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But the Cossacks were coming. ‘I mean to continue this war,’ said Elizaveta, who owned 5,000 dresses, ‘even if I’m compelled to sell all my diamonds and half my clothes.’ Pompadour agreed: ‘I hate the king of Prussia … let’s demolish this Attila of the North.’ Maria Theresa just called him ‘the Monster’. Frederick sneered at ‘the first three whores in Europe united together’. In August 1758, at Zorndorf, he fought the ferocious Russians, a gruelling draw of a butchers’ battle. At year later, at Kunersdorf, the Russians smashed him. ‘My coat is riddled with musket balls,’ he wrote, ‘and I’ve had two horses killed beneath me.’ He considered suicide: ‘It’s my misfortune to be alive … I’ve only 3,000 men out of 48,000 left … Everything is lost … I shan’t outlive the downfall of my fatherland. Farewell for ever.’ Russian cavalry raided Berlin. Frederick’s position was desperate: ‘My only motto now is conquer or die.’ Gambling was all that was left: ‘I must embark on a great adventure and play double or quits.’

Maria Theresa, anxiously charting the slow manoeuvres of her generals and the intermittent ferocity of her Russian ally, watched his demolition with satisfaction. Meanwhile in 1760 she arranged the marriage of her impressive but dogmatic nineteen-year-old son Joseph to Isabella of Parma, aged eighteen, a dark-eyed, olive-skinned sensual brunette, who for a short time illuminated his obstinate egotism and sparked passion among the Habsburgs. Isabella, a clever, wild, brooding romantic who wrote on philosophy and economics, was instantly adored by the empress-queen and her husband (sharing his love of music and philosophy). Yet neither noticed Isabella fall in love with Joseph’s cleverest sister Mimi, still only seventeen, her mother’s confidante and favourite.

‘Believe me, my greatest, I can say only, joy, is to see you and be with you,’ Isabella told Mimi in one of more than 200 love letters. ‘Never in heaven or earth, neither because of absence or anything or anyone else, shall I change in this.’ Her passion was volcanic: ‘I adore you, I burn for you.’ After sending one of her letters, she wrote, ‘Here I am again, my all too cruel sister, on tenterhooks until I know the effect of what you have been reading … I can think of nothing but that I am head over heels in love like a fool. Because you are so cruel, that you really shouldn’t be loved yet how can one help it if one knows you?’

After giving birth to a daughter, she emerged even more passionate, her mind a jumble of ‘Philosophy, morals, stories, profound reflections … and rapture for you’. They arranged secret meetings around Joseph. ‘If the archduke goes out, I’ll be at your house,’ Isabella told Mimi.

‘I love you furiously and yearn to kiss you,’ Mimi wrote. ‘To kiss and be kissed by you. I kiss your archangelic little bum.’

‘Pray for fine weather if you wish to possess me,’ wrote Isabella. ‘I kiss everything you let me kiss.’

Isabella called Mimi ‘the most adorable creature’ whom she was ‘very inclined to suffocate by kisses’. Yet she was weirdly macabre: ‘Death is a good thing.’ Mimi was triggered by Isabella’s fatalism: ‘Allow me to tell you that your great longing for death is an outright evil thing. It means either you are selfish or want to seem a heroine.’ Did Isabella crave death as an escape from an unbearable love or did her wild love express her edgy fatalism?

At the height of this intense relationship, the Habsburgs invited a musical family to perform for them. The empress adored music and singing in public. Joseph played the keyboards, Leopold and Marie Antoinette the harpsichord and all the girls could sing.

On 13 October 1762, the Habsburgs gathered at Schönbrunn to watch the little pianist Wolfgang Mozart play. The six-year-old was accompanied by his family. His father Leopold, a gifted, driven but morose violinist and assistant Kapellmeister of the prince-bishop of Salzburg, descended from a creative family, early recognized that his son was a prodigy: at five, Mozart composed his first piece. Now Leopold played violin, then Wolfgang played harpsichord and, when challenged by Emperor Franz, he placed a cloth across the keys and played perfectly. Archduchess Isabella played violin. ‘Suffice to say that Wolferl [Mozart] sprang on to the lap of the empress, put his arms around her neck and vigorously kissed her,’ wrote Leopold Mozart. The next day the Mozarts received a big payment. Maria Theresa was so delighted by Wolfgang that she sent him a special lilac brocade costume that surely contributed to his future taste for sartorial extravagance.