This etiquette which weighed upon royal families was a heavy burden, an excessive fatigue. For two days the Dauphiness had eaten nothing. “Her great fatigue is the cause of this,” the Marshal wrote again to Augustus III.; “and I have told the King that if she could not have some rest she would fall ill. Indeed, I don’t know how she can avoid it. I am completely knocked up with following her. It is so hot in all the apartments, what with the quantity of people and the candles in the evening, that it is enough to kill one. And besides that, her clothes are so heavy that I don’t know how she has been able to carry them. What is still more fatiguing are all these endless presentations; and she wishes to remember all the names, which is a terrible task to a mind incessantly occupied, moreover, in trying to please and show attentions. The other day the King made me take up her skirt which lay on a sofa. It weighed, at least, sixty pounds; not one of our cuirasses weighs as much. I don’t know how the Princess could have remained on her feet eight or nine hours with that enormous weight.” Marie Josèphe knew how to make herself esteemed and loved. A courtier, who admired the graces and virtues of this good and beautiful Dauphiness, said: “Nobody ought to take a wife anywhere but in Saxony; and rather than dispense with a Saxon wife, when there are no more, I will make one out of porcelain.” Marie Leczinska forgot the quarrels that had existed between the house of Saxony and her father for the throne of Poland. She became tenderly attached to her daughter-in-law, and showed her an almost maternal love. The Dauphiness was delivered, September 13, 1751, of a son, who bore the title of Duke of Burgundy, and who died when nine years old, after long and horrible sufferings which he endured, a precocious Christian, with admirable courage. The Marquis de Pompignan wrote a biography of the little prince. Some years later, another child, likewise fated to undergo tortures, learned to read in this book: it was that most innocent of victims, the future Louis XVII. “How did my little uncle manage to have already so much knowledge and goodness?” cried the compassionate child. The Duke of Berry was born August 23, 1754; the Count of Provence, November 17, 1755; the Count of Artois, November 9, 1757. These three princes were to be called Louis XVI., Louis XVIII., and Charles X.,--three names which on their first appearance affect the imagination with a nameless trouble, and transport it into an unprecedented world of revolutions and catastrophes. Marie Josèphe of Saxony had eight children, five only of whom survived her; the three sons, who were all to reign, and two daughters, Madame Clotilde, who was Queen of Sardinia, and another whose mere name evokes the memory of the purest virtues, the profoundest piety, the most sublime sacrifices, the most heroic courage in sufferings, in prisons, on the scaffold: Madame Elisabeth.