Posterity has devoted much sympathy to Marie Antoinette whose portraits by Vigée LeBrun (Fig. 25) and other court painters are familiar to all art lovers. Although she, too, was by no means an outstanding ruler her life is particularly rich in human and touching incidents. Her very weaknesses are those which arouse one’s sympathy. Who could blame the young Princess, brought to Paris from Vienna at the age of fifteen, that she remained in tutelage to her mother and sought her advice? But this very relationship which resulted when misfortune overtook her, in an appeal for help to the foreign courts, brought about her downfall. Who can fail to understand that the lovely and vivacious Marie Antoinette, surrounded by the pleasure-loving society of Paris, and tied to a dull husband to whom, nevertheless, she remained faithful, should have looked about her for congenial friends. It was this, however, that gave rise in court circles to those calumnies which so injured her reputation among her subjects and finally ruined her--calumnies founded only on gossip, not on facts. Who could blame her for finding burdensome the exaggerated etiquette of the French court, the public dinner of the King and Queen once a week, the ridiculous ceremonies of the lever, the crowd which attended even the birth of her children. And why should this inexperienced Queen have been held answerable for extravagant expenditures for gowns and festivities when her predecessors had spent just as much and the money was always given with the King’s approval? Her only faults were inexperience and lack of caution. Unfortunately, when her husband proved himself unfit, she essayed, to her undoing, to take the political reins in her own hands. In her endeavour to save herself and her family she allowed her feminine sympathies and antipathies to influence her politically and so made matters worse. The price she paid for her mistakes was terrific. In all the history of royalty there is hardly a more terrible plunge from the pinnacle of power and wealth to the depths of misery. Art and culture never bloomed more luxuriantly in France than in the early years of Marie Antoinette’s reign.[6] The most exquisite taste pervaded the mode and was displayed at court functions; the furniture, ornaments, bronzes and porcelains designed for Marie Antoinette are among the most delightful productions of French decorative art; the great French painters of the Rococo period--Boucher, Fragonard and Hubert Robert--were still alive, as well as the sculptors Houdon, Falconet and Clodion. It was natural that the young Queen should have preferred this art to David’s with its cold, stern quality and sombre, tragic motifs; that she ignored revolutionary literature, preferring to amuse herself with charming Italian operas or the music of Gluck which she introduced to France.