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“our sweet Antoinette,” the personality at once engaging and docile designated for her by Maria Teresa.
    Given the inexorable authority of the Empress, the clear favouritism that she exhibited for the Archduchess Marie Christine almost from her birth (was it the shared birthday?) was a source of great resentment to all the brothers and sisters. At one point Marianne was said to have been made ill by it. Joseph felt it; and when his wife, Isabella of Parma, that bride, half-French and half-Spanish Bourbon, bestowed on him by the Family Pact in 1761, also professed herself fascinated by Marie Christine, matters were only exacerbated. The phenomenon was so marked that one wonders, as with all parents who indulge in marked favouritism, why the Empress did not sometimes question it herself. On the contrary, Maria Teresa saw “Mimi,” or “la Marie” as her second surviving daughter was known, as the consolation that was owed to her by life.
    Outwardly Antoine resented the bossiness of this sister who was thirteen and a half years older than she; as she saw it, Marie Christine used her paramount position to make trouble with her mother. It was a view shared by her brother Leopold, who was much closer in age to Marie Christine, who denounced her scolding ways, her sharp tongue and, above all, her habit of “telling everything to the Empress.” Certainly Marie Christine had a strong streak of the “masculine” or masterful in her nature. This was inherited from Maria Teresa by more than one archduchess—Amalia and Maria Carolina, for example—but not by Marie Antoinette. At the same time Marie Christine was highly intelligent as well as artistically gifted; she was certainly the outstanding sister in that respect.
    It was easy as a result for Antoine to conceive a timid disinclination for the company of intellectual, brilliantly self-possessed older women, exactly the sort of sophisticated creatures who by tradition dominated French society. Amalia, although nearly ten years older, was a much less threatening figure; she was not so clever, not so interesting, not so pretty, not so graceful—and for all these reasons she was not so much loved by Maria Teresa. Although Antoine could cope with Amalia, the echoes of her childish jealousy for Mimi, as the years passed, would resonate ever more strongly.
    Antoine’s relationship with her closest sister in age, Charlotte, on the other hand, set quite a different pattern. The future Maria Carolina, three years her senior, was raised with Antoine almost as though they were twins. As Frederick the Great said of his relationship with his own sister: “These first bonds are indissoluble.” From Charlotte, Antoine learnt that loving relationships with delightful female contemporaries could be like bastions in an unkind or puzzling world. The very fact that for some years the two youngest Archduchesses escaped a great deal of official attention meant that they could bond happily with each other. They tended to share experiences; if one got ill, the other would catch the infection, and both would be segregated, then sent off to convalesce together.
    These were two lively little girls; at the same time Charlotte was the dominant one, the protectress, Antoine the dependent one. Maria Teresa, besotted as she was with her Mimi, insistent as she was on obedience, nevertheless admired Charlotte’s spirit; she was, said the Empress, the one who most closely resembled herself. Perhaps it helped their symbiotic relationship that Charlotte and Antoine “resembled each other greatly,” as the painter Madame Vigée Le Brun later pointed out (portraits of the two can easily be mistaken). As children they shared the same big blue eyes, pink and white complexions, fair hair and longish noses; but for indefinable reasons, it all added up to feminine prettiness in Antoine. Charlotte, if “not as pretty,” was on the other hand attractive with a forceful personality.
     
    The marriage of Joseph