ART. IV.-1. Maria Theresia und Marie Antoinette, Ihr Briefwechsel während der Jahre 1770-1780, herausgegeben von ALFRED RITTER VON ARNETH. Paris und Wien: 1865.

2. Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette. Publiée sur les Documens originaux par le Comte PAUL VOGT D'HUNOLSTEIN. Troisième édition. Paris: 1864.

3. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, et Madame Élisabeth. Lettres et Documens inédits publiés par F. FEUILLET DE CONCHES. (Second Tirage.) Trois Tomes. Paris: 1864.

IF

F the authenticity of these several collections of letters of the last Queen of France and of her nearest connexions could be irrefragably established, we should without hesitation assign to them the highest place among the innumerable memorials of the French Revolution. They bring Marie Antoinette before us in the freshness of her girlish royalty, when she passed, at fifteen, from the domestic circles of Schönbrun and Laxenburg to the depraved Court of Louis XV. and the pestilent intrigues of Versailles. They follow her through the earlier years of her reign, when the refinement of her tastes and the vivacity of her affections were struggling with the severe exigencies of her actual position and the dark harbingers of her tremendous destiny. They contain, lastly, a large addition to the evidence already in our possession of her courage and contrivance-her noble bearing and her devoted energy in defence of those she loved-when the ranks of her enemies were closing around her, and the realm over which she had reigned was narrowed to the miserable turret of the Temple and the dungeon of the Conciergerie. These letters illustrate, in the most remarkable manner, her qualities and her defects, her virtues and her faults, her strength of purpose and her errors of judgment. We rise from a careful and repeated perusal of them with the conviction that the whole character of the Queen is now before us, and not only of the Queen, but of her husband, her sister, and her nearest friends. The stately figure of Maria Theresa ushers in the group, not without impressive warnings of the impending tragedy; and the humorous scepticism and shrewd sense of Joseph II. complete the singular picture. So much, at least, of these letters is beyond all question true and authentic, that the omission of all the suspected documents would not materially alter or injure the general effect of the correspondence; and we regret

that publications of such deep historic interest should require at our hands in the first instance the investigation of a charge of literary forgery. Such, however, is the case. Soon after the appearance of M. d'Hunolstein's and M. Feuillet de Conches' collections in Paris, another volume was published by Ritter von Arneth in Vienna, extracted from the archives of the Imperial family; and a comparison between these different versions of the correspondence between Marie Antoinette and her mother, which has been set on foot and conducted with great ingenuity by M. von Sybel, an eminent German critic, has led him to impeach the authenticity of the earlier papers produced by the French editors, and consequently to throw a shade of suspicion over the whole of their work.

To put the reader in possession of the elements of this controversy, we must, first, briefly describe the nature and pretensions of the three collections: and we begin with that of Ritter von Arneth, because its genuineness being indisputable, it has been applied as the text or canon to determine the genuineness of documents found elsewhere. The following is the Vienna editor's account of his materials :—

The correspondence of Maria Theresa and her daughter which is here published is at this moment, and, most probably, always has been, preserved in the private library of the head of the Imperial family. The volume which contains it is inscribed, "1770-1780. Corre"spondance de S. M. l'Impératrice-Reine avec la Reine de France." The whole collection consists of ninety-three letters of Marie Antoinette to her mother, of which thirty-seven are the originals, the remainder are copies, which were evidently made to the order of Maria Theresa, by her confidential cabinet secretary, Charles Joseph Baron von Pichler, in his own handwriting. Several of Marie Antoinette's letters exist, both in the original and, at the same time, in Pichler's well-known handwriting. These are, therefore, the best proofs of the conscientious diligence with which Pichler performed his task. The seventy answers of Maria Theresa exist, as might be inferred from the nature of the case, only in copies made by Pichler. It may be inferred from one of Marie Antoinette's own letters (that of July 12, 1770), that the originals were probably destroyed by her to whom they were addressed.' (P. ix.)

It is contended that these letters form but a part of the correspondence between mother and daughter in ten years of separation; and one of the mysteries in this inquiry is, why these particular letters were preserved so carefully, when others have disappeared. However, such as they are, the Vienna letters have now been published with scrupulous fidelity by M. von Arneth; and he has added to his volume photographs from four of them, as specimens of the Queen's

handwriting at different periods. Here then we have a certain number of documents of unquestionable authenticity. The custody in which they have been preserved is that of the august family to whose head they were addressed. The giltedged paper on which they are written is that which the Queen was known to use. The handwriting of the first letter in July 1770 is that of a child hardly able to form her letters, and confirms Madame Campan's statement that when Marie Antoinette arrived in France they had to assist her imperfect penmanship, so wretchedly had her education been neglected. In two or three years her hand improved and gradually formed itself. Lastly, the confidential and intimate tone of the letters is precisely what might have been expected to pass between the writers. This then is an undoubted portion of the correspondence in question; but strange to say, although M. d'Hunolstein publishes forty-five and M. Feuillet de Conches twentyone letters of the same period, alleged to have been exchanged between the Empress-Queen and her daughter, only one of them is identical with those which exist at Vienna, many of them are essentially different, and some of them are contradictory and incompatible, not only in point of dates, but in substance.

The courier of the Imperial Embassy, by whom Marie Antoinette sent her letters, started from Vienna about the beginning of every month, and from Versailles on his return about the 15th; and as he generally carried a private letter from each sovereign, about twelve letters must have been sent every year on each side. In the space of nearly ten years this would amount to 240 letters. Only 153 are published by M. von Arneth, but with some allowance for occasional interruptions, omissions, or losses, this is not very far below the estimated number. In the earlier years the correspondence was less frequent and regular. In 1778 no less than thirty letters were exchanged, owing to two peculiar occurrences in the spring of that year-the disputes on the Bavarian succession and the first pregnancy of the Queen. These circumstances led to an increase in the number of couriers, which did not take place on any other occasion. But the incredible part of the story is that while this correspondence was going on at regular intervals-the Empress always writing at the beginning of the month, and the Queen always answering in the middle of the month-another series of letters should have passed at irregular dates, wholly unnoticed in the authentic correspondence. In M. d'Hunolstein's volume many of the Queen's letters are dated early in the month,-a time at which she appears never

VOL. CXXIII. NO. CCLII.

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to have written, as her letter would then have crossed her mother's letter on the road.

The volume for which M. d'Hunolstein is responsible has been ushered into the world without any pretension to editorial care. That gentleman contents himself with informing his readers that all the documents comprised in it have been copied from and collated with the originals-that some of these letters had appeared elsewhere, because the Queen was in the habit of making drafts and keeping copies of her correspondence--but that all the letters now published by him are printed from bonâ fide originals collected by himself. It does not seem to have occurred to M. d'Hunolstein that to establish the authenticity of these originals something more is needed than the mere inspection of them by a few serious 'amateurs.' Where did they come from? How came it to pass that letters addressed for the most part to the near relations of the Queen at Vienna and in other parts of Europe, should nevertheless have been removed from the depositories where they would naturally be preserved, and offered for sale in Paris? We know indeed that in 1809 Napoleon obtained at Vienna copies of some of the remarkable letters written by Marie Antoinette to her brother, the Emperor Leopold, in 1791, which he brought to Paris, and which were published in 1835 in the Revue Rétrospective.' But the cession of these precious documents was an affair of state. Nevertheless, M. d'Hunolstein boasts that he is the possessor of the originals of some of these same papers, and has republished them in this volume. The mere fact that several autograph copies exist of a very lengthy and confidential document throws suspicion on it. The improbability that such a paper would be repeatedly copied by the writer, when the discovery of a single copy might have cost a life, is extreme. Every collector of autographs knows that without extrinsic evidence no absolute reliance can be placed on the apparent identity of handwriting. But in this case the extrinsic evidence is against the authenticity of M. d'Hunolstein's collection.*

* It is the more remarkable that so many of the private papers of Marie Antoinette should recently have turned up in Paris, as Madame Campan expressly states that they were burnt immediately after the 14th of July, 1792. La crainte d'une nouvelle invasion des Tuileries fit faire les recherches les plus exactes dans les papiers du Roi; je ' brûlai presque tous ceux de la Reine. Elle mit dans un portefeuille, qu'elle confia à Monsieur de J., ses lettres de famille, etc., et ses réponses dont elle avait fait des copies. M. de J. n'a pu conserver ce

dépôt; il a été brûlé.' (Mémoires de Madame de Campan, vol. ii.

These adverse facts have been collected with much ingenuity, but far too much acrimony, by M. von Sybel, the editor of the Historische Zeitschrift of Munich. He pointed out that the style of the series of letters to Maria Theresa published by M. von Arneth is simple, dry, childish, and natural-that of her letters in the French editions far more elaborate, sentimental, and artificial; that no new facts are adverted to in the French collections, which were not already known by Madame Campan's Memoirs or the Gazette of Paris; that the Dauphiness always signs her letters Antoinette' in the Austrian series, and always Marie Antoinette' in the French series; that with reference to the letters said to be addressed by the Queen to her sister Marie Christine, Duchess of Saxe-Teschen, whom she calls her dearest friend, there was, in fact, no such intimacy between them; the Arch-Duchess was thirteen years older than the Queen, that is, almost twice her age at the time of her marriage, and Marie Antoinette was in the nursery when Marie Christine left Vienna. It appears, moreover, that the papers of this lady and her husband the Duke Albert (with his diary) have been carefully preserved, and that they contain no allusion to any intimate correspondence with the Queen of France. Upon an actual inspection of the Hunolstein letters by M. Sybel, these suspicions were augmented. All the Austrian letters are on gilt-edged paper-all the French letters are plain. The writing of the former varies considerably with the advancing years of the young Princess-that of the latter is uniform.

To these and many other similar considerations must be added some remarkable inconsistencies in the two correspondences supposed to be simultaneous. For instance: in the very first authentic letter of Marie Antoinette to her mother (9th July, 1770, Arneth Collection) she says:-

Le Roi a mille bontés pour moi, et je l'aime tendrement; mais c'est à faire pitié la faiblesse qu'il a pour Madame du Barry, qui est la plus sotte et impertinente créature qui soit imaginable. Elle a joué tous les soirs avec nous à Marly; elle s'est trouvée deux fois à côté de moi, mais elle ne m'a point parlé, et je n'ai point tâché juste

p. 207.) Supposing, however, that Madame Campan was mistaken in this last particular, and that this 'dépôt' had not been burnt, that would explain the possibility of the discovery of the papers. We hear that some of these documents have been procured from a person formerly in Madame Campan's employment. On the other hand, the statement that these papers did exist, and were confided to her, may have encouraged persons to supply by forgery the lost originals.