to cooeperate with Sardinia and Austria.

Amidst these scenes of war, the usual dramas of domestic life moved on.
Prince Charles of Lorraine, had long been ardently attached to Mary
Anne, younger sister of Maria Theresa. The young prince had greatly
signalized himself on the field of battle. Their nuptials were attended
in Vienna with great splendor and rejoicings. It was a union of loving
hearts. Charles was appointed to the government of the Austrian
Netherlands. One short and happy year passed away, when Mary Anne, in
the sorrows of child-birth, breathed her last.

The winter was passed by all parties in making the most vigorous
preparations for a new campaign. England and France were now thoroughly
aroused, and bitterly irritated against each other. Hitherto they had
acted as auxiliaries for other parties. Now they summoned all their
energies, and became principals in the conflict. France issued a formal
declaration of war against England and Austria, raised an army of one
hundred thousand men, and the debauched king himself, Louis XV., left
his _Pare Aux Cerfs_ and placed himself at the head of the army. Marshal
Saxe was the active commander. He was provided with a train of artillery
superior to any which had ever before appeared on any field. Entering
the Netherlands he swept all opposition before him.

The French department of Alsace, upon the Rhine, embraced over forty
thousand square miles of territory, and contained a population of about
a million. While Marshal Saxe was ravaging the Netherlands, an Austrian
army, sixty thousand strong, crossed the Rhine, like a torrent burst
into Alsace, and spread equal ravages through the cities and villages of
France. Bombardment echoed to bombardment; conflagration blazed in
response to conflagration; and the shrieks of the widow, and the moans
of the orphan which rose from the marshes of Burgundy, were reechoed in
an undying wail along the valleys of the Rhine.

The King of France, alarmed by the progress which the Austrians were
making in his own territories, ordered thirty thousand troops, from the
army in the Netherlands, to be dispatched to the protection of Alsace.
Again the tide was turning against Maria Theresa. She had become so
arrogant and exacting, that she had excited the displeasure of nearly
all the empire. She persistently refused to acknowledge the emperor,
who, beyond all dispute, was legally elected; she treated the diet
contemptuously; she did not d