On the last Sunday of the carnival, he even went alone with the queen to the masked opera ball, and was highly amused at finding that not one of the company recognized either him or her.

He even proposed to repeat his visit on Shrove-Tuesday; but when the evening came he changed his mind, and insisted on the queen's going by herself with one of her ladies, and the change of plan led to an incident which at the time afforded great amusement to Marie Antoinette, though it afterward proved a great annoyance, as furnishing a pretext for malicious stories and scandal.

To preserve her _incognito_, a private carriage was hired for her, which broke down in the street close by a silk-mercer's shop.

As the queen was already masked, the shop-men did not know her, and, at the request of the lady who attended her, stopped for her the first hackney-coach which passed, and in that unroyal vehicle, such as certainly no sovereign of France had ever set foot in before, she at last reached the theatre.

As before, no one recognized her, and she might have enjoyed the scene and returned to Versailles in the most absolute secrecy, had not her sense of the fun of a queen using such a conveyance overpowered her wish for concealment, so that when, in the course of the evening, she met one or two persons of distinction whom she knew, she could not forbear telling them who she was, and that she had come in a hackney-coach.
Her health seemed less delicate than it had been before her confinement.
But in the spring she was attacked by the measles, and her illness, slight as it was, gave occasion to a curious passage in court history.