THE LIFE OF MARIE ANTOINETTE QUEEN OF FRANCE. BY CHARLES DUKE YONGE, REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. PREFACE. THE principal authorities for the following work are the four volumes of Correspondence published by M. Arneth, and the six volumes published by M. Feuillet de Conches. M. Arneth's two collections contain not only a number of letters which passed between the Queen, her mother the Empress-Queen, Maria Teresa, and her brothers Joseph and Leopold, who successively became Emperors after the death of their father; but also a regular series of letters from the Imperial Ambassador at Paris, the Count Mercy d'Argenteau, which may almost be said to form a complete history of the Court of France, especially in all the transactions in which Marie Antoinette, whether as Dauphiness or Queen, was concerned, till the death of Maria Teresa, at Christmas, 1780. The correspondence with her two brothers, the Emperors Joseph and Leopold, only ceases with the death of the latter in March, 1792. The collection published by M. Feuillet de Conches,† * One entitled, "Marie-Antoinette, correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le Comte Mercy d'Argenteau avec des lettres de Marie-Thérèse et de Marie-Antoinette." (The edition referred to in this work is the greatly enlarged second edition in three volumes, published at Paris, 1875.) The second is entitled, Marie-Antoinette, Joseph II., und Leopold II.," published at Leipsic, 1866. 66 Entitled, "Louis XVI., Marie-Antoinette, et Madame Elizabeth," in 6 vols., published at intervals, from 1864 to 1873. has been vehemently attacked, as containing a series of clever forgeries rather than of genuine letters. And there does seem reason to believe that in a few instances, chiefly in the earlier portion of the correspondence, the critical acuteness of the Editor was imposed upon, and that some of the letters inserted were not written by the persons alleged to be the authors. But of the majority of the letters there seems no solid ground for questioning the authenticity. Indeed, in the later and more important portion of the correspondence, that which belongs to the period after the death of the Empress-Queen, the genuineness of the Queen's letters is continually supported by the collection of M. Arneth, who has himself published many of them, having found them in the archives at Vienna, where M. F. de Conches had previously copied them,* and who refers to others, the pub-. In his "Nouveau Lundi," March 5, 1866, M. Ste. Beuve challenged M. Feuillet de Conches to a more explicit defence of the authenticity of his collection than he had yet vouchsafed: complaining, with some reason, that his delay in answering the charges brought against it "was the more vexatious because his collection was only attacked in part, and in many points remained solid and valuable." And this challenge elicited from M. F. de Conches a very elaborate explanation of the sources from which he procured his documents, which he published in the "Revue des deux Mondes," July 15, 1866, and afterwards in the Preface to his fourth volume. That in a collection of nearly a thousand documents he may have occasionally been too credulous in accepting cleverly executed forgeries as genuine letters is possible, and even probable; in fact the present writer regards it as certain. But the vast majority, including all those of the greatest value, cannot be questioned without imputing to him a guilty knowledge that they were forgeries: a deliberate bad faith, of which no one, it is believed, has ever accused him. It may be added that it is only from the letters of this later period that any quotations are made in the following work; and the greater part of the letters so cited exists in the archives at |