"I have inspired her with an eager desire to do her duty to you, with a tender attachment to your person, with a resolution to be attentive to think and do every thing which may please you. I have also been most careful to enjoin her a tender devotion toward the Master of all Sovereigns, being thoroughly persuaded that we are but badly providing for the welfare of the nations which are intrusted to us when we fail in our duty to Him who breaks sceptres and overthrows thrones according to his pleasure. "I say, then, to you, my dear dauphin, as I say to my daughter: 'Cultivate your duties toward God. Seek to cause the happiness of the people over whom you will reign (it will be too soon, come when it may). Love the king, your grandfather; be humane like him; be always accessible to the unfortunate. If you behave in this manner, it is impossible that happiness can fail to be your lot.' My daughter will love you, I am certain, because I know her. But the more that I answer to you for her affection, and for her anxiety to please you, the more earnestly do I entreat you to vow to her the most sincere attachment. "Farewell, my dear dauphin. May you be happy. I am bathed in tears.[2]" The dauphin did not falsify the hopes thus expressed by the Empress-queen. But his was not the character to afford his wife either the advice or support which she needed, while, strange to say, he was the only member of the royal family to whom she could look for either. The king was not only utterly worthless and shameless, but weak and irresolute in the most ordinary matters. Even when in the flower and vigor of his age, he had never been able to summon courage to give verbal orders or reproofs to his own children,[3] but had intimated his pleasure or displeasure by letters. He had been gradually falling lower and lower, both in his own vices and in the estimation of the world; and was now, still more than when Lord Chesterfield first drew his picture,[4] both hated and despised. The dauphin's brothers, for such mere boys, were singularly selfish and unamiable; and the only female relations of her husband, his aunts, to whom, as such, it would have been natural that a young foreigner should look for friendship and advice, were not only narrow-minded, intriguing, and malicious, but were predisposed to regard her with jealousy as likely to interfere with the influence which they had hoped to exert over their nephew when he should become their sovereign.