1788 he married his first wife, Princess Elizabeth Wilhelmina Louisa
of Wurtemberg, who died February 17, 1790, in giving birth to a
daughter who lived but six months. The same year he married by proxy
at Naples, August 15, and September 19 in person at Vienna, the young
Neapolitan princess Marie Therese, daughter of Ferdinand IV. and of
Marie Caroline, who ruled over the Two Sicilies.

The young princess, who was born June 6, 1772, was then eighteen years
old. She was kind, virtuous, and well educated, and her influence at the
court of Vienna was most excellent. Her mother, who during her reign of
thirty-six years endured many trials and exhibited great qualities as
well as great faults, was a remarkable woman.

Marie Caroline, the Queen of Naples, was energetic to excess, courageous
to the point of heroism; she believed that severity and sometimes
even cruelty was demanded of a sovereign; her religion amounted to
superstition, her love of authority to despotism; she alternated between
passionate devotion to pleasure and earnest zeal for her duty; she was
ardent in her affections and implacable in resentment, intense in her
joys and in her sorrows; she was often an unwise queen, but as a
mother she was beyond reproach. Like the matrons of antiquity and her
illustrious mother, the Empress Marie Therese, she was proud of her
large family; she had no fewer than seventeen children, and political
cares never prevented her actively and intelligently caring for their
moral and physical welfare. If she had not the happiness of seeing them
all grow up, those who survived were yet the constant object of her
tender solicitude. She took a prominent part in the education of her two
sons, the Duke of Calabria and the Prince of Salerno, and still more
in that of her five daughters: Marie Therese, the wife of the Emperor
Francis II.; Marie Louise, who married the Archduke Ferdinand, Grand