affording a healthful and becoming occupation, nor for the sale of the
giver, but only because it recalled to her memory the gardens of
Schönbrunn, to which, as their malice suggested, she never ceased to
look back with unpatriotic regret.

In one point of view they were unquestionably correct. The queen did
undoubtedly desire to establish in the French court the customs and the
feelings which, during her childhood, had prevailed at Vienna; but they
were wholly wrong in thinking them Austrian usages. They were Lorrainese
in their origin; they had been imported to Vienna for the first time by
her own father, the Emperor Francis; when she referred to them, it was as
"the patriarchal manners of the House of Lorraine[7]" that she spoke of
them; and her preference for them was founded on the conviction that it
was to them that her mother and her mother's family were indebted for the
love and reverence of the people which all the trials and distresses of
the struggle against Frederic had never been able to impair.

Nor was it only the old stiffness and formality, which had been compatible
with the grossest license, that was now discountenanced. A wholly new
spirit was introduced to animate the conversation with which those royal
entertainments were enlivened. Under Louis XV., and indeed before his
reign, intrigue and faction had been the real rulers of the court,
spiteful detraction and scandal had been its sole language. But, to the
dispositions, as benevolent as they were pure, of the young queen and her
husband, malice and calumny were almost as hateful as profligacy itself.
She held, with the great English dramatist, her contemporary, that true
wit was nearly allied to good-nature;[8] and she showed herself more
decided in nothing than in discouraging and checking every tendency to
disparagement of the absent, and diffusing a tone of friendly kindness
over society. On one occasion, when she heard some of her ladies laughing