A FAMOUS NECKLACE. 261
tion
ago her memory was again loaded with the crime by M. Louis Blanc. Marie
Antoinette has had every possible and impossible crime cast upon her by
writers who sought in her person to degrade the idea of a monarchy, but
slowly history is removing this dirt from the garment of her
reputation. She was silly and headstrong in her youth and did harm by
her thoughtless-ness, but she was neither so silly nor so headstrong
as many of the queens, her predecessors, nor did she do one tithe of
the mischief that some of them attempted. She chanced, however, upon
troublous times, and therefore everything she did was reckoned a
crime, as also many things which she did not do, such as the stealing
of the Diamond Necklace.
