to gratify their antipathies or resentments.

And the same feeling of vacancy in her heart, of which she was ever
painfully conscious, produced in her also a constant restlessness, and a
craving for excitement which exhibited itself in an insatiable appetite
for amusement (as she confessed to her mother), and led her to seek
distraction even in pastimes for which naturally she had but little
inclination. In these respects it can not be said that, during the first
year of her reign, she was as uniformly prudent as she had been while
dauphiness. The restraint in which she had lived for those four years had
not been unwholesome for one so young; but it had no doubt been irksome to
her. And the feeling of complete liberty and independence which had
succeeded it had, by a sort of natural reaction, sharpened the energy with
which she now pursued her various diversions. It is possible, too, that
the zest with which she indulged herself may have derived additional
keenness from the knowledge that her ill-wishers found in it pretext for
misconstruction and calumny; and that, being conscious of entire purity in
thought, word, and deed, she looked on it as due to her own character to
show that she set all such detraction and detractors at defiance. To all
cavilers, as also to her mother, whose uneasiness was frequently aroused
by gossip which reached Vienna from Paris, her invariable reply was that
her way of life had the king her husband's entire approbation. And while
he felt a conjugal satisfaction in the contemplation of his queen's
attractions and graces, the qualities in which, as he was well aware, he
himself was most deficient, Louis might well also cherish the most
absolute reliance on her unswerving rectitude, knowing the pride with
which she was wont to refer to her mother's example, and to boast that the
lesson which, above all others, she had learned from it was that to
princes of her birth and rank wickedness and baseness were unpardonable.