but Joseph had
made it on the part of the empire, and, when it was once made, the empress
could not withhold her support from her son. She therefore threw herself
into the quarrel with as much earnestness as if it had been her own.
Indeed, since Joseph had as yet no authority over her hereditary
possessions, it was only by her armies that it could be maintained; and in
her letters to her daughter she declared that Marie Antoinette had her
happiness, the welfare of her house, and of the whole Austrian nation in
her hands; that all depended on her activity and affection. She knew that
the French ministers were inclined to favor the views of Frederick, but if
the alliance should be dissolved it would kill her.[7] Marie Antoinette
grew pale at reading so ominous a denunciation. It required no art to
inflame her against Frederick. The Seven Years' War had begun when she was
but a year old; and all her life she had heard of nothing more frequently
than of the rapacity and dishonesty of that unprincipled aggressor. She
now entered with eagerness into her mother's views, and pressed them on
Louis with unremitting diligence and considerable fertility of argument,
though she was greatly dismayed at finding that not only his ministers,
but he himself, regarded Austria as actuated by an aggressive ambition,
and compared her claim to a portion of Bavaria to the partition of Poland,
which, six years before, had drawn forth unwonted expressions of honorable
indignation from even his unworthy grandfather. The idea that the alliance
between France and the empire was itself at stake on the question, made
her so anxious that she sent for the ministers themselves, pressing her
views on both Maurepas and Vergennes with great earnestness. But they,
though still faithful to the maintenance of the alliance, sympathized with
the king rather than with her in his view of the character of the claim
which the emperor had put forward; and they also urged another argument
for abstaining from any active intervention, that the finances of the
country were in so deplorable a state that France could not afford to go
to war. It was plain, as she told them, that this consideration should at
least equally have prevented their quarreling with England. But, in spite
of all her persistence, they were not to be moved from this view of the
true interest of France in the conjuncture that had arisen; and,
accordingly, in the brief war which ensued between the empire