It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of
France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted
on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful
vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering
the elevated sphere she just began to move in- glittering like the
morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a
revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without
emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she
added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant,
respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp
antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I
dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her
in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of
cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their
scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But
the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists; and
calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished
forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to
rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself,
the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the
cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic
enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honor which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing
all its grossness.
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