CHAPTER II.
Proposal for the Marriage of Marie Antoinette to the Dauphin .-- Early Education of the Dauphin .-- The Archduchess leaves Vienna in April, 1770 .-- Her Reception at Strasburg .-- She meets the King at Compiegne .-- The Marriage takes place May 16th, 1770.
Royal marriages had been so constantly regarded as affairs of state, to be arranged for political reasons, that it had become usual on the Continent to betroth princes and princesses to each other at a very early age; and it was therefore not considered as denoting any premature impatience on the part of either the Empress-queen or the King of France, Louis XV., when, at the beginning of 1769, when Marie Antoinette had but just completed her thirteenth year, the Duc de Choiseul, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was himself a native of Lorraine, instructed the Marquis de Durfort, the French embassador at Vienna, to negotiate with the celebrated Austrian prime minister, the Prince de Kaunitz, for her marriage to the heir of the French throne, who was not quite fifteen months older.

Louis XV.

had had several daughters, but only one son.

That son, born in 1729, had been married at the age of fifteen to a Spanish infanta, who, within a year of her marriage, died in her confinement, and whom he replaced in a few months by a daughter of Augustus III., King of Saxony.

His second wife bore him four sons and two daughters.