same disease a few days later, just as she was starting off to be
married. Joseph, in terror lest his little girl should be the next
victim, had her inoculated, as people were before vaccination was
introduced, and wrote to tell Louis XV., who was very anxious about
her, that she was getting on very well. With his letter went one from
the little archduchess herself.
'I know, dear grandpapa, that you love me, so I write to tell you that I
am quite well, and that I had only fifty spots, which I am very glad of.
How I wish I could show them to you, and hug you, for I am very fond of
you.'
Now, although not a word had been said to Marie Antoinette as to the
fate that was in store for her, she was quite clever enough to guess a
great deal that was happening. In the first place two French actors
arrived in Vienna to teach her how to speak clearly and prettily. They
were followed by the abbé de Vermond, who instructed her in the history
of France and its literature, while the celebrated Noverre gave her
lessons in dancing and the French mode of curtseying, which was far more
difficult to learn than the curtsey practised in Vienna. Marie
Antoinette delighted in the hours she spent over her dancing, and those
passed in playing on the clavecin, under Glück, whose opera of 'Orfeo'
had just been finished; but her new teachers found the same fault that
the old ones had done, that she must have everything told her like a
child if it was to dwell in her memory. She never got impatient or
cross, in fact she tried to turn everything into a joke; but the abbé
discovered her to be ignorant and inattentive, and though she had plenty
of good sense, she disliked being made to think. And in all this she was
not different from a hundred thousand other little girls!
[Illustration: She delighted in her dancing lessons]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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