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behaviour.
    It was true that the Empress paraded her wifely deference to the Emperor; on the other hand it was she who worked day and night at her state papers and the Emperor who went happily off hunting. It was Maria Teresa who was the wonder of Europe for her strength and decisiveness, not Francis Stephen. To say the least of it, Maria Teresa presented a complicated role model to her daughters.
    Beneath the idyllic surface, there were also currents and rapids and shoals, jealousies and rivalries, which, however common to all large families, took on an added significance in a family of state. In effect the children of Maria Teresa and Francis Stephen, born between 1738 (Marianne) and 1756 (Max), fell into two groups. The first family—and the phrase was apt in more ways than one—consisted, besides the invalid Marianne, of the heir, Joseph, born on 13 March in 1741; Marie Christine born on 13 May, Maria Teresa’s own birthday, the following year; then came “the lovely Elizabeth” as she was known, born in August 1743. The Archduke Charles, born in 1745, died when young; the first family was completed by Amalia born in 1746, and Leopold in 1747.
    After that there was an artificial gap of five years caused by the birth and death of a daughter in 1748, compounded when the next-born daughter, Joanna, also died young. The third in line of the row of ill-fated daughters, Josepha, another beauty born in 1751, would not, as we shall see, survive either, with crucial effects on the fortunes of her two younger sisters. Thus the second family began with that Archduchess always called Charlotte by her siblings, just as Marie Antoinette was called Antoine, although she is known to history as Maria Carolina; she was born on 13 August 1752. There followed in quick succession Ferdinand, an extremely pretty little boy, Antoine, and Maximilian, a chubby baby later nicknamed plainly “Fat Max”; the three of them were born in the space of two and a half years.
    It will be seen that Madame Antoine’s position in the family was marked on the one hand by distance; the Archduke Joseph was nearly fifteen years older, old enough to be her father by the royal standards of the time. On the other hand this position was marked by closeness; sandwiched as she was between two brothers eighteen months older and thirteen months younger, Antoine’s share of maternal attention as a baby can hardly have been great. In any case Maria Teresa, in her late thirties and forties, was no longer the happy young mother who had greeted the birth of Joseph, the male heir, with ecstasy. In fact her energies were now dominated by affairs of state and the halcyon period during which Antoine had been conceived and born was over. From late 1756 until the Peace of Paris in February 1763—Antoine’s infant years—Austria was at war with Prussia and England, and Maria Teresa was at the helm. The Seven Years’ War was not a time of serenity for the Empress. Nor was the lost region of Silesia gloriously restored, as predicted by Kaunitz, at the subsequent peace, which marked no more than a stalemate between Austria and Prussia.
    Nevertheless it was Maria Teresa, however preoccupied, who was the central figure of her children’s lives and whose love—hopefully coupled with respect—they sought, even if, in the case of the younger ones, a strong dose of awe, even fear, was mingled with these feelings. Much later Marie Antoinette told a lady-in-waiting that she had never loved her mother, only feared her; but this was hindsight, when a great many unhappy adult experiences had distorted the simplicities of childhood. Her comment during her mother’s lifetime was probably nearer the truth: “I love the Empress but I’m frightened of her, even at a distance; when I’m writing to her, I never feel completely at ease.” The evidence of earlier times is of an adoring daughter who on occasion was quite pathetic in her desire to please. She dearly wanted to incarnate