Elizabeth was famous for her beauty and Hélène for her cleverness, while Maria was endowed with almost an equal share of both. She was warm-hearted, sweet-tempered, and incapable of falsehood, but very impulsive and unable to adapt herself to people; and the Duchess’s methods of education did little to modify her independence of speech and action. Like Elizabeth, she was a passionate lover of nature and of animals; but she was bolder and less sensitive than her sister and early developed a love of danger and excitement. The happy days of childhood soon passed, however, and one by one the sisters left the home nest. In 1854 Elizabeth became Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, to the bitter disappointment of Hélène, who had been selected as bride of Francis Joseph. The Emperor preferred her younger sister, however, and in 1858 Hélène consoled herself with the enormously wealthy Hereditary Prince of Thurn and Taxis, and went to Regensburg to live. Ludwig, the eldest son, had renounced his right of succession the preceding year to marry an actress in Augsburg, making Karl Theodore, then in his twentieth year, the future head of the house. Although the court of Possenhofen was seemingly of small importance, it enjoyed universal respect, and the Catholic royal houses of Europe were glad to ally themselves with it. In the Autumn of 1858 a messenger arrived from the King of Naples desiring to know whether the Duke and Duchess would consent to an alliance between their daughter Maria, then eighteen years old, and his eldest son. The two families were scarcely acquainted personally, and the young people had never seen each other, yet the Duke and Duchess returned an unconditional acceptance of the offer. To be sure, the Neapolitan Prince was considered a good match, being a Bourbon on his father’s side and a member of the royal house of Sardinia on his mother’s, and the heir, moreover, to an ancient and important kingdom in fair Italy.