CHAPTER XX.
St.Cloud is purchased for the Queen .-- Libelous Attacks on her .-- Birth of the Duc de Normandie .-- Joseph presses her to support his Views in the Low Countries .-- -The Affair of the Necklace .-- Share which the Cardinal de Rohan had in it .-- The Queen's Indignation at his Acquittal .-- Subsequent Career of the Cardinal.
Marie Antoinette had long since completed her gardens at the Trianon, but the gradual change in the arrangements of the court had made a number of alterations requisite at Versailles, with which the difficulty of finding money rendered it desirable to proceed slowly.

It was reckoned that it would be necessary to give up the greater part of the palace to workmen for ten years; and as the other palaces which the king possessed in the neighborhood of Paris were hardly suited for the permanent residence of the court, the queen proposed to her husband to obtain St.Cloud from the Duc d'Orleans, giving him in exchange La Muette, the Castle of Choisy, and a small adjacent forest.

Such an arrangement would have produced a considerable saving by the reduction of the establishments kept up at those places, at which the court only spent a few days in each year.

And as the duke was disposed to think that he should be a gainer by the exchange, it is not very easy to explain how it was that the original project was given up, and that St.Cloud was eventually sold to the crown for a sum of money, Choisy and La Muette being also retained.
St.Cloud was bought; and Marie Antoinette, still eager to prevent her own acquisition from being too costly, proposed to the king that it should he bought in her name, and called her property; since an establishment for her would naturally lie framed on a more moderate scale than that of any palace belonging to the king, which was held always to require the appointment of a governor and deputy-governors, with a corresponding staff of underlings, while she should only require a porter at the outer gate.
The advantage of such a plan was so obvious that it was at once adopted.
The porters and servants wore the queen's livery; and all notices of the regulations to be observed were signed "In the queen's name.[1]" Yet so busy were her enemies at this time, that even this simple arrangement, devised solely for the benefit of the people who were intimately concerned in every thing that tended to diminish the royal expenditure, gave rise to numberless cavils.

Some affirmed that the issue of such notices in the name of the queen instead of in that of the king was an infringement on his authority.