She pursued this, as she pursued every other amusement which she took up, with great keenness for a while, so much so as to provoke earnest remonstrances from her mother, whose letters were commonly dictated by Mercy's reports and suggestions. Nor, if she felt uneasiness, did Maria Teresa spare her daughter, or take any great care to moderate her language of reproof. At times her tone is so severe as to excite a feeling of wonder at the submissiveness with which her letters were received. No express eulogy of her admirers could give so great an idea of Marie Antoinette's amiability, good-nature, genuine modesty, and sincere affection for her mother, as the ingenuousness with which she admits errors, or the temper with which she urges excuses. To that venerated parent she is just as patient of admonition, now that she is seated on a throne, as she could have been in her schoolroom at Schönbrunn; and, in reply to the scoldings (no milder word can do justice to the earnest vehemence of the letters which at this time she received from Vienna), she pleads not only that an appetite for amusement is natural to her age, but that she enters into none of which the king does not fully approve, and none which are ever allowed to interfere with her giving him full enjoyment of her society whenever he has leisure or inclination for it. But her replies to her mother hint also at the continuance of the old causes for her restlessness, and for her eager pursuit of new diversions to distract her thoughts. Her natural desire for children of her own was greatly increased when, on the 12th of August, her sister-in-law, the Countess d'Artois, presented her husband with a son.[2] She treated the young mother with a sisterly kindness suited to the occasion, which extorted the unqualified praise of Mercy himself; but she could not restrain her feelings on the subject to her mother, and she expressed to her frankly the extreme pain "which she suffered at thus seeing an heir to the throne who was not her own child." Nor is it strange that at such moments she should feel hurt at the coldness with which her husband continued to behave toward her, or that she should ran eagerly after any excitement which might aid in diverting her mind from a comparison of her own position with that of her happier sister-in-law.[3]