"Some time during the early spring of the year 1797, a party of Royal fugitives might have been seen leaving the Austrian capital and hurriedly making their way along the road to Hungary; the progress of their attendants being somewhat impeded by the many packages of valuable property which they were endeavouring to save from the enemy. Making one of this party of refugees of the Imperial House of Hapsburg was the little Archduchess, Marie Louise, then a child between five and six years old, 'whom our imagination,' writes Sir Walter Scott in his 'Life of Napoleon,' 'may conceive agitated by every species of childish terror derived from the approach of the victorious general, on whom she was at a future and similar crisis destined to bestow her hand."
And her education, besides, had been carefully devoted towards increasing the hatred of the man who had inflicted this humiliation on her family. For she was brought up "with the truest respect for religion, while she learned to eschew revolutionary ideas, more especially as exemplified in the conduct of Napoleon Bonaparte."
To such an extent was the latter feeling carried, that when Marie Louise used to play as a child with her little brothers and sisters, they were accustomed to select the blackest and ugliest of their dolls, which they dressed in uniform and stuck full of pins, in denunciation of the ogre who was an incarnation of terror to their childish
