A great distance will separate us . . . Do so much good to the French people that they can say that I have sent them an angel.” MARIA TERESA’S PARTING WORDS TO HER DAUGHTER, 1770 As Count Khevenhüller set about the highly elaborate preparations for a daughter of Austria to marry a son of France, the Empress decided to spend the modern notion of quality time with Antoine. It took the form of a votive pilgrimage made together in August 1769 to Mariazell in northern Styria. Here, at the shrine in the Basilica, behind a silver grille donated by the Empress who made her First Communion here, a twelfth-century wooden image of the Blessed Virgin Mary—Magna Mater Austriae—was venerated.*12 The journey was intended not only to bind Maria Teresa and Marie Antoinette together but also to symbolize that special devotion of the House of Habsburg to the Virgin which had given them both the same prefix in her honour. And now Antoine too could take Communion at her mother’s side.
