Some relaxations, too, of the formality which had previously been maintained between the sovereign and the subordinate members of the royal family, and especially an order of the king that his brothers and sisters were not in private intercourse to address him as his majesty, had grated on the empress's sense of the distance always to be preserved between a monarch and the very highest of his subjects. And she had complained that reports had reached her that "there was no distinction between the queen and the other princesses; and that the familiarity subsisting in the court was extreme." But Marie Antoinette replied, in defense of the king and herself, that there was "great exaggeration in these reports, as indeed there was about every thing that went on at the court; that the familiarity spoken of was seen but by very few. It is not for me," she said, "to judge; but it seems to me that what exists among us is only the air of kindly affection and gayety which is suitable to our age. It is true that the Count d'Artois" (who had been the special subject of some of the empress's unfavorable comments) "is very lively and very giddy, but I can always keep him in order. As for my aunts, no one can any longer say that they lead me; and as for monsieur and madame, I am very far from placing entire confidence in them.
"I must confess that I am fond of amusement, and am not very greatly inclined to grave subjects. I hope, however, to improve by degrees; and, without ever mixing myself up in intrigues, to qualify myself gradually to be of service to the king when he makes me his confidante, since he treats me at all times with the most perfect affection."
Her reflections on the impulsiveness and impatience of the French character, and of the difficulties which those qualities placed in the path of their rulers, justify the praises which Mercy had lavished on her sagacity, for it is evident that to them the chief troubles of her later years may be clearly traced. And it is difficult to avoid agreeing with her rather than with her mother, and thinking the most entire freedom of intercourse between the king and his nearest relations as desirable as it was natural. Royalty is, as the empress herself described it, a burden sufficiently heavy, without its weight being augmented by observances and restrictions which would leave the rulers without a single friend even among the members of their own family. And probably the empress herself might have seen less reason for her admonitions on the subject, had it not been for the circumstance, which was no doubt unfortunate, that the royal family at this time contained no member of a graver age and a settled respectability of character who might, by his example, have tempered the exuberance natural to the extreme youth of the sovereigns and their brothers.
Not that Marie Antoinette was content to limit the number of those whom she admitted to familiarity to her husband's kinsmen and kinswomen. Still fretting in secret over the want of any object on whom to lavish a mother's tenderness, she sought for friendship as a substitute, shutting her eyes to the fact that persons in her rank, as having no equals, can have no friends, in the true sense of the word. Nor, had such a thing been possible anywhere, was France the country in which to find it. There disinterestedness and integrity had long been banished from her own sex almost as completely as from the other; and most of those whom she took into favor made it their first object to render that favor profitable to themselves. If she professed in their society to forget for a few hours that she was queen, they never forgot it; they never lost sight of the fact that she could confer places and pensions, and they often discarded moderation and decency in the extravagance of their solicitations; while she frequently, with an overamiable facility, surrendering her own judgment to their importunities, not only granted their requests, but at times even adopted their prejudices, and yielded herself as an instrument to gratify their antipathies or resentments.
And the same feeling of vacancy in her heart, of which she was ever painfully conscious, produced in her also a constant restlessness, and a craving for excitement which exhibited itself in an insatiable appetite for amusement (as she confessed to her mother), and led her to seek distraction even in pastimes for which naturally she had but little inclination. In these respects it can not be said that, during the first year of her reign, she was as uniformly prudent as she had been while dauphiness. The restraint in which she had lived for those four years had not been unwholesome for one so young; but it had no doubt been irksome to her. And the feeling of complete liberty and independence which had succeeded it had, by a sort of natural reaction, sharpened the energy with which she now pursued her various diversions. It is possible, too, that the zest with which she indulged herself may have derived additional keenness from the knowledge that her ill-wishers found in it pretext for misconstruction and calumny; and that, being conscious of entire purity in thought, word, and deed, she looked on it as due to her own character to show that she set all such detraction and detractors at defiance. To all cavilers, as also to her mother, whose uneasiness was frequently aroused by gossip which reached Vienna from Paris, her invariable reply was that her way of life had the king her husband's entire approbation. And while he felt a conjugal satisfaction in the contemplation of his queen's attractions and graces, the qualities in which, as he was well aware, he himself was most deficient, Louis might well also cherish the most absolute reliance on her unswerving rectitude, knowing the pride with which she was wont to refer to her mother's example, and to boast that the lesson which, above all others, she had learned from it was that to princes of her birth and rank wickedness and baseness were unpardonable.
Indeed, many of the amusements Louis not only approved, but shared with her, while she associated herself with those in which he delighted, as far as she could, joining his hunting parties twice a week, either on horseback or in her carriage, and at all times exhibiting a pattern of domestic union of which the whole previous history of the nation afforded no similar example. The citizens of Paris could hardly believe their eyes when they saw their king and queen walk arm-in-arm along the boulevards; and the courtiers received a lesson, if they had been disposed to profit by it, when on each Sunday morning they saw the royal pair repair to the parish church for divine service, the day being closed by their public supper in the queen's apartment.