacious saloon of gifted and polished of Europe, she acquired a certhe imperial palace, and seeing a piano he in-tain dignity of carriage, which made her the most stantly seated himself and began to elicit its admired of women. She had seen danger in powers. As its rich tones struck on his ear, his childhood and the effect of generous confidence soul was quickened with some of those glorious in her vassals, for her mother held Antoinette by thoughts which have immortalized him. Insensi- the hand in that hour of danger when she apble to all external things, he abandoned himself to pealed to the Hungarian soldiers for protection, his own visions, wrought into tangible form through and they answered the appeal with an enthusias the magnificent instrument. He neither heard tic devotion, which soon replaced her on the nor saw a majestic form behind him, holding by throne. She was married to the dauphin of the hand a little beauty, who could scarcely re- France, afterwards the unhappy Louis XVI., strain her delight at the sounds which she heard. when she was not yet fifteen years of age. Happy She was but one year older than he, and perhaps had it been for this woman, elevated to share the a more beautiful pair of gifted and sprightly chil- throne of France, had she followed the advice of dren was never seen together. her imperial mother, who says, in a letter to Louis:

"Ah, how sweetly you do play," she exclaimed," Above all I have recommended to her humility running up to him, and gazing admiringly at him. "I would like to play so too, will you not be my teacher?"

towards God, because I am convinced that it is impossible to secure the happiness of those confided to us, without love of Him who breaks the sceptre and crushes the thrones of kings according to his

The little musician gazed at her with admiration, and that sort of pity with which genius re-own will." gards those who cannot attain what seems so easy to it. "It is a hard labor to learn to play. You must sit till you are tired to death, and continue a long time. You must wait till you are bigger, and then it will not tire you as it does me."

"But who taught you?" insisted the forward beauty.

The saint and my father," he replied. Very well said," said she laughing "you and the saint shall be my teachers."

Mozart had felt poverty at home, and there was some meaning in his reply. "Princesses are so rich, that it is not necessary for them to be taught by the saints to play. But we must play for bread!"

The brilliant little beauty was Marie Antoinette, the very mention of whose name causes sadness. Well had it been for her had she been chained to the piano with Mozart for a teacher for life, rather than have gone to Paris to be admired, to be worshipped, and, in the noonday of her glory, to be dragged down step by step to the same scaffold on which perished plebians and nobles under the axe of an infuriate populace! But it was not to be. To have been reduced to such a tame existence as to learn crotchets and swells, might not have been enviable in itself, but it would have been bliss beside the hurried tocsins, the maddened shouts, the crucifixions of affection, the long confinement in prison, and at last the scaffold, which made up the dreadful fate she experienced as Queen of the French!

Marie Antoinette was the daugter of Francis

At her departure for Paris the Viennese displayed the most lively regrets, and her coming to Paris was welcomed with the most lively joy, and yet, as if premonitory of her stormy life, scarcely had the last word of her marriage ceremony been pronounced, when the most terrific thunder storm ever witnessed in Paris burst on the city with a fury which appalled the stoutest. The elements were not alone. The scenes of joy became fatal, since the festival prepared by the city on the happy occasion, was so thronged that more than fifty persons were trodden to death, and three hundred more were dangerously wounded. It was during these enthusiastie outbursts of popular joy that Edmund Burke saw the woman, whom his own gorgeous words have given a lasting record in the memories of men. "It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision! I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor and joy."

And yet what a husband had this gifted woman! A dull, sluggish, sensual, conscientious, wavering, and weak-minded man, who might have become eminent as a locksmith, but as a king, requiring all his misfortunes to make us pity him. At any other period of French history, his dullness might have suffered him to drift quietly; but now that famine and taxes had made the people mad; now that Voltaire had made the people infidels; now that Mirabeau was shaking his boars head,"

palace, when Louis is only remembered to be pitied for his weakness!

and raising his thundering voice in behalf of the people; now tha: France was underlaid with waking earthquakes, for such a Louis XVI. to be As for the queen, what a spectacle for her, as placed on the throne was a most unhappy event, the mob conveyed the royal family from Versailles but scarcely more so than to have Antoinette as a to Paris. The heads of the guards killed, in the queen. Had she been dull as himself the guillo-attack on the palace, were carried before her coach tine might have been escaped, or had she possessed the profound gifts of the English Elizabeth, she might have guided France clear of the breakers. But no, she was not dull enough to suffer herself to be drifted like a straw on the bosom of a river, nor had she the talent of Elizabeth to manage all things so as to make them her friends. It was her misfortune to have just enough of brilliant gifts, of aristocratic pride, and blind obstinacy, to turn every event of life into a personal evil, and to hasten the final catastrophe.

on pikes, whilst, at every step, hags, prostitutes, beggars, and the basest of the sans-cullottes saluted her with imprecations and vile epithets. Six long hours rolled away slowly under this excruciating punishment. What a contrast with her first entry into Paris as the bride of Louis! And yet she was brave as a lioness in defence of her offspring. Frenchmen are inflammable as powder, and when at the palace the mob shouted for "the Austrian woman," she advanced on the balcony with her son in her arms! Instantly they shouted, "the the boy to an attendant, and stood like a magnifiqueen alone!" and without hesitation she gave cent statue of a goddess, unprotected and alone. In a moment all were subdued with admiration, and vociferated" Live the queen" as loudly as be fore they had cursed her. Throughout the whole her courage was proved a diamond of the first

water.

It is not the intention of this sketch to trace out the misfortunes of this noble daughter of the Cæsars. This would exceed our limits. A few incidents must suffice. The popular tempest was becoming daily more terrible, until even those who had raised it found themselves powerless to control it. Like the man in the " Arabian Nights," who had opened the casket, and found a genius issuing from it too great for his control, so was it beau came into conference with her the lawless She was not destitute of genius. When Mira. with the demagogues of the French Revolution. They could unlock the casket of popular fury, but not death come so soon, he would have broken a man acknowledged himself enthralled, and had when the diabolus therein confined came forth, lance with the populace in her defence. Bamare standing on the earth and striking the stars, they melted into pity and loyalty during his ride in the found themselves unable to charm him back again, carriage with her, when her family fleeing to Ausand the most of them perished his victims. The tria was arrested, and even the coarse brewer, queen was grossly attacked in the National As-Santerre, yielded a kindness to her when he saw sembly, the public papers, the Jacobin and Cordelier Halls, and in the disorderly gatherings of the mob. Her character was aspersed as though she were a prostitute. The crushing taxes all came from the prodigality of the " Austrian woman." She it was, if popular orators were to be credited, who urged the king to kill France. No baseness was too great to be credited to her account, and yet these scenes of blackness, mingled with insult, were relieved by an occasional outburst of loyalty, which as soon was effaced by the same unnatural popular ferocity.

her as she really was, which he had denied to the woman." During her confinement as a state pripopular caricature, commonly called "the Austrian soner, the most abandoned and cruel men and hags were selected as their attendants, because the queen, like Madame Roland, found her way to the sympathies of any around her who were

not utterly hardened.

est affections, and was so unhappy as to make The queen at heart was possessed of the strongenemies who hated her as much as her friends loved her. Among these attachments none was And here we cannot forbear introducing an in-stronger or purer than her friendship for the Princident, placing the vacillations of the royal family in singular contrast with the great man who at last lulled the storm. The mob had ransacked the palace, and insulted the king and his family in the most cruel way. Bonaparte, a slender stripling, saw the mob pass by, and followed on with a friend. He heard the abuse, and saw the king degraded before the rabble, by supplicating their clemency with the red cap on his head. The young corporal told his indignation, and prophesied a part of his own coming history, as he exclaimed: What madness! how could they allow the scoundrels to enter! They ought to have blown four or five hundred of them into the air with cannon. The rest would then have taken to their heels!"

But Louis was not Bonaparte, he was imbecile, pious Louis, no more and no less, and so he must take his fate. The young corporal, who knew the way to the hearts of a mob to be through perferations made by cannon-balls, will reign in that

cess de Lamballe. At the age of eighteen she was left a widow, with a splendid fortune, and a beauty which even sorrow had only served to enhance. She had not the courage of Antoinette, but she had her strong affections. Even in that loose age the virtue of this beautiful woman was never questioned, except by designing villians, able to extract the most virulent poison that ever dripped from the tongue of slander, from her heroic and pure devotion to her queen. According to the cold reckoning of selfishness, it was an unnecessary sacrifice. She was loved as a child by her noble father-in-law, who wished her to remain at home in obscurity as the only safety. The queen also added her remonstrances against her return to Paris, as a violent exposure to death, and her letter to the princess is a noble exposition of the fine affections of her own heart. But to the ill-fated, yet high-souled Lamballe, it seemed treason to love to secure even life for herself by remaining at a distance from her friend in the

hour of her danger. The queen's remonstrance the rest dispatched her. The bloody brute, whose only served to hasten her approach to fatal scenes, jest cost this splendid woman her life, cut her which were to give her in history a melancholy head off, and with others, " infamous names eterimmortality. It was the bitterest ingredient in nally pilloried in history, carried the head of the the chalice of Antoinette's sorrow, that she her-princess to a neighboring public house, where, self seemed to be the evil genius of her friends. All she touched died.

placing it amid bottles and glasses, they compelled those present to drink to her death." And these friends, placing the mutilated head on a pike, paraded before the prison in which the royal family was imprisoned. The cries of the mob brought the king to see the horrid spectacle, and but for his friendly detention the queen would have seen it also.

the crime of this unhappy princess, and this retribution wrung the heart of the queen with a keener anguish than she had yet experienced.

This beautiful and charming friend was now within the magic circle, standing by her queen, to cheer her anguish, and to speak of hope in her despair. Diabolical malice marked the gifted princess a victim, as it were, to rend the heart of the woman most hated in France, and she was immured in the prison called La Force. A mock But who can tell the exquisite agony she entribunal hurried on its judicial murders with greedy dured when the facts were related to her! It ferocity. In two days one hundred and sixty had was one of the bloody steps down which she was been tried and executed. The scenes here were treading to more terrible calamities. To love the a mere repetition of what occurred at the other" Austrian woman," and to be loved by her, was prisons. The condemned were hurried out to the mob, who instantly dispatched them. The wretches were paid by the government. Brutal laughter ever and anon was the death dirge of the butchered. Women were there to gloat with fiendish joy over the horrors of death, and mingled their shrill note of glee with those coarser, but, if possible, pleasanter peals of laughter from the men. These patriots behind the scenes were not proof against money, and a bribe of some fifty thousand dollars from her father-in-law had purchased for the princess the promise of life. They intended to fulfill the promise, it may be, to purchase peace of conscience for a thousand other murders. The ribal-heard the formal sentence of their dethronement, dry, the shouts, the laughter, as one after another and then they were hurried to the Temple, a for two days had perished in rapid succession, had dismal building hard by, to be confined until the unnerved the delicate girl, and she had gone from Assembly should determine their fate. Throughthe extreme of fright to that of stupidity in sleep. out the whole scene Louis acted like a dull lump Now she shrieked in terror as she awoke from of matter, gifted with powers of eating, hearing her horrid dreams, and now fainted so as to be and seeing. Marie Antoinette deported herself almost beyond recovery. At last she was sum-nobly as a queen, and from her worst enemies exmoned before the tribunal, who could not fulfill their promise save by a mock trial. She fainted on her way to the tribunal, but, recovering, went forward. Her attendants whispered courage to her, and gave her a gleam of hope.

After the royal family had been brought to Paris, they enjoyed the semblance of freedom, although closely guarded. Here they were subjected to fears of assassination and poison, as well as the terrors of insurrection. At last they were relieved from these by taking refuge in the National Assembly. In a reporter's box, almost suffocated, they heard the revolutionists denounce them, and saw the rabble bringing in the jewels and papers found in the palace. At last they

torted admiration and pity.

What a step down for this high-born woman. It was a long descent from the Tuilleries to the Temple. It was a gloomy place once occupied by monks. Its furniture was scanty and coarse, but these would have been tolerable. But bru. tality, obscenity, and cruelty, from attendants selected on account of their supposed inhumanity, these were intolerable. Ingenuity devised exquisite tortures for them. The most of their attendants, not massacred yet, were driven away, and their places supplied by brutal creatures of the mob. Did pity soften any heart among these not utterly bereft of humanity, his place was filled instantly with a choicer fiend. It seemed as if the words of the Divine Teacher eighteen centu ries before, might here be applied, From the blood of Abel unto the blood Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple, verily I say unto you it shall be required of this generation." All the bloody wrongs, and exactions, and tyrrany, from Charlemagne to the fifteenth Louis, seemed now to be visited on this wretched family, whose principal crime was to have inherited the French throne in regular succession.

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She was a timed fawn and yet proved herself a true woman. The judges bade her swear hatred to kings, and to love liberty and equality. But the queen was her friend and an oath to hate her would palsy her tongue. She refused. "Go then," said one to her, "and, as you meet the people, shout long live the nation." She was acquitted, but the end was not yet. An important man was conducting her through the mob, all red with blood, and over pavements slippery with human gore. She could not repress her feelings, and shrieked her terror. The attendant put his hand on her mouth, and led her on unhurt. Outside the ring of human butchers she must be safe! But no, the man who was to be as her evil genius had not yet met her. At last he came in form of a drunken and blood thirsty barber. He did it in a jest, but his jest was fatal. Drunk and unsteady, he attempted to tear her cap from her head with his pike. The instrument, misdirected by such a hand, struck her forehead, and the blood flowed. Tigers could Nor will this imperfect outline satisfy humanity, not have been kindled into such ferocity by the if it neglect to repeat here the devotion and the sight as the rabble. In an instant they surround-goodness of one who never forgot that in the king ed her. One knocked her down with a club, and she had a brother. Noble woman, others have

rated from her son. Clinging to his mother the noble boy was torn away in spite of her long resistance and her piteous wails. And then that mother found no other comfort but to watch the place by which her child passed each day, to get but a glimpse of him! And what depths of barbarity are found outside the pit, when such a son could be decoyed to self-ruin by the foul temptations of his keeper, whose name, let it be the infamous synonyme for fiendishness, was Simon! When the queen was removed to the Conciergerie, as she wailed out her last piteous farewell to her daughter and the Princess Elizabeth, her heart seemed dead to any more misery. As she was passing through a low door she struck her forehead, and being asked if she were hurt, replied, "Oh, no, nothing now can harm me farther!"

praised thee for the heroism and purity of thy | virtue! The Princess Elizabeth, the king's sister, was so noted for her piety and for her kindness to the poor, that when the infuriated rabble was shouting for the queen, during the outrages at Versailles, and supposing they had found her in the person of the princess, were making furious passes at her to kill her, their arms grew powerless, as some one cried out "it is Madame Elizabeth." This devoted woman exclaimed, as she saw what was so complimentary to herself, and yet which left her queenly sister still exposed, "Ah, what are you doing! let them suppose I am the queen; dying in her place I might perhaps have saved her!" During the cruelties of the march to Paris, the insults in the National Assembly, and the rigors of the imprisonment in the Temple, she suffered with pious heroism, and felt in her own heart every shaft aimed at her friends, for whom she endured much. But even her goodness could not save one placed in the charmed death circle. She was the sister of Louis, and that was a sin for which there was no atonement. She was arraigned at the revolutionary tribunal, and there displayed the courage and the piety of a martyr. A purer victim the revolution had not. In any other age, she would have lived and died merely a good woman, but through the harsh discipline of unexampled suffering, she became the noble, heroic, and pious Elizabeth, whose good-a mother. I appeal to all mothers here." And ness and martyrdom have immortalised her. Humanity will not reverse this sentence.

Her hair, what was left, had become snowwhite, although she was now only thirty-seven years old. For a little indulgence to her, two of her attendants were thrown into the dungeon.— The accusations on one point ought to have struck dumb the man who uttered them. She was charged with debauching her own son. To other accusations she replied, but on this she was silent. One of that bloody jury asks why she is silent about this charge, and she made a reply which thrills the heart of humanity: "Because nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against

even then the base lie was strangled by what little of feeling was left in her motley audience. But it availed her not. She was to die, and some demagogues felt themselves unsafe so long as she were alive. She wrote to her sister, and her words are full of tenderness. Sorrow had done a kindly office for her, and in that letter she gave the truly christian command, "Let not my son attempt to avenge the death of his parents!" Having complied with the ceremonies of the Ro

As for the royal family, for up to this point the queen's troubles were those of the whole family, they were subjected to the most rigid watch, administered in the most unfeeling manner. What a picture does Clery, the king's faithful attendant, present, when he describes the savage whiskaroon of a porter puffing tobacco smoke into the faces of the queen and the king's sister! The queen once saw on the walls of the prison, in large let-man Catholic Church, she dressed herself gaily as ters, written by a soldier, "Madame Veto shall swing!" and, in allusion to her children," The little wolves must be strangled!" French patriotism had become niggardly, and Marie Antoinette, once described, by an admirer, " as gliding by him as if borne on a cloud," now was supplied with necessary linen by an English lady. At last the blow so long dreaded fell on Louis. After the mockery of a trial he was guillotined. The queen had been faithful to him, and exhibited great affection. This was strengthened by misfortune itself. The separation from him was painful in the extreme, and the faithful attendant, Clery, has left a vivid account of the scene. As a king Louis was contemptibly weak, as a martyr his bearing was noble. As he said "farewell, farewell" to his family the last night they met, and they were taken away," though both doors were shut, their screams and lamentations were heard for some time on the stairs." The misery of existence is becoming more and more burdensome.

In the meantime, after the execution of Louis, the National Assembly resolved to put the queen on trial, but one bitter drop was in reserve for her, a drop of gall and wormwood, so dreadful that she might have said, without exaggeration, "surely the bitterness of death is past." She was sepa

she could for the final scene. Vast crowds covered the roofs and thronged the streets of Paris. She showed no fear, and to insult made no reply. It was only when she came in sight of the Tuilleries that she shed tears. Sad memories caused them. It was not weakness. Without tremor she mounted the scaffold, and kneeled there in silent prayer. Her eyes now wandered to the Temple in which her children were imprisoned, and with all the tenderness of a stricken and dying mother, exclaimed: “Adieu once again, my children, I go to rejoin your father!" A moment more and the heavy axe did its work, and Antoinette was no more.

La Marline declares that this daughter of an emperor, and this wife of a king, was buried in so humble a way, that among the government accounts was found this item: "For the coffin of the widow Capet, seven francs." Such was the eventful history of the beautiful child whom Mozart admired, the beautiful woman whom Burke likened to the morning star, and the magnificent queen whom at one time all the world adored. It constitutes an infinitely sad lesson on the vanity of earthly good, and with this before him, who does not feel the force of the exclamation, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity!"