Philip’s sister, the wife of Maximilian, heir to the empire, wrote to Isabel early in 1561, asking her to lend her help to the suit then being pressed by the imperial ambassador for the marriage of Carlos with one of his Austrian cousins, the Archduchess Anne,[183] and Isabel, in giving an account of this to her mother, says that she showed the letter to Princess Joan, who had received a similar letter, and angrily expressed her opinion to Isabel that the plan was directed against her (Joan); with which opinion Isabel agreed. ‘I spoke to the King about it,’ wrote Isabel to her mother, ‘telling him that the Queen of Bohemia had made one exception (before her daughter’s claim was put forward), whereas I made two; namely, first my sister, and, secondly, the Princess (Joan). He replied that his son was yet so young, and in such a condition, that there was plenty of time for everything yet, though the Prince has got over his quartan fever.’[184] To the imperial ambassador Philip gently hinted also that his son’s infirmity of mind and body made it impossible to arrange seriously for his marriage; but Catharine was not to be put off easily, and Isabel did her best to obey her. The Queen-Mother, sending her own portrait and that of her son, the new boy King of France, Charles IX., to her daughter, included in the parcel a likeness of her daughter Margaret; and one of Isabel’s maids writes of the joy that the pictures of her dear ones gave to the Queen; who, she says, after having recited her prayers at night in church, went to her chamber, and said them again before her mother’s portrait. When the precious portraits were unwrapped Princess Joan was there to admire them, and soon Don Carlos came in. ‘Which is the prettiest of them?’ he was asked. ‘The _chiquita_,’ he naturally replied; whereupon one of the ladies drove home the lesson by saying, ‘Yes, you are quite right, for she is the most fit for you’; whereupon he burst out laughing.[185] Isabel herself wrote joyfully to her mother that Carlos was pleased with Margaret’s portrait, and had repeated to her three or four times laughing that the ‘little one was the prettiest; if she was like that;’ whereupon Isabel assured him that she was ‘_bien faite_,’ and officious Madame de Clermont interjected that she would make a good wife for him, to which the lad, though he giggled, made no reply. Philip also, probably to please his wife, confessed that the portrait of her younger sister was very beautiful: but it was noticed that, simultaneously with these transparent matrimonial intrigues, he suddenly began to pay ostentatious attention to his sister Joan, whose marriage with her nephew Carlos was always a possibility to play off against other matches proposed.