It is said to be a fact that duchesses—nay, princesses—have been known to go about from Jew to Jew in order to obtain the highest price for their gold. Dolls and all sorts of toys were made and covered with gold brocades; and the gentlemen never failed rendering themselves agreeable to their fair acquaintance by presenting them with these toys!
Every one knows that the court costume of the French noblemen at that period was most expensive; this absurd custom rendered it doubly, trebly so; and was carried to such an excess, that frequently the moment a gentleman appeared in a new coat the ladies crowded round him and soon divested it of all its gold ornaments.
The following is an instance:—“The Duke de Coigny one night appeared in a new and most expensive coat: suddenly a lady in the company remarked that its gold bindings would be excellent for untwisting. In an instant he was surrounded—all the scissors in the room were at work; in short, in a few moments the coat was stripped of its laces, its galoons, its tassels, its fringes; and the poor duke, notwithstanding his vexation, was forced by politeness to laugh and praise the dexterity of the fair hands that robbed him.”
But what a solace did that passion for needlework, which the queen indulged in herself and encouraged in others, become to her during her fearful captivity. This unhappy princess was born on the day of the Lisbon earthquake, which seemed to stamp a fatal mark on the era of her birth; and many circumstances occurred during her life which have since been considered as portentous.
“’Tis certain that the soul hath oft foretaste
Of matters which beyond its ken are placed.”
One circumstance, simple in itself and easily explained, is recorded by Madame Campan as having impressed Marie with shuddering anticipations of evil:—
“One evening, about the latter end of May, she was sitting in the middle of her room, relating several remarkable occurrences of the day. Four wax candles were placed upon her toilet; the first went out of itself—I relighted it; shortly afterwards the second, and then the third, went out also: upon which the queen, squeezing my hand with an emotion of terror, said to me, ‘Misfortune has power to make us superstitious; if the fourth taper go out like the first, nothing can prevent my looking upon it as a fatal omen!’—The fourth taper went out.”
At an earlier period Goëthe seems, with somewhat of a poet’s inspiration, to have read a melancholy fate for her. When young he was completing his studies at Strasburg. In an isle in the middle of the Rhine a pavilion had been erected, intended to receive Marie Antoinette and her suite, on her way to the French court.
“I was admitted into it,” says Goëthe, in his Memoirs: “on my entrance I was struck with the subject depicted in the tapestry with which the principal pavilion was hung, in which were seen Jason, Creusa, and Medea; that is to say, a representation of the most fatal union commemorated in history. On the left of the throne the bride, surrounded by friends and distracted attendants, was struggling with a dreadful death; Jason, on the other side, was starting back, struck with horror at the sight of his murdered children; and the Fury was soaring into the air in her chariot drawn by dragons. Superstition apart, this strange coincidence was really striking. The husband, the bride, and the children, were victims in both cases: the fatal omen seemed accomplished in every point.”
The following notices of her imprisonment would but be spoiled by any alteration of language. We shall perceive that one of her greatest troubles in prison, before her separation from the king and the dauphin, was the being deprived of her sewing implements.