down by a system of infamous taxation, toiled and moiled in semi-starvation, that Court and nobles might enjoy the greater luxury? What cared she for the peasants who, sooner than cultivate the fruitful champaigns, chose to uproot their vines because of the exorbitant dues which made hard work as useless as idleness? She could care nothing for these things, since she knew nothing whatever of the condition of the people whose Queen she was.
Her peep at this royal show must have been not a little suggestive to Marie Phlipon, when taken by her mother to pass a week at Versailles, in the autumn of 1774. Accompanied by the Abbé Bimont and his housekeeper they were lodged in the attics, one of the female servants of the palace being a friend of theirs. The sumptuous repasts, receptions, plays, balls, card-parties, and what not, passing in succession before the eyes of Plutarch's disciple, shocked her sense of justice and hurt her pride. While she stood there among the crowd, she must often from a distance have seen the radiant young queen, brightly blazing amid her favourite attendants, and recognised Louis XVI.'s bluff, ungainly bearing amid the obsequious swarm of elegant courtiers. And as the dazzling pictures of court-life were passing before her, did she foresee that presently, as in a play, the scene would be shifted, and that this same brilliant court would quake to the tramp of an infuriated mob of women—menacing, haggard, dishevelled, half-starved—till, under the very walls of the Palace of Versailles, with its daintily-fed inmates, rang out the terrible cry for bread? And that, again, presently King and Queen, courtiers and all, would be swept in the revolutionary tornado from the very face of the earth? No, these things were as yet only darkly brewing in the future;
