MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN


The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view
of Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one
brilliant passage has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring
picture of this unhappy queen.

When we speak or think of her we speak and think first of all of a
dazzling and beautiful woman surrounded by the chivalry of France
and gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And
then there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her
despised, insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more
fiendish women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to
the guillotine, where her head is severed from her body and her
corpse is cast down into a bloody pool.

In these two pictures our emotions are played upon in turn--
admiration, reverence, devotion, and then pity, indignation, and
the shudderings of horror.

Probably in our own country and in England this will remain the
historic Marie Antoinette. Whatever the impartial historian may
write, he can never induce the people at large to understand that
this queen was far from queenly, that the popular idea of her is
almost wholly false, and that both in her domestic life and as the
greatest lady in France she did much to bring on the terrors of
that revolution which swept her to the guillotine.