The marriage of Napoleon on the 2d of April, 1810, with Maria Louisa, the daughter of the emperor of Austria, surrounded his throne with additional splendor. This marriage had a double object; that of raising an heir to his broad empire, his first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, whom he divorced, having brought him no children, and that of legitimating his authority and of obliterating the stain of low birth by intermingling his blood with that of the ancient race of Habsburg. Strange as it must appear for the child of revolution to deny the very principles to which he owed his being and to embrace the aristocratic ideas of a bygone age, for the proud conqueror of all the sovereigns of Europe anxiously to solicit their recognition of him as their equal in birth, these apparent contradictions are easily explained by the fact that men of liberal ideas were the objects of Napoleon's greatest dread and hatred, and that he was consequently driven to favor the ancient aristocracy, as he had formerly favored the ancient church, and to use them as his tools. Young and rising nations, not the ancient families of Europe, threatened his power, and he therefore sought to confirm it by an alliance against the former with the ancient dynasties.[4] The nuptials were solemnized with extraordinary pomp at Paris. The conflagration of the Austrian ambassador's, Prince von Schwarzenberg's, house during a splendid fete given by him to the newly-wedded pair, and which caused the death of several persons, among others, of the Princess Pauline Schwarzenberg, the ambassador's sister-in-law, who rushed into the flaming building to her daughter's rescue, clouded the festivities with ominous gloom. In the ensuing year, 1811, the youthful empress gave birth to a prince, Napoleon Francis, who was laid in a silver cradle, and provisionally entitled "King of Rome," in notification of his future destiny to succeed his father on the throne of the Roman empire.[5] Austria offered a melancholy contrast to the magnificence of France. Exhausted by her continual exertions for the maintenance of the war, the state could no longer meet its obligations, and, on the 15th of March, 1811, Count Wallis, the minister of finance, lowered the value of one thousand and sixty millions of bank paper to two hundred and twelve millions, and the interest upon the whole of the state debts to half the new paper issue. This fearful state bankruptcy was accompanied by the fall of innumerable private firms; trade was completely at a standstill, and the contributions demanded by Napoleon amounted to a sum almost impossible to realize. Prussia, especially, suffered from the drain upon her resources. The beautiful and high-souled queen, Louisa, destined not to see the day of vengeance and of victory, died, in 1810, of a broken heart.[6]