I still possess a sketch of Mademoiselle de Fauveau standing with her hand on a favourite dog, which was drawn by my dear governess, Miss Redgrave, from a full-length statuette which the sculptress herself had modelled. The dress, oddly enough, is almost exactly similar to a tailor-made costume of to-day; but in 1842 it was considered a very great eccentricity, and used, I recollect, to excite almost as much astonishment as the lady’s cropped head. Nevertheless, Mademoiselle de Fauveau was a very dignified figure, her face, curiously enough, bearing a considerable resemblance both in feature and expression to the martyred Queen whose memory she adored. Though it is now a hundred and fourteen years since Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold and became the victim of a crime which, according even to Napoleon, was far worse than regicide, the very mention of her name evokes as great a feeling of sympathetic compassion as it did at the time of her brutal execution. No one who has studied the story of the terrible persecution and mental torture to which she was subjected can fail to be moved by the sufferings of this royal martyr, whose dignified bearing in some measure actually impressed the howling mob which shouted for her blood. The progress of the unfortunate Queen to the place of execution was an awful one, for the squalid cart in which she was placed was escorted by a band of furies, whose raucous howls and ignoble jests disgusted even the rough soldiery who guarded the august prisoner’s road to death. As the tumbril, it is said, passed the church of Saint Roch a band of wretches seated on the steps actually clapped their hands as if at a circus; the only open expression of sympathy, indeed, came fitly enough from a little child, which, as the rueful procession wended its way past the Oratoire, rose to its feet and kissed its little hands to the poor Queen, a last message of love, as it were, from the true heart of France. When one thinks of the respectful affection, amounting almost to adoration, which Marie Antoinette inspired in men like Fersen, the Chevalier de Rougeville, and others, it would seem that there hung about her graceful personality an atmosphere of mesmeric fascination, something of which still seems to linger in certain places closely connected with her romantic memory. Notably is this the case at the Petit Trianon, where she must always remain almost a living figure to the visitor of any imagination. Strolling through the beautiful grounds on a fine spring day, the graceful trees bathed in a golden light, one well imagines the beautiful Queen surrounded by her children and friends wending her way to her _hameau_, the toy village in which she took so much interest and delight.