one is to consider only the greatness of your position, you are the happiest of your sisters and all princesses.”
M ARIA T ERESA TO M ARIE A NTOINETTE , 1770
The bereft Empress now shared her power—since part of it could only be enjoyed by a male—with her twenty-four-year-old son, who was elected Emperor (as Joseph II) to replace his father. But she allowed nothing, neither mourning nor Joseph’s promotion, to interrupt her sedulous policy of planning her children’s marriages. There were to be victims of this single-hearted application, giving new meaning to the celebrated family motto in Latin, which can be roughly translated as: “Others have to wage war [to succeed] but you, fortunate Habsburg, marry!” But there was one beneficiary of the Emperor’s untimely death, and that was the Archduchess Marie Christine.
The favourite daughter had set her heart on a cousin on her mother’s side, Prince Albert of Saxony. This intelligent and sensitive young man, four years Marie Christine’s senior, had arrived in Vienna in 1759 with his younger brother Clement. Both fought in Maria Teresa’s army during the Seven Years’ War; Clement of Saxony went into the church and subsequently became Archbishop-Elector of Trier. Albert, however, fell in love with the lively young Archduchess as they shared a sledge on the way to Schönbrunn. Unfortunately for all his qualities, his intelligence and his artistic interests, Albert presented no sort of match for an Emperor’s daughter. A brother of the Dauphine Maria Josepha, he was the fourth son in the huge family of Augustus III of Saxony, King of Poland, and could offer no kind of position. In any case Francis Stephen had wanted Marie Christine to marry his sister’s son the Duke of Chablais, thus underlining the Lorrainer connection.
The death of her father and the increased dependency of her mother on her Mimi gave Marie Christine her chance. She married Albert in April 1766. It was a brilliant stroke in more ways than one. First of all, Mimi had achieved that ultimate rarity among the marriages of princesses, a love match. That was in itself enough to arouse the jealousy of her sisters for whom less romantic fates were reserved. But there was more to envy. Since Albert was not a rich man, Maria Teresa proceeded to even things up. Marie Christine was given a huge dowry while Albert received the Duchy of Teschen which Maria Teresa acquired for him. The couple were promised jointly the reversion of the governorship of the Austrian Netherlands on the death of Maria Teresa’s brother-in-law Prince Charles of Lorraine. In the meantime Albert was made Governor of Pressburg in Hungary, with its vast castle on the Danube.
After the wedding Maria Teresa was “childish enough,” in her own words, to hear her remaining daughters pass through her room and fancy that “my Mimi” was among them, instead of in her own home at Pressburg. In truth the position of Pressburg made it easy for the Empress to visit this young couple, whom she found it a pleasure to see together. Marie Christine also received the coveted award of a house of her own at Laxenburg. A year after the wedding Marie Christine nearly died in childbirth, and her baby daughter did die; there would be no more children. The consequence was that Marie Christine enjoyed the greatest prize of all, the constant gift of her mother’s company. As Marie Antoinette would write wistfully to Maria Teresa: “How I envy Marie [Christine] the happiness of seeing you so often!”
At the beginning of 1767 the Empress was left with five daughters on her hands. “The lovely Elizabeth” was twenty-three, Amalia nearly twenty-one, and Josepha, another beauty, was sixteen; then there was Charlotte, who would be fifteen in August, and Antoine, who was in her twelfth year. Due to her youth, the last named was not at this point a vital player in the imperial game, although she was mentioned vaguely in connection with her coevals, the