The French armies were advancing; shot and shell were falling upon village and city; fortress after fortress was surrendering.  “Give me Lorraine,” repeated Louis XV., persistently, “or I will take all Austria.”  There was no alternative but for the emperor to drink to the dregs the bitter cup which his own hand had mingled.  He surrendered Lorraine to France.  He, however, succeeded in obtaining some slight compensation for the defrauded duke.  The French court allowed him a pension of ninety thousand dollars a year, until the death of the aged Duke of Tuscany, who was the last of the Medici line, promising that then Tuscany, one of the most important duchies of central Italy, should pass into the hands of Francis.  Should Sardinia offer any opposition, the King of France promised to unite with the emperor in maintaining Francis in his possession by force of arms.  Peace was thus obtained with France.  Peace was then made with Spain and Sardinia, by surrendering to Spain Naples and Sicily, and to Sardinia most of the other Austrian provinces in Italy.  Thus scourged and despoiled, the emperor, a humbled, woe-stricken man, retreated to the seclusion of his palace.

While these affairs were in progress, Francis Stephen derived very considerable solace by his marriage with Maria Theresa.  Their nuptials took place at Vienna on the 12th of February, 1736.  The emperor made the consent of the duke to the cession of Lorraine to France, a condition of the marriage.  As the duke struggled against the surrender of his paternal domains, Cartenstein, the emperor’s confidential minister, insultingly said to him, “Monseigneur, point de cession, point d’archiduchesse.” My lord, no cession, no archduchess. Fortunately for Francis, in about a year after his marriage the Duke of Tuscany died, and Francis, with his bride, hastened to his new home in the palaces of Leghorn.  Though the duke mourned bitterly over the loss of his ancestral domains, Tuscany was no mean inheritance.  The duke was absolute monarch of the duchy, which contained about eight thousand square miles and a population of a million.  The revenues of the archduchy were some four millions of dollars.  The army consisted of six thousand troops.

Two months after the marriage of Maria Theresa, Prince Eugene died quietly in his bed at the age of seventy-three.  He had passed his whole lifetime riding over fields of battle swept by bullets and plowed by shot.  He had always exposed his own person with utter recklessness, leading the charge, and being the first to enter the breach or climb the rampart.  Though often wounded, he escaped all these perils, and breathed his last in peace upon his pillow in Vienna.

His funeral was attended with regal honors.  For three days the corpse lay in state, with the coat of mail, the helmet and the gauntlets which the warrior had worn in so many fierce battles, suspended over his lifeless remains.  His heart was sent in an urn to be deposited in the royal tomb where his ancestors slumbered.  His embalmed body was interred in the metropolitan church in Vienna.  The emperor and all the court attended the funeral, and his remains were borne to the grave with honors rarely conferred upon any but crowned heads.