701. His success with his students was not so much that he was a good teacher but rather because in the company of children he because a child himself, often forgetting all about music and spending the entire music session playing jacks, knuckle-bones, of even hopscotch. He often managed to make these activities circle back to the subject of music, but not always.
702. You may think it is just great to be born a princess, or in the case of Marie Antoinette an 'Archdutchess' but you would be entirely wrong about that. As Marie said herself, "I am just an ordinary child with ordinary looks and this business of having to be a princess is like being forced into a little gilded footlocker to be sent off to a foreign land to be the wife of a 'smockmordermonten'.
703. A 'smockmordermonten' was not a peasant word, it was a very rare word used only by young female aristocratic girls to describe their future royal husbands. Roughly translated it meant a young man who is fat, smelly, talks with a fake lisp, is awkward and incapable of any sort of sexual activity.
704. You will remember that Marie was one of fifteen children so she had often seen how one of her sisters had been packaged up and set to another country to be a queen, only months later to write home pathetic letters full of euphemisms hinting at a wretched court life full of desperation, and husbands who were worse than smockmordermonten.
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