The Emperor Francis was an excellent husband, but he was not an inconsolable widower. April 13, 1807, he lost his second wife; but less than nine months afterwards, January 6, 1808, he married his young cousin, Marie Louise Beatrice of Este, daughter of the late Archduke Ferdinand of Modena. This princess, who was born December 14, 1787, was very short, but attractive in appearance and of an excellent character. Her disposition was pleasant and her intelligence acute, but she was not the woman to give Marie Louise any taste for France or the French; for if in all Europe there was a princess who utterly detested the French Revolution and all its works, it was the third wife of Francis II. The new Empress was but four years older than her step-daughter, Marie Louise, and at the age of twenty-one, she looked much more like the sister than the step-mother of the young Archduchess, who was then in her seventeenth year. Nevertheless, the Empress took hold of the princess's education with a high hand, and displayed as much solicitude as if she had been her real mother. II. 1809. The Emperor Francis was not without distractions during his honeymoon with his third wife, the young Empress, Marie Louise Beatrice. It was evident to every one that the Peace of Presbourg, like that of Lunéville, could be nothing more than a truce. Austria could never be reconciled to its loss, between 1792 and 1806, of the Low Countries, Suabia, Milan, the Venetian States, Tyrol, Dalmatia, and finally of the Imperial crown of Germany; for the heir of the Germanic Caesars now styled himself simply the Emperor of Austria, and a great part of Germany had become the humble vassal of Napoleon. Of all the Austrians, it was perhaps the Emperor who felt the least hatred of France. His whole family and his whole people--nobles, priests, the middle classes, and the peasantry--nourished an angry resentment against the nation that was overturning Europe. The new Empress, whose family had been deprived of the Duchy of Modena, was conspicuous for the bitterness of her indignation and of her political feelings. In the eyes of all the Austrians, great or small, poor or rich, the French were the hereditary enemies, the invaders, the destroyers of the throne and the Church, impious, sacrilegious, revolutionary,--the authors of every evil. It was they who, for years, destroyed the harvests, shed torrents of blood, smote with the sword or the axe of the guillotine, crowded war upon war, heaped ruins upon ruins, bringing misery and disgrace to all mankind. The old nobility, once so proud of its coats-of-arms and of its sovereign rights, now enslaved, humiliated, shorn of its independence, knew no limit to its abuse of the "Corsican savage," who had cut the roots of the old Germanic tree, previously so majestic. The priests denounced the nation which had dared to confiscate the patrimony of Saint Peter, and they cursed in Napoleon the persecutor of the Holy Vicar of Christ.