On 14 September 1792 Prince Charles Antoine de Ligne, elder son and heir of his more famous father Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne, died fighting the French at Croix-au-Bois in the Argonne region. A thirty-three-year-old colonel in the Habsburg engineering corps, Charles had led a difficult assault, overcoming three cannons. Rushing toward the fourth and last cannon, reportedly he had turned to his men, crying “Forward hussars, follow me! This cannon also!” as the French enemy sang “La Marseillaise.” His followers’ horses could not keep pace with Charles's fine English mount. Charles was hit in the head and the right hand by cannon fire. He fell, his horse running off into the French lines. All enemy cannons were eventually overcome, the battery was seized, the French retired, and so the difficult action was successful in the end. But Prince Charles was dead.Footnote ¹

Charles left behind a last will and testament with detailed instructions concerning disposition of his corpse and his personal effects. He urged that his body be retrieved from the battlefield if at all possible and that obsequies with full military honors (tous les honneurs de la guerre) be conducted on his behalf, after which his embalmed body should be transported to Beloeil to lie with his Ligne ancestors. He directed that his heart be wrapped separately in a kerchief previously worn by the unnamed love of his life. On the four corners of the handkerchief the following words were to be embroidered: (1) the name Alona; (2) the two words “tenderness delicacy” (tendresse délicatesse); (3) the word “indissoluble”; and (4) two inclusive dates, one being 21 September 1787 and the other to be the date of Prince Charles's actual death. A striking feature in the testament was Charles's plan to commemorate a particular group of aristocratic Viennese friends, dubbed les Indissolubles, in whose honor he wished to have a “temple of friendship” (temple à l'amitié) erected in his rooms at the Ligne family estate in Beloeil. Over the entryway to the “temple” would be inscribed the words “chamber of the indissolubles” (chambre des indissolubles). On the walls would hang portraits of six members of the group, specified formally by name in the testament: Prince Joseph Poniatowski, Countess Kinsky née Dietrichstein, Princess Liechtenstein née Manderscheid, Princess Jablonowski née Czaski, Princess Lichnowsky née Thun, and Caroline Thun. A seventh portrait, of “Madame Woina,” was to be procured and added to the collection. The portrait of Charles's wife, Hélène Massalska, would be removed to storage. A plaster bust of Charles on a pedestal would occupy the center of the room, facing Countess Kinsky's portrait. Prince Charles asked his father, the Prince de Ligne, an agile versifier, to compose appropriate lines to attach to the bust, describing the happiness Prince Charles had experienced in this company, as well as suitable verses for each portrait. The individuals whose portraits would appear in the “temple” received specific bequests in the testament, befitting the relationship each had shared with Charles.Footnote ²

For more than two decades a vigorous corrective process in the historiography of the Habsburg monarchy's late eighteenth-century aristocracy has been under way. Ivo Cerman, Franz Szabo, and others have documented aristocratic responsiveness to European cultural trends, reevaluating older assumptions about “feudal” resistance to Enlightenment ideas or cloistered aristocratic ignorance. Particularly fruitful has been exploration of the correspondence and other informal writings that lie untapped in the private archives of aristocratic families, suggesting avenues for further research.Footnote ³ The testament examined here, yet another type of semiformal writing, offers additional clues concerning the mindset of Vienna's elite, attesting to the active role played by Vienna's aristocracy in absorbing and transmitting social and cultural trends in late eighteenth-century Europe. It is uniquely helpful that letters young Charles Ligne wrote during the last few years of his life to Prince Joseph Poniatowski have been preserved, highlighting both Charles's exuberant enthusiasm for his friends and his pessimistic assessment of his own chances for happiness or even survival.Footnote ⁴

The bequests in Prince Charles's testament offer a snapshot of a small but functioning coterie in late eighteenth-century Vienna. To his close friend Joseph Poniatowski, the only male in the group, Charles bequeathed his horse Wimmer and Field Marshal Gideon Laudon's sabre, asking Joseph to carry it into battle in his (Charles's) honor, as the gift of a friend who would gladly have sacrificed his own life to save Joseph's.Footnote ⁵ Countess Kinsky, identified by Ligne family historians as the woman who was to donate her handkerchief to contain Prince Charles's heart, received Charles's dog Tristam who, according to Charles, “has always been for me what I was for her [Countess Kinsky], always treated like a dog and always faithful.” As an additional bequest the countess was to receive the framed engravings that were kept in the prince's apartments in Beloeil as well as a chain that the prince wore around his neck. To Princess Liechtenstein, Prince Charles left his watch as a sign that the happiest hours the watch had marked were those that Charles spent with her and that to the very end he thought of her as the best of friends, second in his heart only to his adored favorite. To Princess Lichnowsky, the prince gave his fine edition of the works of Shakespeare and the best English horse in his stable; and to Caroline Thun went Ligne's eight silver candlesticks, a handsome cafetière, and a twenty-ducat annuity for life, which Caroline could use to acquire for herself the most comfortable armchair or chaise longue available, for her to enjoy in any residence where she lived. To Princess Jablonowski, Prince Charles gave the ring that he had always worn containing the inscription “indissoluble,” one portefeuille containing a small chain, and others containing Prince Charles's letters and additional personal writings. This bequest, Charles noted, would serve as final proof of his confidence in the princess “as being the one to whom I owe the most gratitude for all the goodness, all the friendliness that she has shown me, and the one as well who has always best understood all that I have felt and experienced of pleasure or pain; and finally as being a true friend, whom I am sure not to forget even in the world to come.” Madame Woina received Prince Charles's table and assorted tea set “so that she will remember the pleasure I had in coming to share [tea] with her.” Charles also gave Madame Woina two Turkish sabres for her young sons Maurice and Felix.Footnote ⁶

Although the group of “Indissolubles” is of particular interest here, other individuals mentioned in Prince Charles's will should also be noted. Charles bequeathed to his daughter and heiress Sidonia his portrait of her mother Hélène Massalska, estranged and living in Poland for several years, as a reminder that Sidonia should not imitate her. Sidonia would receive also Charles's Turkish sword from Prince Potemkin, which was to pass eventually to Sidonia's eldest son. To his illegitimate daughter Christine, Charles bequeathed his portrait of her mother (not named within the testament), together with a necklace bearing the inscription “these ties are precious to me.” To “Norokos,” a foundling Charles brought home from the Turkish campaign, he gave his Turkish rifle and sword. Prince Charles provided for little Christine and Norokos, who would have no portion from the Ligne family fortune, by asking that his own extensive collection of engravings, accumulated carefully in the course of many years, should be sold so that the proceeds could support Christine and Norokos.Footnote ⁷ To his father the elder Prince de Ligne he gave two paintings depicting the military action that took place at Poesig in Bohemia in 1778, where the youthful officer Charles had first distinguished himself. To these, Prince Charles's insignias of the Maria Theresa military order and of the Russian order of Saint George were to be attached. Charles's married sister Christiane Clary received Charles's drawings and all his miniature cameos and various small framed items. To his younger brother Louis went his sabre from the king of Poland and his pistols from Marlborough. To his friend François (Franz Joseph) Dietrichstein, Countess Kinsky's brother, Prince Charles left any arms in his possession at the time of his death on the battlefield or elsewhere. Servants received pensions. Prince Charles asked François Dietrichstein to see to it that the legacies in his testament were distributed as directed.Footnote ⁸

The group of Indissolubles depicted in the testament was undoubtedly short-lived, active for only a few “seasons” in Vienna. As Joseph Poniatowski's biographers Simon Askenazy and Claude Pasteur suggest, in many respects this was an unexceptional coterie of young friends who spent time dancing, flirting, singing Mozart's melodies, reading Shakespeare (apparently Joseph excelled at declaiming), picnicking in the Prater, and participating in amateur theatricals and concerts—all light amusements popular among well-placed young Viennese of their day.Footnote ⁹ Although all members of the group were part of Vienna's upper aristocracy and securely positioned within that elite, they were diverse in origin. Charles Ligne came from the Austrian Netherlands, today's Belgium. Two members, Princess Lichnowsky and her unmarried younger sister Caroline Thun, came from a Bohemian family. The birth family of Countess Kinsky had its possessions primarily in Moravia. Princess Liechtenstein had moved to Vienna from Blankenheim in the Holy Roman Empire's German lands. Three individuals hailed from Poland, namely Prince Joseph Poniatowski, Princess Jablonowski, and Countess Woina (or Woyna); long-term residents of Vienna, they were not Habsburg subjects. No such group could be either wholly unique or wholly representative of Habsburg social life of the time, but the group was quintessentially Viennese in having members from mixed ethnic backgrounds. Charles and Joseph were both army officers. Countess Woyna was the wife of the Polish ambassador in Vienna. The lives and concerns of this group were in many ways a microcosm of elite Viennese society.

Of the two male members of the group, Charles Ligne (1759–92) was the elder by about four years. A military engineer, Charles served with distinction as his father's aide de camp under Marshal Laudon during the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778. In 1788, when Emperor Joseph II sent Austrian forces against the Turks, these included Prince Charles, who was tasked with organizing a siege of Šabac (Sabacz), not far from Belgrade. Charles led the assault and thus achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel and the cross of the military Maria Theresa order. In autumn 1789 both Charles and his father the Prince de Ligne participated in the siege of Belgrade. Again Prince Charles led the assault, earning promotion to the rank of colonel, commander of a corps of engineers. Joseph II's successor, Leopold, reached an accommodation with Prussia in July 1790 that headed off potential Prussian intervention in Austrian affairs, leaving Leopold free to quell the Belgian insurgency that had been provoked by Joseph II's reforms but also precluding further Austrian action against the Ottoman Empire; so Charles sought and received permission to serve in the Russian army, which continued to fight the Turks. In the Russian army's siege and assault at Izmail (in present-day Ukraine) under Suvorov, Charles again was among the first to breach the defenses. For his outstanding bravery, he was awarded the cross of the military order of Saint George by Catherine II.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1792, Prince Charles was back with the Austrian army, defending the Habsburgs’ Belgian possessions against the invading French revolutionary forces under Dumouriez. In Champagne, while he was serving as quartermaster general under General Clerfayt, Charles's luck at last ran out on 14 September, as noted previously. Less than two months after Charles's death, following the battle of Jemappes, the French took control of much of the Austrian Netherlands, including the Belgian lands of the Ligne family. Permanent loss of the territory occurred in 1794.Footnote ¹¹

In 1779, just before his twentieth birthday, Charles Ligne had entered an arranged marriage with fifteen-year-old heiress Hélène Massalska (nicknamed Mouchette). The marriage was not a success. By origin Polish but educated in a convent near Paris, Hélène preferred a gay life in the French capital to Charles's more modest lifestyle in Vienna, Brussels, or Beloeil. Charles had a serious “German” side (a certain “je ne sais quoi d'allemand,” Hélène had reported when she first met him at her convent) that Hélène deemed unattractive.Footnote ¹² When not preoccupied by military duties or traveling with his peripatetic father, Hélène's husband, the young Prince Charles, busied himself building his collection of engravings and prints and indulged his own significant talents in creating them as well. Charles fathered an illegitimate daughter with an actress in Brussels, Adelaide Bernardy-Nones; little Christine (nicknamed Titine) was baptized in the church Saint-Germain in Mons on 4 January 1786. Wife Hélène gave birth to their daughter Sidonia in December 1786.Footnote ¹³ When residing in Vienna Charles was happy in the company of his “indissoluble” circle of friends, particularly his romantic interest Thérèse Kinsky. In September 1788, dissatisfied with her own circumstances, Hélène sought and received permission from the Lignes to visit her uncle, bishop of Vilna, who was residing in Warsaw temporarily. She left her small daughter Sidonia with her Ligne in-laws and did not return. In Warsaw Hélène began a rather public romantic relationship with Count Vincent Potocki, himself married with two small sons. She and the count each sought divorces but the Ligne family and Potocki's wife refused to comply. There the matter rested, still in suspenso as of Charles's death in September 1792.Footnote ¹⁴

Like Charles Ligne, Joseph Poniatowski (1763–1813) was heart and soul a military officer. For a number of years Joseph was a comrade-in-arms of Charles, serving in the Austrian army with permission of Stanislaus Poniatowski, Joseph's uncle and Poland's last king. Joseph's father, Andrei Poniatowski, Stanislaus's brother, had made his career in the Habsburg army. Born and largely raised in Vienna, son of a countess of the Kinsky family, Joseph was nevertheless financially dependent upon his uncle the Polish king. Joseph Poniatowski's early education in Vienna, under the instruction of English and French tutors, was perhaps better suited to produce a cosmopolitan military officer than a Sarmatian patriot. Poland's army being in disarray after the First Partition of 1773, by which Austria, Prussia, and Russia had taken from the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth roughly 30 percent of its territory, Joseph's Kinsky relatives had urged that Joseph begin his military career in the Austrian army. Stanislaus, as sovereign and family head, granted permission in 1780 but on a temporary basis for training purposes and subject to recall. Joseph relished his life in the Austrian army. According to his biographer Pasteur, the prince could not conceive of any form of heroism other than death in battle; and as a result he grew uncomfortable in his role as the nephew of peace-loving King Stanislaus.Footnote ¹⁵

In early 1787 Joseph Poniatowski and a cousin accompanied the Polish king to Kaniow for a meeting with Catherine II. Sent ahead to await Catherine's arrival first at Kiev and later Kaniow, Joseph met and became a close friend of Prince Charles Ligne, who had accompanied his father the elder Prince de Ligne in the train of Emperor Joseph II as he traveled to meet with Catherine (an earlier meeting, in 1781, had already led to an alliance between Austria and Russia). According to the story, the two fun-loving young men enjoyed the lavish entertainment but grew restless and fled Kiev by night on a boat along the Dnieper to Kaniow, subsequently leaving that town as well without waiting for the empress's arrival. Like Prince Charles, Joseph was with the Austrian forces at Šabac in April 1788, where he was seriously wounded. But in 1789 he was recalled to Poland to serve in its army. Once in Warsaw he became involved in Polish military and political reforms designed to thwart Russian influence and preserve Poland's independence. The second and third partitions, in 1793 (when Austria did not participate) and 1795, ended Poland's independent existence. But throughout the remainder of his career and life Joseph Poniatowski displayed a Polish loyalty and valor that raised his posthumous status to that of hero and martyr for many Poles. After Napoleon established the diminutive “Duchy of Warsaw” in 1807, Joseph supported the French emperor's cause. The prince lost his life during the battle of Leipzig in 1813, newly appointed a marshal of the French empire and defending the French emperor. Like Prince Charles, during his earlier Vienna days Joseph Poniatowski had a romantic interest in one of the Indissolubles in the person of Caroline Thun, described in the following text. With actress Zelia Sitanska he fathered an illegitimate son, born in Warsaw in November 1791. He had a second illegitimate son (born 1809) with Zofia Czosnowska.Footnote ¹⁶

Thérèse Kinsky (Maria Theresia Kinsky, 1768–1822), Charles Ligne's beloved of several years’ standing, was the daughter of Prince (Count until 1784) Karl Johann Dietrichstein, long-serving Master of the Horse (Oberststallmeister) and close associate and travel companion of the reforming Joseph II. Like Prince Charles, Thérèse was unhappily married to Count Philipp Joseph Kinsky, from whom she separated very soon after their arranged marriage in August 1787. The date 21 September 1787, noted in the testament, presumably had personal significance for both Prince Charles and Thérèse Kinsky. Thérèse was an attractive woman with many male admirers but also with an unblemished reputation. Baroness de Montet (admittedly a skilled retailer of uncorroborated stories in her memoirs) described the sentiments of Thérèse's many swains as “keen, profound, respectful; it was a cult they had for her.”Footnote ¹⁷ In letters to Joseph Poniatowski, Prince Charles complained repeatedly about Thérèse's coldness toward him. In 1789 he wrote, “and so I am smitten, sir, I am wasting my time and my efforts, I know that and yet I will go on wasting my time and my efforts.” In 1791 he spoke of “lovely Alona [Thérèse], to whom my devil of a heart is still attached in spite of myself, but what would you, man proposes and love disposes.”Footnote ¹⁸

Princess Caroline Liechtenstein (1768–1831), also referred to as Charlotte, came from the Eifel region in Germany, as noted previously. Hers was an old family of the Holy Roman Empire (Manderscheid) with the impeccable genealogical credentials highly valued by the Habsburg aristocracy in Vienna. In 1783 she had married Prince Louis Liechtenstein (1759–1805), head of the vastly wealthy Liechtenstein family since his father's death in 1781. Apparently Louis's weak health virtually ruled out the possibility of children for the couple, so ardently desired by the Liechtenstein clan. In 1793, Caroline would give birth to an illegitimate son named Carl Friberth. A daughter followed later in the decade. Both children were fathered by military officer Franz von Langendonck, with whom Caroline shared a long-term relationship. The Liechtenstein family's discretion was such that these circumstances were unknown to the interested public for generations.Footnote ¹⁹

Princess Christiane Lichnowsky (1765–1841) and Countess Caroline Thun (1769–1800) were daughters of Countess Wilhelmine Thun née Uhlfeld, prominent Viennese hostess and early patroness of the composer Mozart, and the eccentric but well-meaning Count Franz Joseph Thun-Hohenstein.Footnote ²⁰ Once entered into their teens, the Thun daughters were often present at their mother's lively, cosmopolitan soirées. Caroline Liechtenstein's mother-in-law, the dowager Princess Liechtenstein, worried because her son Louis Liechtenstein and daughter-in-law Caroline spent much time in the Thun household, apparently too lively an environment for a young wife like Caroline (too much like a “cabaret,” “furthermore I do not like the atmosphere”).Footnote ²¹ In November 1788, Christiane Thun married Prince Charles Lichnowsky, whose family hailed from Prussian Silesia, with estates that now lie within the Czech Republic. The couple shared an interest in promoting the fortunes of talented composers and musicians (Mozart and Beethoven among them), but otherwise the union was not a happy one, though a son was born in 1789. Christiane's younger sister Caroline Thun is described by Joseph Poniatowski's biographers as the first and last genuine love of Joseph's life (“pure and still quasi-childlike . . . perhaps the sole true love of one who subsequently proved to be so inconstant.”). Obliged by his uncle the Polish king to leave Vienna and join the Polish army in 1789, Joseph regretted his separation from Caroline Thun who, as he told his sister wistfully, “would sweeten for me my passage from an active life to a quiet retreat, to whom I would owe my happiness and whom I could make happy . . . if she wished to wait for me, if I was free to dispose of myself, I would have found by her side and with her the fulfillment of my destiny.” Joseph assumed that a politically motivated marriage awaited him in Poland. In 1793, Caroline would marry a Protestant landlord from Ireland named Lord Guilford (later 2nd Earl of Clanwilliam), who had been briefly attached to the British embassy and remained in Vienna thereafter. Joseph did not marry.Footnote ²²

Princess Thekla Jablonowski née Czaski (or Czacki, born ca. 1770) was the wife of Karl Jablonowski (1768–1841), scion of a Polish family. Karl Jablonowski's principal property was Ostrog/Ostroh in western Ukraine, territory that would be taken by Russia in the partition of 1793.Footnote ²³ Although “Madame Woina” was not more specifically identified in the testament, in all likelihood this was Countess Theresa Thekla née Czaplic (1768–1835), wife of Franciszek Xaver Woyna, Polish plenipotentiary minister in Vienna from 1789 through 1793. In addition to his diplomatic work, Woyna was a Polish military officer, music connoisseur, and translator of theater pieces. He was esteemed by King Stanislaus. The couple had sons named Moritz and Felix, as mentioned in Charles's testament, a younger boy named Eduard (1789), and two daughters, Caroline and Sophie.Footnote ²⁴

The social and cultural milieu in which these eight persons functioned as a group was “Enlightenment Vienna,” an imprecise historical tag for the city particularly during the solo reign of Joseph II from 1780 to 1790. After many years of relative peace, prosperity, and incremental change under the joint control of Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, who acted as her coregent from 1765 until Maria Theresa's death in November 1780, the Habsburg monarchy witnessed a spectacular climax of abrupt, fast-paced reform propelled by Emperor Joseph as sole ruler during the 1780s. Historians have long debated definitions and boundaries that can best characterize this Europe-wide phenomenon, and an unexceptionable interpretation of the Enlightenment remains elusive.Footnote ²⁵ In Vienna, as elsewhere in Europe, proponents of the Enlightenment questioned tradition and authority. Late eighteenth-century society and culture accommodated interest in both rationalism and affectivity, speculative philosophy and natural science, mysticism and quackery, and moral and political philosophy. In the Catholic Habsburg monarchy, and Vienna, the Enlightenment proved to be less stridently secular or antigovernment, and it owed many of its more dramatic initiatives to government reforms and civil servants. But private individuals and groups also contributed to a growing ferment of ideas and commentary, particularly during the early years of Joseph II's reign when he eased censorship, broadened religious freedoms, and initiated extensive church reforms often designated as “Josephinism” by later historians. Popular interests in elite circles of Enlightenment Vienna as among middle-class intellectuals included freemasonry (still controversial though relatively widespread even in Catholic Vienna) and experimental science. Freemasonry reached the height of its popularity in the early 1780s, just prior to its reorganization and regulation by Joseph II in 1785–86. Both Charles Ligne and Joseph Poniatowski were freemasons, and masonic membership of husbands, fathers, brothers, male in-laws, and friends of the female Indissolubles can be documented. Thérèse Kinsky's father, Prince Dietrichstein, served as head of the Austrian provincial masonic lodge.Footnote ²⁶ He experimented with various forms of popular science, natural and esoteric. The growing prestige and popularity of such ventures tempted some to extend their inquiries into unknown fields through imagination, fiction, and speculative religion.Footnote ²⁷ Count Thun, father of Christiane Lichnowsky and Caroline Thun, ended his association with freemasonry and struck out on his own in ways that even his most broad-minded contemporaries found odd: channeling the wisdom of an ancient Hebrew medium named Gablidon and claiming power to heal through laying on of hands, his efforts resembling those of Mesmer in some respects. Sharing his contemporaries’ interest in balloon travel, Count Thun assisted an aspiring entrepreneur who faced bankruptcy after his balloon launch failed in Augsburg in 1786. For his part, young Charles Ligne, together with several other eager volunteers, was a passenger in a brief and ultimately abortive balloon launch supported by his father, the Prince de Ligne, in Lyon in January 1784.Footnote ²⁸

A conspicuous feature of Prince Charles's testament is its ubiquitous allusions to artifacts of English life, a veritable catalog of European Anglophilia (or “Anglomania”). Admiration for the English lifestyle, its products, and its literature was fashionable in Enlightenment Vienna as elsewhere in Europe. Anglophiles endorsed an attractive if notional English lifestyle believed to be free, secure, and prosperous. Viennese Anglophilia was still typically (and perhaps naively) apolitical in outlook during the 1780s. In Charles's testament one finds an English riding horse, the works of Shakespeare, a tea table and service, and pistols of Marlborough.Footnote ²⁹ Even the portraits of the Indissolubles requested by Prince Charles for his temple of friendship were most likely painted in Georgian English style; the painter Josef Grassi (1757–1838), deeply influenced by English portraiture and later a protégé of the Woyna and Jablonowski families, was known to have painted the Indissolubles in Vienna.Footnote ³⁰ The Viennese writer Johann Pezzl, in his Skizze von Wien, published in 1787, noted and gently mocked the external signs of “British mania” (Brittensucht) among Viennese men (fondness for English literature, round hats, boots and spurs worn on random occasions, careless rustic manners, punch and whiskey, racing) and women (horseback riding, drinking tea, a preference for English literature and for males who hailed from any land between the Isle of Wight and the Orkneys).Footnote ³¹ French remained the lingua franca for elite Viennese social life, and German language skills were increasingly needed as Joseph II insisted that German be employed as the principal administrative language of his lands; but there was growing interest in learning English as well. Joseph Poniatowski could read English fluently, according to his biographer Pigeard. Members of the Indissolubles mastered English (most obviously the Thun sisters) and found opportunities to use the language. The British ambassador in Vienna, Sir Robert Murray Keith, reported in his private letters the progress of several acquaintances who were studying English including Christiane Thun (later Lichnowsky), who wrote to Keith her first letter in English in May 1786.Footnote ³² According to Keith, both Christiane Lichnowsky and her sister Caroline traveled to England in autumn 1790.Footnote ³³ Some years after her marriage Caroline Thun, now Lady Guilford, accompanied her husband to Ireland for a visit, although the couple soon returned to Vienna to live. Lord Minto, British envoy-extraordinary in Vienna from 1799 to 1801, reported concerning the Thuns at the time that “[a]ll this family talk English, or at least understand it perfectly,” and he noted that Countess Kinsky was present in the household.Footnote ³⁴

“Alona,” a pet name for Thérèse Kinsky and one of the words Charles wished to have stitched on a corner of the kerchief that would hold his heart, was familiar to readers of James Macpherson's The Works of Ossian. The name appeared frequently in Charles's letters to Joseph Poniatowski, along with additional nicknames for friends taken from Ossian: Ros-crana, Morna, Vinvella, and Cathmar (apparently Joseph Poniatowski).Footnote ³⁵ French works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and others were available to Vienna's elite classes, discussed in salon gatherings as a matter of course already during the 1760s; already during Maria Theresa's lifetime, censorship was a minor obstacle for upper-class readers in Vienna, as Joseph II had pointed out during the coregency.Footnote ³⁶ English authors, too, were known, in their original language or in translations. James Macpherson's Ossianic Fragments of Ancient Poetry had been published in 1760, his complete Works of Ossian in 1765. The first complete translation of Ossian into German was produced in 1768–69 by Michael Denis, a resident of Vienna and staff member of the Theresianum. Goethe's lengthy excerpt and translation in his wildly popular and controversial novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) publicized Ossian's poems among German speakers. A full translation into French by François-René de Chateaubriand appeared in 1777.Footnote ³⁷ In England Macpherson's work had met with mixed praise and criticism. Concerns about its authenticity as a “Gaelic epic” had been raised almost immediately, with some commentators denouncing the poems as forgeries and others lauding them as works of genius, composed by a “Homer of the North.” But Macpherson's European readers were not concerned with the debates of Irish and Scottish scholars. According to Paul DeGategno, on the continent Macpherson's poems were greeted “with an excitement bordering on hysteria.” “Ossian” became the single most popular English-language poet in Europe during the late eighteenth century.Footnote ³⁸ By the 1780s, Ossian's poetry was readily available in complete French, German, and Italian translations. Given the interest of the Indissolubles in things English (or Scottish, in this case), it is certainly possible that they read Ossian together in Macpherson's original English, and by preference aloud.

Anglophilia and the interest of Charles and his fellow Indissolubles in Ossian's poetry positioned them squarely in the mainstream of European trends, though assuredly not in their vanguard since Ossian was no novelty by the 1790s even in Vienna. Ossian's attractiveness for a group such as the Indissolubles is understandable. The two young officers Charles Ligne and Joseph Poniatowski were restless, eager to excel in battle, and invariably apprehensive about the activities of clumsy statesmen (“those bloody awful politicians,” in Charles's words) who might conclude peace at inopportune moments. They sought “honor” and gloire (a reputation for conspicuous valor in combat), conforming to a code that embodied traditional ideals of aristocratic life in the comparatively elite and cosmopolitan officer corps.Footnote ³⁹ In a letter to Joseph, Charles expressed regret that he and Joseph had not been born a century earlier or later; present-day warfare was worse than barbaric (in this case Charles bemoaned the pettiness that impeded the passage of personal letters).Footnote ⁴⁰ For Charles and Joseph, Ossian's tales could conjure an idealized ancient world, superior to contemporary reality. Ossian's poetry bolstered and glamorized heroic attitudes. In the words of Corinna Laughlin, in Ossian's poetry “Violence is at once made much of, and concealed in beauty.”Footnote ⁴¹ Battles and wounds were gory, but the language used to depict them was formulaic, with repetitive descriptions that softened their impact on the reader or listener and suited them to mixed company of the drawing room. Stylistic imitations of Homer, Virgil, Milton, and also the Bible elevated the tone. Ossian's heroes seemed almost Rousseauian in their natural refinement, magnanimous toward defeated enemies and for the most part gentlemanly toward women, although these same women died at alarming rates. (As Adam Potkay writes, “The poems of Ossian are littered with the corpses of women who have died from their love of warriors and who . . . are posthumously revived in the minds of the men they loved.”)Footnote ⁴² Throughout his career, Prince Charles exhibited a compulsive desire to perform heroic deeds and a reckless appetite for risk; and Joseph Poniatowski's actions both as a young officer and later as a mature commander demonstrate a similar impulsiveness. In his letters, Charles Ligne periodically expressed his fear of being judged un jean foutre (blackguard or good-for-nothing) by his army comrades. He wanted to lead every assault, to be the first to breach enemy defenses, flirting with injury or death (to Joseph Poniatowski he wrote from near Šabac about two actions “during which the balls and bullets whistled through the air quite merrily”).Footnote ⁴³ A witness to Prince Charles's death reported that he had seemed indifferent to the hazards he faced.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the biography ascribed to François Soubiran, the author noted that Prince Charles relied upon his good fortune to keep him safe in battle (“for, counting on his luck, he always ran too great a risk”).Footnote ⁴⁵

In the works of England's eighteenth-century “graveyard poets,” which were known in Vienna before Macpherson's publications, religion brought consolation to melancholy individuals, although the thoughts expressed were not always entirely orthodox.Footnote ⁴⁶ By contrast, Macpherson did not include references to Christianity in Ossian's poetry. Apparently this lacuna did not trouble the poetry's enthusiastic readers. Macpherson's earliest and most loyal Scottish fans were ordained ministers, and his translators included abbots, Jesuits, and even a Polish bishop. Perhaps absence of any attempt to reconcile this “epic” with Christian ideals even enhanced its appeal.Footnote ⁴⁷ It has been suggested that Ossian's despairing tone resonated with contemporaries precisely because the absence of a deity or religious belief in the characters and the void of a purposeless universe described by Ossian spoke directly to unsettled minds of the period. Certainly the landscape surrounding Ossian was unrelievedly dreary. Nature mirrored the bleakness of Ossian's yearning, with its windblown hills, lowering mists and swirling clouds, craggy rocks, and rushing and roaring streams and rivers. The mood conveyed was at once heroic, desolate, and fatalistic. For warriors, Ossian's world offered no transcendence, neither heaven nor Valhalla as a reward for valor and sacrifice. Fame and immortality were available only through the songs of a bard.Footnote ⁴⁸ Prince Charles's testament was not a statement of faith; the sole mention of religion in the text was a provision for military rites appropriate to Charles's rank, a collective mark of respect for his profession and his comrades. It would be pushing the point too far to cite this singular testament as positive evidence of increasing secularism in Enlightenment Europe.Footnote ⁴⁹ But Charles's own despairing lament in his letters, his conviction that he was destined to be unhappy, expressed precisely the fatalistic resignation found in Ossian's poems. Peculiarly apposite, under the circumstances, is the fact that Charles's exploits, like those of Macpherson's characters, were celebrated by a bard, in the person of his father the Prince de Ligne. After the siege in 1788, Charles sent a message to his father, guaranteed to please the older soldier, as follows: “We've taken Sabacz. I have the cross [of the Maria Theresa military order]. You may be sure, papa, that I thought of you as I led the assault.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Before long the elder Prince de Ligne took action in Beloeil, proudly erecting a monument with an inscription lauding Charles's exploits at Šabac and Izmail. After Charles's death the grieving Prince de Ligne would have raised yet another monument to Charles's prowess if he had not lost his gardens and lands in Belgium to the French occupation.Footnote ⁵¹

Macpherson's lonely poet Ossian, though superficially hearkening back to Homer or Hebrew prophets, exhibited the emotional sensitivities prized by the eighteenth century. Ossian wept, sighed, and yearned. Potkay notes that Ossian's Fingal was “an ideal reconciliation of eighteenth-century oppositions,” combining the fierceness of a warrior with tender domestic affections, displaying both “precommercial civic virtue” and modern manners. Evocations of heaths, moors, mist, storms, turbulent seas, and autumnal decay could remind knowledgeable readers of dark scenes from popular works of Shakespeare. Read aloud, the text might prompt sensitive individuals to weep, sigh, and yearn.Footnote ⁵² In a word, Ossian's sorrowing heart and tears marked the work as one of many products of eighteenth-century “sensibility” or Empfindsamkeit, as Ossian scholars have noted. This mode of behavior, thought, and literary expression, popularized through eighteenth-century epistolary fiction, affirmed the worth of human affective response along with the reasoning faculty lauded by Enlightenment proponents.Footnote ⁵³ Originating early in the century with authors such as Marivaux and Richardson, the fashion flourished on the continent especially beginning in the 1770s, after widespread dissemination of works by Shakespeare, Macpherson, Rousseau, Goldsmith, and Sterne as well as Sturm und Drang authors such as Goethe and Lessing. For practitioners, sensibility expressed itself in family life, in private friendships, and in any circumstances that either could or should produce sensitive reactions: listening to music, attending theater productions, viewing beautiful sights, visiting evocative locales such as ancient ruins and (increasingly) mountains, and of course reading various forms of “sentimental” literature.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was a social phenomenon, even though its exemplars in popular novels might face loneliness and alienation. Like-minded individuals gloried in the actions and expressions that marked them as persons of feeling. They shared their poignant experiences through a wide range of social interactions, accompanied by well-understood nonverbal communication and symbolic gestures. Potential dangers of excessive sentimentality were early recognized among writers and their critics, and by the 1790s such concerns had long been openly discussed.Footnote ⁵⁵ Popular models and examples of “sensibility” nevertheless abounded, available in epistolary novels and in poetry, and presumably also in the comportment of loosely formed social groups in Vienna with whom the Indissolubles mingled to share music, new publications, playacting, and readings. There is evidence in Charles's testament and letters that he, Joseph Poniatowski, and their associates purposefully adopted expressions and modeled behaviors that among their contemporaries passed as “good form” for individuals of sensitive feelings.Footnote ⁵⁶

Charles's correspondence with his fellow officer Joseph contained emotional flourishes and other hallmarks of sensibility even though lighthearted bawdiness was also present. Ending a letter from Kronstadt, 21 May 1789, Charles wrote, “Adieu, I embrace you from the depths of my soul, you know that I say and do less than I feel.” He told his friend that after morning prayers his first thoughts were of him (Joseph), “my good friend, my true friend, my sole intimate friend, the comrade of my heart and soul, of thought and will, of desire.” In one letter, after bewailing his marriage tie with his unfaithful wife, from whom he now held himself to be absolutely free (this was a separation, however, not a divorce), Charles told Joseph that he would nevertheless be willing to visit to Warsaw again because Joseph was there, and “in my heart I am married to my good Pepi [Joseph], and I must see him to be happy.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The highly emotional content of relationships among the Indissolubles was noted rather dismissively as long ago as Askenazy's work as a form of preromanticism, “salon romanticism” (romantisme de salon).Footnote ⁵⁸ Both Charles and Joseph suffered from periodic bouts of “melancholy,” that mixture of angst and yearning so familiar to eighteenth-century devotees of sensibility. Biographer Askenazy observed that Joseph experienced intense mood swings. Prince Charles urged his friend to control such tendencies. One should not give way to excessive feelings, he warned Joseph; melancholy began as mere lassitude but evolved into sickness (maladie) and despondence, “and that is the most terrible illness of all.”Footnote ⁵⁹ These may or may not have been episodes of full-blown depression for either man, but in any case Charles and Joseph demonstrated acute self-awareness. It is worth noting that the much-admired English, even with their coveted freedom, prosperity, intelligence, and literary talent, were held to be peculiarly prone to melancholy and suicide.Footnote ⁶⁰ Charles self-consciously laid claim to emotional and physical susceptibility, a capacity for deep and refined feelings. He described in detail his presentiment that he was losing his friend Joseph for all eternity, either to a battle death or to some other fatal circumstance: “you can have no idea how much I miss you . . . my day and my heart are both empty, I go mechanically from one place to another and then to yet another, I annoy myself and others, and then I go to bed.”Footnote ⁶¹ This language of melancholy can be found also in letters written by Caroline Liechtenstein. Returning to Vienna in 1789 after spending time with her sister, Caroline wrote to the latter that she had been so content but now was sunk in “melancholy, for I feel a dreadful sadness, this happens each time [after] I have spent time with people who are very dear to me.” In September 1792 just days before Charles Ligne's death, Caroline's mother-in-law, the dowager Princess Liechtenstein, complained in a letter to her own “sister” (very likely her sister-in-law Countess Augusta von Sternberg née Manderscheid, wife of the dowager princess's brother Philip and Caroline's half-sister) that it was difficult to combat “the extreme indifference that she [Caroline] has about everything, about herself, which comes from a great store of melancholy, which unfortunately has but too many causes.”Footnote ⁶²

In popular sentimental literature, and in Ossianic poetry too, objects and scenes were shown to have emotional import. Prince Charles emulated this technique in his testament, calling attention to items that would waken in his surviving friends a gentle longing for times past. Most striking of all, the prince wrote that the handkerchief of “Alona” was needed as a covering for his heart so that in her absence his heart would be made as content as possible, being close to an object that had belonged to her.Footnote ⁶³ In his letters, Charles presented nonlinguistic evidence of his emotional attachments, such as were the stock of sentimental literature; he shuddered, he sensed constrictions of his own heart, he experienced nightmarish frights. In a letter written after Joseph's departure from Vienna for the Polish army Charles told him that his (Joseph's) empty chamber had become a sanctuary; Charles could not pass by without tears starting to his eyes. Charles recorded his daily activities in journal-like lists similar to those that appeared in epistolary novels.Footnote ⁶⁴ Writing from Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) on his way to Izmail, Charles first voiced frustration with his slow travel and his fear that he would miss his chance to win “this bloody glory.” But even as he lamented the cold, the annoyance, and the discomfort of his journey, Charles told Joseph, he had only to think of his friend Joseph to become happy; “it cheers my heart and soul, when I think of you.”Footnote ⁶⁵ When Charles had not received a letter from Joseph for many weeks and feared the worst, he wrote despairingly: “Oh my god where are you? are you still alive? are you not taken prisoner or wounded? . . . if you knew with what terrible trembling I take up the gazettes, a thousand times I have been tempted not to read them anymore, and yet I cannot resist my desire to know even that which I dread.” Resolving, as he said, to ignore the casualty lists, Charles reported that he could not help but look; “for I have the most dreadful presentiments when I recall that for three years you have sought a [suitable] position everywhere and yet have found no opening, this seems to me to be a warning from heaven that you should not expose yourself. . . . my heart contracts.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Quite as fatalistic as Ossian, Charles espied alarming portents of Joseph's doom. In Ossianic fashion he lamented a vanishing world, a happier past. In the event, it was Joseph Poniatowski who would mourn the loss of his friend Charles. When a bereft Prince Joseph returned to Vienna briefly in October 1792, shortly after Charles's death, in a letter to King Stanislaus (by then hard pressed by Russia and forced to send nephew Joseph away because of Joseph's opposition to Russian dictates) the prince noted how the familiar scenes brought to mind former times in the city: “I am sad, every object I encounter reminds me of the friend I have lost, I am inconsolable, all of my acquaintances have greeted me with marks of the warmest friendship, and if I knew that Y[our] M[ajesty] was happy, and that Charles still lived, I could say that I experienced genuine pleasure in seeing Vienna again, but these two thoughts are always there to sadden and distress me.”Footnote ⁶⁷

By the early 1790s the comparatively genial, cosmopolitan world inhabited by Vienna's aristocracy was fraying, the solidity of its foundations eroding. Joseph II's Turkish war, begun in 1788, dragged on for several years, though Austrian forces eventually enjoyed success. Meantime the emperor's unpopular reforms had led to an uprising in the Habsburgs’ Belgian lands and active discontent in Hungary, encouraged by Prussia. To the east, that portion of Poland taken by the Habsburgs during the First Partition (“Galicia and Lodomeria”) likewise grew restless. King Stanislaus Poniatowski's nominally independent kingdom of Poland was subjected to increasingly acute pressure from Russia and soon from Prussia as well. With the passage of time, internal unrest in France became a source of anxiety, as revolutionary partisans within France advanced from proclamations about universal human rights to aggressive patriotism and radical political goals that led to coercion and violence both at home and abroad. Agitated, mobile French émigrés, some of whom left France as early as 1789 during the first stages of the revolution, called for military action against the French revolutionaries in defense of monarchy (“difficult guests,” as Michael Hochedlinger describes the émigrés).Footnote ⁶⁸ Soon even Viennese Anglophilia would become more markedly earnest and political in outlook, most clearly when England joined the anti-French coalition in 1793. For the Habsburg elite England came to embody a strong and secure, albeit Protestant, country with stable conservative leadership.

In view of harsh trends in the 1790s, there is at least some justice in Pasteur's poetic dismissal of the Indissolubles as the frothy byproduct of a fleeting era: “A fragrant scent of the Ancien Régime wafted over these gatherings of amiable men and women who were living, without realizing it, during the final sweet moments of a society at its waning.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The sensitive outlook cultivated by the Indissolubles was for them an apolitical stance well suited to a comfortable, cosmopolitan elite group. Its viability in an increasingly politicized European environment was untested and less evident.Footnote ⁷⁰ Joseph Poniatowski's recall to Poland in 1789 from service in the Habsburg military signaled the change that was under way as the political climate grew harsher. A letter to his sister, cited earlier with regard to his affection for Caroline Thun, contained also Joseph's lament that he existed only to serve the Polish king; “I am sad,” he wrote, “my life is a burden when I think of the cruel sacrifices required of me.” He pledged that despite his sorrow he would serve his Polish fatherland through the sacrifice of his life if necessary.Footnote ⁷¹ Equally symptomatic was the plight of Charles Ligne's younger brother Louis, serving as an officer in the French army, who was tormented like other Ligne family members by conflicting loyalties when Flanders rebelled. Louis briefly joined the Belgian patriotes who aspired to independence. When French revolutionary forces invaded Belgium in 1792, Louis defected to the Austrian forces a few months before his elder brother's death at Croix-au-Bois.Footnote ⁷² Charles wrote with feelings of confusion about dilemmas he too faced in 1790 during the Belgium revolt: “I love a woman perhaps more than I've ever loved any woman in the world, Europe is falling apart and I must abandon her, my homeland [Pays] summons me and I will leave in two days with my Father; God knows if I can remain in service, God knows whether or not I should; God knows if my country will become a republic, if we will give our support to the Prussians, to the Austrians; if I resign and make war against the Austrians then I will be seen as a deserter, if I remain in service I will appear to be a traitor to my homeland. If I resign and do nothing, my blood will boil in my veins, as I watch others who fight, and who are fighting for a good cause.”Footnote ⁷³ In earlier years, both Charles Ligne and Joseph Poniatowski had served in the armies of different monarchs successively and openly while each maintained ultimate fealty to the sovereign of his own patrie.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the early 1790s questions of allegiance were becoming more perplexing and consequential.

Many Viennese aristocrats welcomed early events of the French Revolution, evidently believing that the French estates were reclaiming authority they had lost to the French crown or that France was establishing a viable constitutional monarchy. But the complacent attitude of both individuals and the Habsburg government (initially less concerned with events in France than with ominous plans of Prussia and Russia) did not last.Footnote ⁷⁵ Louis-Gabriel de Villeneuve Laroche-Barnaud, an émigré officer who visited Beloeil in summer 1791 while the Ligne family was in residence, reported in his journal that Charles and his father both shared his own thoroughly hostile attitude toward the revolutionary regime in France. According to Villeneuve Laroche, Charles stated that he would offer his services to the new Emperor Leopold II's coalition forces or, if not employed in that way, he would join the émigré officers as a volunteer.Footnote ⁷⁶ After France declared war in April 1792 and invaded the Habsburgs’ Belgian lands, Charles wrote to Joseph Poniatowski that although he had earlier hoped he could throw in his lot with the forces of the Polish king and serve in the Polish army with his friend Joseph, this was no longer possible; now he was “leaving to go knock sense into these archvillain-devil French nationals [ces vilains archi vilains bougres de françois nationaux].” Charles's customary insouciance was on display: “I hope the bullets of these scoundrels [ces jean foutres] will not cause greater mischief than those of the Turks; but if one of them happens to clip me a bit too close, I will call to mind how you will regret my loss and that will give me pleasure as I bite the dust [en me crevant]; and for my funeral oration, declare that you have always been my friend. That will prove that I was a fine lad [brave garçon]. Farewell.”Footnote ⁷⁷

French forces were readily expelled from Belgium in late spring and summer of 1792, but for Prince Charles and other participants in the anti-French coalition, disillusionment came in the autumn. French soldiers proved to be highly motivated and resourceful in countering the threat to their country from invading forces of Austria and Prussia. Prince Charles recorded his impressions of this new war in a letter composed in camp just before his fatal adventure and left unfinished (the letter was found on his body by the French as he lay dead on the battlefield). In considering the contents, it should be recalled that Charles was a seasoned officer. The recent Turkish war, in which both he and his friend Joseph Poniatowski had participated, had been demoralizing at times.Footnote ⁷⁸ Illness had been endemic, desertion rates high. Even during the successful 1789 season under Laudon and the Russian commander Suvorov, supplies for both men and horses remained scarce and expensive, according to Charles's reports at the time.Footnote ⁷⁹ The campaign against French revolutionary forces in 1792, as described by Charles, involved additional challenges. Though not yet the formidable army of subsequent years, French soldiers were holding their ground (“we are fighting troops of the line none of whom desert, national troops who remain firm,” Charles wrote), and the inhabitants of the surrounding French countryside were hostile to the point of vindictiveness toward the invaders. Execrable weather conditions contributed to the dejection of the troops; their boots and jackets were rotting, and sickness was spreading. Charles confessed that the Habsburg side was becoming weary (las). “I do not know how we will get along and what will become of us,” he wrote.Footnote ⁸⁰

These struggles of 1792 constituted the beginning of what some historians have identified as the first modern ideological war.Footnote ⁸¹ At first blush, one might assume that as a model for behavior sensibility, with its genial cosmopolitanism and blithe endorsement of fine feeling, would become an early casualty of war especially among military officers who witnessed sharpening animosities at close hand. Yet recent historical studies have suggested that sensibility was relatively robust. Particularly suggestive for the subsequent military careers of Charles Ligne and Joseph Poniatowski, a form of “military sensibility” apparently served to bolster spirits on both sides of the conflict during the American Revolution; American Continental officers “took up the vocabulary of sensibility and the ideal of the man of feeling and pressed them into military service” so that, in the words of Sarah Knott, sensibility “was made part of the experience of war.” French participants in the American war had likewise expressed themselves using memes of sensibility.Footnote ⁸² Charles Ligne's testament and letters serve as evidence that as of the early 1790s sensibility had not become a gender-bound, exclusively feminine ideal, at least among Vienna's aristocrats.Footnote ⁸³ In Paris during the early years of the French Revolution sentimental expression was readily adapted to the new political environment, at least until the fall of Robespierre and end of the Terror in 1794.Footnote ⁸⁴ Especially intriguing is the expressed fear of French politicians that sensibility's vaunted outward signs of supposed inward feelings could mask hypocrisy, an uneasiness highlighted by the outcry that followed a theatrical rendering of Pamela in Paris in 1793.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the early 1790s the Austrian and French officer corps, though now opponents, retained elements of the tradition of cosmopolitan solidarity and finely tuned mutual esteem. The French commander Dumouriez demonstrated the persistence of this attitude through respectful treatment of Charles Ligne's remains; and according to Soubiran's biography, Charles was admired and mourned by the French army just as he was by the Austrian.Footnote ⁸⁶ Charles's final unfinished letter was extensively quoted in French newspapers in late September 1792, but even in France Charles's honor was not publicly impugned. One can imagine that a suitably mortified Charles would have found French reticence gratifying. (Describing this situation, historian Roland Mortier quipped, “Autre temps, autres moeurs.”)Footnote ⁸⁷

Documents chosen for examination in this article do not continue past 1792. The nature and prevalence of Habsburg iterations of sensibility in these critical years of the late 1780s and the 1790s, when the Habsburg monarchy embarked on decades of war and when three different Habsburg rulers headed the government in quick succession, would reward additional study, particularly in view of the aristocracy's multiethnic composition; this was a group with strong cosmopolitan traditions for which burgeoning patriotisme and militancy were likely to be mixed blessings. Charles Ligne's letters, could they have continued after 1792, would have supplied historians with the candid observations of a participant whose intellect was “clearsighted and without illusions,” in the words of Mortier.Footnote ⁸⁸

Among the Indissolubles there were no philosophers or political activists. The testament examined here is the work of an active young military officer, and the letters cited are the correspondence of comrades-in-arms. Prince Charles's legacies and letters exhibit the accoutrements of European Anglophilia and the expressive techniques of sensibility, ample corroborative evidence of active participation by the Indissolubles in the larger European culture. Implied is Prince Charles's conception of himself and his friends as men and women of fine feeling and capacious “English” proclivities. It may be interesting to note here that Charles's estranged and much-maligned wife, Hélène Massalska, proved to be a votary of sensibility, proclaiming that authentic emotional responsiveness was the most consequential factor in human existence. Having left her unsatisfying alliance with Charles in the late 1780s and having attached herself in Warsaw to Count Potocki, she explained rather grandly to the count that she regarded the arranged marriage in which she found herself as “a mistake of destiny; it is you alone to whom I have plighted my troth, my true love, the most chaste and sacred of ties.” In an extravagant, passionate gesture, she followed the count when he left Warsaw for his estate near Niemerow, publicly sacrificing what remained of her reputation. Hélène wrote in one of her letters to Potocki, “I have no interest in ever reentering society, early in life I became acquainted with all that was most celebrated, and I am weary of it, I will not grow tired of a modest way of life, even in poverty, if you love me”; and again, “so long as you continue to love me always, I wish for nothing else in the world, I have neither vanity, nor ambition, I have only love.” When Charles was killed, Hélène interpreted that event as a sign that her destiny would be fulfilled: “A cannon ball has just carried off Prince Charles, I am free, it is the divine will: this cannon was loaded for all eternity.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The couple married three months after Charles died.

Charles's will was not published at the time of his death, much less so his earlier letters. But Charles could assume that, as with any final testament, his statements would become known to, and honored by, a limited “public” of their own. And to have his messages circulate in this way was surely his intent as author, or at least his expectation. As Cerman has noted, even when texts were not published in a conventional sense—that is, printed and distributed systematically—they could still address a subsection of the “public.” As with correspondence, where letters were often read to assembled groups of friends, a testament might be read aloud solemnly in both formal and informal settings to a public broader than the individuals specifically named in the testament. In this sense, a testament briefly became “performative literature,” as Cerman classifies some forms of semiprivate writing. Charles's testament was read out in the council room of the military engineering directorate (K. K. General Genie Directori) in Vienna on 27 December 1792. As noted on the testament, a week earlier François Dietrichstein had testified that Prince Charles showed him the will several times and wished the provisions to be honored. As always, the elder Prince de Ligne, Charles's bard, publicized Charles's heroic death and some of his final requests through his own writings.Footnote ⁹⁰

At the beginning of his testament Charles had explained that he felt impelled to make his wishes known because most likely he would be killed “if not in this war then in some other.”Footnote ⁹¹ Although Charles's expressions of sensibility may have entailed some posturing and his Ossianic fatalism did not prevent him from savoring life while life was his, surely the testament and letters can be viewed as Charles's personal cri de coeur—not just a lament for a specific lost love or a sentimental “narrative of misfortune” but also an articulation of his quiet despair and inchoate sense of alienation from the increasingly confusing events of his day, no doubt shared by other young contemporaries.Footnote ⁹² Prince Charles achieved the hero's death he admired and perhaps sought. Ahead of the surviving Indissolubles lay decades of warfare, most of it far from heroic.