"first put the proposal before the young Archduchess, she is said to have listened with much distaste and dismay;" but she presently asked him: "What does my father wish?'? And that, after all, was the one decisive question for her.
At first Marie Louise, who was much attached to her home and family, could look only on the gloomiest side of the picture, the having to part from them to journey to a country that was strange to her, as the affianced bride of a man whom she had never seen, and whose very name had been a terror to her. But Metternich did his very utmost to reassure her by turning her thoughts to the gaiety and grandeur which awaited her at the French Court, where she would occupy a position in which she would have the whole world at her feet; while shortly afterwards Napoleon despatched Count Montesquieu to Vienna with his portrait—one of Isabey's exquisite miniatures set in diamonds—when gazing at it long and attentively, she observed with an air of relief: "After all, he is not ill-looking."
IV.
EVERLASTING PEACE.
Meantime, every good Austrian thought that the marriage would ensure permanent alliance between France and Austria, and there was a tremendous reaction in Napoleon's favour. Metternich, as
