The war of 1805, which brought Austria to the brink of ruin, added to
the Archduchess's instinctive repulsion for Napoleon. At Vienna the
panic was extreme; the Imperial family was obliged to flee in different
directions. Marie Louise was only fourteen years old, and she was
already learning bitter lessons at the school of experience. Seeking
shelter in Hungary, and afterwards in Galicia, she prayed most warmly
for the success of the Austrians. She wrote: "Papa must be finally
successful, and the time must come when the usurper will lose heart.
Perhaps God has let him go so far to make his ruin more complete when
He shall have abandoned him." November 21, 1805, a few days before the
battle of Austerlitz, she wrote a letter to her governess's husband,
Count Colloredo, in which she said: "God must be very wroth with us,
since He punishes us so sorely. Perhaps at this very moment there is
living in one of our rooms at Schoenbrunn one of those generals who are
as treacherous as cats. Our family is all scattered: my dear parents are
at Olmuetz; we are at Kaschan; there is a third colony at Ofen."

Every sort of misfortune combined to smite this suffering family. While
the Emperor Francis was losing the battle of Austerlitz, his wife, who
was in Silesia, with only one of her children, the little Archduchess
Leopoldine, who was born in 1797 and was not yet eight years old, fell
seriously ill with the measles, and dreaded giving the disease to her
little girl. "The only thing which would make death terrible," she wrote
to her husband, "would be to die without seeing you again.... Do not
take a step that will injure you or the country. Only don't let me be
taken to France." Nothing disturbed her so much as the dread of falling
into the hands of the enemy. The details which her husband wrote to her
about his interview with Napoleon did not allay her uneasiness. "I have
been as happy," he wrote, "as I could hope to be with a conqueror who