who presumed on her good-nature and inexperience to make requests which,
as they well knew, should never have been made, but which they also
reckoned that she would be unwilling to refuse.

But lest this general amiability and desire to give pleasure to those
around her might seem to impart a prevailing tinge of weakness to her
character, it is fair to add that she united to these softer feelings,
robuster virtues calculated to deserve and to win universal admiration;
though some of them, never having yet been called forth by circumstances,
were for a long time unsuspected by the world at large. She had pride--
pride of birth, pride of rank--though never did that feeling show itself
more nobly or more beneficially. It never led her to think herself above
the very meanest of her subjects. It never made her indifferent to the
interests, to the joys or sorrows, of a single individual. The idea with
which it inspired her was, that a princess of her race was never to commit
an unworthy act, was never to fail in purity of virtue, in truth, in
courage; that she was to be careful to set an example of these virtues to
those who would naturally look up to her; and that she herself was to keep
constantly in her mind the example of her illustrious mother, and never,
by act, or word, or thought, to discredit her mother's name. And as she
thus regarded courage as her birthright, so she possessed it in abundance
and in variety. She had courage to plan, and courage to act; courage to
resolve, and courage to adhere to the resolution once deliberately formed;
and, above all, courage to endure and to suffer, and, in the very
extremity of misery, to animate and support others less royally endowed.

Such, then, as she was, with both her manifest and her latent
excellencies, as well as with those more mixed qualities which had some
defects mingled with their sweetness, Marie Antoinette, at the age of
fourteen years and a half, was thrown into a world wholly new to her, to