The offered terms of capitulation were sent to Maria Theresa.  She rejected them with disdain.  She displayed a revengeful spirit, natural, perhaps, under the circumstances, but which reflects but little honor upon her character.

“I will not,” she replied, in the presence of the whole court; “I will not grant any capitulation to the French army.  I will listen to no terms, to no proposition from Cardinal Fleury.  I am astonished that he should come to me now with proposals for peace; he who endeavored to excite all the princes of Germany to crush me.  I have acted with too much condescension to the court of France.  Compelled by the necessities of my situation I debased my royal dignity by writing to the cardinal in terms which would have softened the most obdurate rock.  He insolently rejected my entreaties; and the only answer I obtained was that his most Christian majesty had contracted engagements which he could not violate.  I can prove, by documents now in my possession, that the French endeavored to excite sedition even in the heart of my dominions; that they attempted to overturn the fundamental laws of the empire, and to set all Germany in a flame.  I will transmit these proofs to posterity as a warning to the empire.”

The ambition of Maria Theresa was now greatly roused.  She resolved to retain the whole of Bavaria which she had taken from the elector.  The duchy of Lorraine, which had been wrested from her husband, was immediately to be invaded and restored to the empire.  The dominions which had been torn from her father in Italy were to be reannexed to the Austrian crown, and Alsace upon the Rhine was to be reclaimed.  Thus, far from being now satisfied with the possessions she had inherited from her father, her whole soul was roused, in these hours of triumph, to conquer vast accessions for her domains.  She dreamed only of conquest, and in her elation parceled out the dominions of France and Bavaria as liberally and as unscrupulously as they had divided among themselves the domain of the house of Austria.

The French, alarmed, made a great effort to relieve Prague.  An army, which on its march was increased to sixty thousand men, was sent six hundred miles to cross rivers, to penetrate defiles of mountains crowded with hostile troops, that they might rescue Prague and its garrison from the besiegers.  With consummate skill and energy this critical movement was directed by General Mallebois.  The garrison of the city were in a state of great distress.  The trenches were open and the siege was pushed with great vigilance.  All within the walls of the beleaguered city were reduced to extreme suffering.  Horse flesh was considered a delicacy which was reserved for the sick.  The French made sally after sally to spike the guns which were battering down the walls.  As Mallebois, with his powerful reenforcement, drew near, their courage rose.  The Duke of Lorraine became increasingly anxious to secure the capitulation before the arrival of the army of relief, and proposed a conference to decide upon terms, which should be transmitted for approval to the courts of Vienna and of Paris.  But the imperious Austrian queen, as soon as she heard of this movement, quite regardless of the feelings of her husband, whom she censured as severely as she would any corporal in the army, issued orders prohibiting, peremptorily, any such conference.