what you have to bring against me."

"Your boundless frivolity, your culpable short-sightedness, your
foolish pleasures, your extravagance, your love of finery, your
mixing with politics, your excessive jovialness, your
entertainments, your--"

Marie Antoinette interrupted this series of charges with loud, merry
laughter, which more enraged the princess than the most stinging
words would have done.

"Yes," she continued, "you are frivolous, for you suppose the life
of a queen is one clear summer's day, to be devoted to nothing but
singing and laughing. You are short-sighted, for you do not see that
the flowers of this summer's day in which you rejoice, only bloom
above an abyss into which you, with your wanton dancing, are about
to plunge. You indulge in foolish pleasures, instead of, as becomes
a Queen of France, passing your life in seclusion, in devout
meditation, in the exercise of beneficence, in pious deeds. You are
a spendthrift, for you give the income of France to your favorites,
to this Polignac family, which it has been reckoned receives alone a
twentieth part of the whole income of the state; to these gracious
lords and ladies of your so-called 'society,' supporting them in
their frivolity, allowing them to make golden gain out of you. You
are a lover of finery, not holding it beneath your dignity to spend
whole hours with a poor milliner; allowing a man to dress your hair,
and afterward to go into the toilet chambers of the Parisian dames,
that their hair may be dressed by the same hands which have arranged
the hair of a queen, and to imitate the coiffure which the Queen of
France wears. And what kind of a coiffure is that which, invented by