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346 minds. The young Archduchess had, too, a lively remembrance of the war in the year 1805, which also brought Austria to the very verge of ruin. The Imperial family had on that occasion been again compelled to flee from their capital, and writing from Hungary, where they had taken refuge, to her father, Marie Louise had endeavoured to console him by the assurance that she prayed daily and hourly that the power of the usurper might be humbled in the dust, cheerfully suggesting that perhaps the Almighty had let him get so far that his ruin might be more complete when it came.

Later on, when Marie Louise heard that Napoleon had lost the battle of Eckmuhl, she wrote to her father.

"We have heard with joy," she writes, "that Napoleon was present at the great battle which he lost. May he lose his head as well!" She then goes on to refer to a prophecy which was current that he would die that year at Cologne, adding: "I do not attach much importance to these prophecies, but how happy I should be to seem them fulfilled."

"Napoleon appeared to her on a background of blood, a kind of fatal being, a wicked genius, a satanic Corsican, a sort of Antichrist," thus a clever French writer sums up the girl's early impressions of her future husband.

To her he was the murderer of the Duke