"'As to the Lady Abbess, she is one of my best recruiting sergeants. She
is so fond of training cadets for the benefit of the army that they learn
more from her system in one month than at the military academy at
Neustadt in a whole year. She is her mother's own daughter. She
understands military tactics thoroughly. She and I never quarrel, except
when I garrison her citadel with invalids. She and the canoness,
Mariana, would rather see a few young ensigns than all the staffs of the
oldest Field-marshals!'

"The Queen often made signs to the Emperor to desist from thus exposing
every member of his family, and seemed to feel mortified; but the more
Her Majesty endeavoured to check his freedom, and make him silent, the
more he enlarged upon the subject. He did not even omit Maria Theresa,
who, he said, in consequence of some papers found on persons arrested as
spies from the Prussian camp, during the seven years' war, was reported
to have been greatly surprised to have discovered that her husband, the
Emperor Francis I., supplied the enemy's army with all kinds of provision
from her stores.

"The King scarcely ever answered excepting when the Emperor told the
Queen that her staircase and antechamber at Versailles resembled more the
Turkish bazars of Constantinople

[It was an old custom, in the passages and staircase of all the royal
palaces, for tradespeople to sell their merchandise for the accommodation
of the Court.]

than a royal palace. 'But,' added he, laughing, 'I suppose you would not
allow the nuisance of hawkers and pedlars almost under your nose, if the