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evidence; Antoine was present when he rushed up to the Empress and jumped on her lap, receiving a kiss in return. Mozart also responded to the Emperor’s teasing by accurately playing with one finger on a covered keyboard, and showed his own playfulness by demanding that Wagenseil should turn over his music for him, as he played the court composer’s own work. Shortly afterwards Mozart travelled on to France, where the French King’s daughter Madame Victoire became his patron, receiving a dedication of some piano sonatas in return. The Marquise de Pompadour was, however, less welcoming. “Who is this that will not kiss me?” enquired the “little Orpheus” of the haughty mistress: “The Empress kissed me.”
    Much of the girls’ education was centred on their need to appear and perform gracefully at court events as they grew older. Their teachers included not only Gluck, but Wagenseil, Joseph Stephan and Johann Adolph Hasse, who later dedicated a book to Marie Antoinette. There were also two English women, Marianne and Cecilia Davies, who played the harpsichord and also specialized in the armonica or “musical glass.” They lived in the same house as Hasse while they instructed the Empress’s daughters. With such influences it was not difficult for anyone with a modicum of natural talent, plus natural inclination, to shine as required. Marie Antoinette would later be described as sight-reading to a professional standard, and able to take part in enjoyable little concerts with her friends. The harp was her favourite instrument and under the guidance of the talented performer, Joseph Hinner, she would make considerable progress.
    Of the various arts, however, dancing was the one at which Marie Antoinette was generally held to excel. The particular grace of her deportment, including the distinguished carriage of her head, would become a feature of her appearance upon which every observer, whether friendly or hostile, commented. Its origin lay in the formal dancing lessons that she was given at a time when ballet itself was beginning to develop in a new direction. It was the celebrated French ballet master and choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, author of a seminal book of 1760, Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets , who taught Madame Antoine. Maria Teresa was the patroness of Noverre, a role that her daughter would also adopt.
    Apart from this perceived need to perform, the other emphasis in the Archduchesses’ education was on docility and obedience. The crucial text used in their upbringing was Les Aventures de Télémaque by Fénelon, written at the end of the seventeenth century for the heir to Louis XIV and imported to Austria by Francis Stephen. This underlined the importance for the female sex of industriousness and dexterity (embroidery, which Madame Antoine loved, was fortunately a suitable feminine skill) but also of modesty and submission. The little dancers, especially Antoine, the youngest, were to be like puppets and manipulated as puppets are. The necessity for total obedience from her daughters was something about which Maria Teresa was quite unequivocal. “They are born to obey and must learn to do so in good time,” she declared the year after Antoine was born.
    But the imperial daughters were not puppets, none of them, not even the littlest one who would in the future be termed by her mother, lovingly but patronizingly, as “our sweet Antoinette.” Like any other large family, this one contained a collection of diverse individuals and, like any other large family, was inevitably divided by its range of age and experience, which means that it cannot helpfully be regarded as a monolithic entity. As one analyses the internal dynamics of the Habsburgs, the idyllic picture that was promoted by Maria Teresa, which Marie Antoinette obediently remembered, takes on a very different aspect. Even the female submission that the Empress preached contrasted rather oddly with much of her own perceivable