by C. M. Mayo
But Charlotte looked out for him, she stood up for him. She always put his interests first, as a good wife should. She was not his first love, but he would trust his life to her. One balmy morning just south of the thirtieth parallel, there was a rare moment when they happened to be alone on the rear deck. Turquoise water churned by; two dolphins were porpoising in the foamy wake, which unrolled from beneath the ship into the endless plain that appeared to melt into sky. To the east, perhaps twenty leagues distant, there was the broom-like smudge of a rain shower.
“Aren’t they beautiful creatures?” Charlotte said.
Perhaps it was the sweetness in her face as she watched those dolphins from beneath the shade of her parasol or, perhaps that over her hair she wore a blue silk scarf just a shade darker than the sea, and this reminded him of a certain Madonna by Botticelli: he opened his heart. He confessed that, though he was, as the English say, taking it coolly, to have had to sign that Family Pact . . .
“I know,” she said.
Tears sprang to his eyes. He had tried to bury it, but his rage rose again bitter in his throat.
“It was so,” he said shakily, “unjust.”
She set the pole of her parasol on her shoulder and turned to face him. Her nostrils flared. “The grossest injustice.”
The next day, he was both surprised and deeply touched when she came to his cabin with a draft of a—he blinked twice to read her crisply molded handwriting— “Repudiation of the Family Pact.” It had not occurred to him to protest. But she, who had been up most of the night consulting the various law books in the ship’s library, argued that, first, the Family Pact was unconstitutional; modification of the order of succession to the throne could not be effected with a document such as this; second, Maximilian had known nothing about it until the last minute when he was forced to sign it; and third, he had not even read the whole of it. Therefore, she concluded, the Family Pact could not be considered legally binding.
“Bull’s-eye!” Maximilian said. “But . . .” He pulled at his beard. “I don’t know . . . it might not be wise to send it.”
“Well, isn’t that what we have our advisors for?” They had with them onboard two chancellors, good old Schertzenlechner and also Monsieur Eloin, a Belgian mining engineer Charlotte’s father, King Leopold, had commended to them. (Suffice to say, neither of these advisors spoke Spanish—not a pertinent skill in this particular instance, but very telling.)
After both Schertzenlechner and Monsieur Eloin had read the draft, Maximilian said, “Gentlemen: I am inclined to sign it, but be so good as to give me your unbiased opinions.”
Monsieur Eloin first looked at Charlotte. She nodded, almost imperceptibly. Monsieur Eloin turned to Maximilian. “I would advise Your Majesty to sign it.”
Maximilian addressed Schertzenlechner. Not long ago a mere valet, Schertzenlechner was not the usual sort of advisor for an archduke, to say nothing of that of an emperor, but Maximilian appreciated both his skill at billiards and his earthiness, what he thought of as a peasant-like honesty. “And you?”
Schertzenlechner, miffed at not being asked first, puffed out his cheeks. “Well.” He waited a beat, to gather all attention securely upon himself. “Well,” Schertzenlechner said again. “Better now than later.”
“What do you mean?”
“They ought to know it right now. They can’t kick Your Majesty around.”
“That’s right!”
But to be absolutely sure, Maximilian summoned Count Karl Bombelles. Charlie, as he called him, had come along to head the Palatine Guard. Charlie had a sure compass for the precise point at which Maximilian’s needs coincided with his own. He had a smooth, chocolatey way about him, a gravelly voice, a long nose and long fingers, ferret-like eyes, a bristling beard that made his jaw appear to jut out, and a mustache that covered his mouth. He had been down in the billiards room and he smelled of beer.
“You are a Habsburg,” Charlie said. “Document or no document. That is God’s truth, sir.”
At once Maximilian signed the repudiation, and with such heavy pressure he nearly tore the paper. His signature was bigger than it was before, and the sweep of underlining more elaborate. The envelope was sealed by a dot of scarlet-red wax into which was impressed his imperial monogram: MIM, for the Latin Maximiliano Imperator de Mexico. At the next port of call, Fort-de-France on the island of Martinique, this document was put onboard a French packet boat and telegrams to that effect dispatched to all the courts of Europe.
Maximilian might as well have sent back bags of putrid fish. In a letter that arrived in Mexico City more than two months later, Charlotte’s father, King Leopold of the Belgians, scolded them both and said that he had had to work double-time to avoid a rift in Austrian-Mexican relations. No other government deigned to comment. And unfortunately, because the telegrams had been relayed via New Orleans, Juárez’s agents picked up on the news sooner than anyone. You see, the Republicans jeered, Maximilian has come to Mexico in bad faith.
Despite the French censors, by the spring of 1865, Angelo de Iturbide was aware of the rumors about Maximilian’s protest of the Family Pact, but as he remarked to his elder brother, Agustín Gerónimo, it was difficult to know what to believe. After all, in the north of Mexico, and in pockets, the war was still going on between the French and the guerrillas; lies were raining down on all sides.
Agustín Gerónimo replied with a refrán, one of their mamá’s rhyming sayings: “Nofirmes carta que no leas, ni bebas agua que no veas,” Don’t sign a letter you haven’t read, nor drink water you haven’t seen. Whatever the truth or untruth in this story about the so-called Family Pact, certainly, Mexico’s second emperor had taken on his realm sight unseen.
It had occurred to the Iturbide brothers that Maximilian must have been given pause by what happened to their father, though, perhaps, he had not heard the most gruesome details. In her bitter moments, and these were many, Madame de Iturbide had often said, Mexicans are a people who do not deserve their heroes.
Maximilian’s ship was due in at Veracruz any day. That morning, General and Madame Almonte and a party of the most enthusiastic conservatives had departed under heavy guard for the coast.
Seldom did the Iturbide brothers reveal their political views. But in Angelo’s parlor, the shutters closed and drapes drawn, the women having retired, a bottle of cognac down to its dregs and a game of dominoes arrayed before them, the youngest brother, Agustín Cosme, spoke.
“If beards gave wisdom, goats would be prophets.”
Angelo said, “You take Maximilian for a fool?”
“Eh, ship of fools,” the eldest, Agustín Gerónimo, said, waving his pipe to signal he had no interest in the subject, or perhaps he meant his comment to encompass the whole of creation.
A BREEZE RIFFLING THROUGH AN AUTUMN FOREST
I was June of 1864, well into the rainy season, when Maximilian and Charlotte arrived in Mexico City; nonetheless, as if the Almighty Himself intended to show His pleasure, the day’s sky was as clear as newly washed glass. Thousands thronged the main street of the capital, the Calle de San Francisco; hundreds more waited out in the sun on open flatroofs and balconies. A series of wood-and-plaster triumphal arches had been erected, each spanning the street, and as tall as five-storey buildings: The Arch of Peace, the Arch of Flowers, and so on, with allegorical figures and cornucopias and elaborate inscriptions, O Carlota, Mexico’s flower-gardens salute you with palms, roses, and laurels . . . For days this street had been the scene of frantic hammering and tinkering, potholes filled in with sand, curbs swept, balconies draped with banners, and bowers, and the green-white-and-red Mexican imperial flags. Once again, the police had gone around early in the morning, dropping off sacks of flowers for people to toss. The best balconies were being rented at between eighty and a hundred pesos a head. Rumor had it that a newspaperman had offered a certain Mrs. Yorke five hundred pesos for hers!
Angelo and Alicia de Iturbide, however, did not enjoy their pri
vileged perch of the previous year when the French Imperial Army marched in down this same street for, in protest at French ambitions in what it regarded as its own hemisphere, the United States had recalled its minister, Mr. Thomas Corwin, to Washington. The building that had served as the U.S. legation, vacant for the length of time it would take to whistle a ditty, was being used to billet French officers. From the Iturbides’ third-floor dining-room balcony, to the extreme right, if one leaned out over the railing, one could see a tight slice of the main street. Angelo and his brothers could not be enticed to the window. They remained at the table, smoking and playing dominoes. The baby was left in his bedroom with his nanny; they could all hear him wailing and her trying to shush him with a lullaby. Alicia and Pepa had been waiting for some time out on the balcony. The sun was intense. In the small space, their parasols kept bumping.
For Pepa, the thought of seeing these foreigners fêted as her own papá and mamá had been was bringing back heart-wrenching memories. And she was already in a testy mood because a promiscuous number of Mexican society had been invited to watch the fireworks from the flat-roof of the Imperial Palace this evening, however, not a one of her family had been included. The guest list must have been concocted by General and Madame Almonte and their ilk—that lowest class of parvenus and flimflam artists.
They could hear the drums, but the parade did not seem to be coming any closer. Alicia said, closing her parasol with a snap, “What a bother! Oh, let’s go inside.”
“Yes, let’s,” Pepa said, and she went in first.
Within the week, the shops were inundated with cartes de visite, collectable photographs of the imperial couple. Doña Juliana de Gómez Pedraza, the Iturbides’ elderly landlady, peered at the most recent photograph through her tortoiseshell lorgnette. This was Doña Juliana’s at-home day, a Tuesday. Handing the carte de visite back to its owner, Mrs. Yorke, Doña Juliana observed drily, “In life, Maximilian’s beard is redder than one would guess.”
“It hides a weak chin,” said Pepa, taking the carte de visite and with scarcely a glance passing it to Alicia, who was sitting next to her on the sofa, close enough that their elbows touched. Alicia put the magnifying glass on it.
From the opposite sofa, Doña Juliana’s sixteen-year-old niece, Pepita de la Peña, said, “I don’t think it’s half so bad, but his teeth—”
“Did you say, ‘his teeth’?” Pepa had to cup her hand to her ear. She looked at Pepita de la Peña incredulously. “Child, you can see that without a glass?”
Mrs. Yorke, a longtime resident whose Spanish was excellent, said, “Pues, it is a very good photograph.”
Pepa gave Mrs. Yorke a withering look. “I have seen much better.”
With the magnifying glass, however, Alicia was examining the other end of things: Maximilian’s shoes. They were different. The toes came to more of a point. She pushed the photograph back into its slot in Mrs. Yorke’s album. There were two cartes de visite to a page, each with a gilded edge. The album itself, of handsomely tooled leather with a brass clasp that might have been inspired by the door of a medieval monastery, was the size and heft of a brick. Alicia turned the page. The cut and quality of their clothing was stunning. Alicia studied the empress’s gown, the pattern of its pleats, the scalloped lace on the cuffs, and the sweep and precise volume of her coiffure. Carlota, the Mexicans were calling her. Just as she, Alice, had so easily, abracadabra, become Alicia.
“Ay, como! Oh, now! I would not go so far as to call Carlota homely,” Doña Juliana was arguing with Mrs. Yorke.
The women nitpicked over another photograph, comparing it to what they had glimpsed when the imperial landau had happened to pass by. Nearly every day the emperor swept down the Calle de San Francisco, nodding and raising his stovepipe hat to enthusiastic cheers. Carlota’s carriage, too, was frequently seen hurtling to and fro; as the new newspaper, the peach-colored La Sociedad, detailed, Her Majesty maintained a heavy schedule of visits to schools and hospitals and orphanages—though, not the orphanage of which Doña Juliana, widow of President Manuel Gómez Pedraza, had long been a patroness. Lesser members of Mexican society had been attended to; but, other than Mrs. Yorke, none of these ladies had yet been invited to one of the tertulias at the Imperial Palace. Resentment and hope, like vinegar and orange juice, make an unappetizing mix. Status hierarchies in Mexico City society, to put it bluntly, were being crudely rearranged by witless foreigners, by General and Madame Almonte, and their cronies. There were all sorts of complete nobodies, who happened, in these first golden weeks, to have the emperor’s ear. But, welcome or unwelcome, adored or disdained, Maximilian and Carlota were a topic of endless fascination. No European royalty had ever before set foot in Mexico. Or Washington—except for the visit of the Prince of Wales, which to Alicia’s inconsolable disappointment had taken place in 1860. She’d had to hear about that in letters that took forever and a century to arrive.
“Wales?” Pepita de la Peña asked. “Where is that?”
Alicia covered her mouth to hide her smile. Pepa said, with arch-backed dignity, “Never mind about Wales, Pepita dear. The Prince of Wales does not live there, it is simply the title of England’s Crown Prince.”
Pepa was a fount of information on royal genealogy. Consanguinity was the rule, she declared. In other words, royalty are all related. Carlota, for example, was Queen Victoria’s first cousin as Carlota’s father, King Leopold of the Belgians, was Victoria’s mother’s brother. And his first wife was the Princess of Wales, but she died in childbirth. After that, the Belgians took him on, on condition that he marry the daughter of King Louis-Philippe of the French, who—
“Now there’s an eggplant patch!” Doña Juliana interjected. She found Pepa’s patronizing her niece annoying; however, after that warning shot, Doña Juliana said nothing more; she sat back and fingered her black lace mantilla.
“Didn’t that king get his head chopped off?” Pepita said.
“No, no,” Pepa corrected Doña Juliana’s little niece. “You confuse the Bourbons with the Orléans. Charlotte’s grandfather, King Louis-Philippe, abdicated in 1848 and subsequently died in exile.”
Pepita said, “Where?”
Pepa said, “In England.”
“So he knew the Prince of Wales.”
“You can be sure.”
Pepita de la Peña, unblemished and long-lashed, had the face of an archangel, at once child-like and womanly, and with a touch (perhaps it was the dimple on her chin) of the masculine. She was exceptionally beautiful, even in consternation. “But . . . What about his queen then, that one who got her head chopped off?”
“No, I tell you, that was a different king—King Louis the Sixteenth, the Revolution, 1789, all that. Carlota’s grandfather, Louis-Philippe, assumed the throne much later, in 1830.”
“Um, is Louis Napoleon Carlota’s uncle then?”
This time, Alicia had to bend forward and cough to hide her laugh.
On many an occasion, Alicia and Pepa had commented to one another about the appalling level of what passed for “education” in Mexico, especially for women. A one like Pepita de la Peña would not know Rome from Ragusa, or the Iliad from Ivanhoe. Her French, though respectable in terms of vocabulary and grammar, came out with the most atrocious accent. Her English? Nonexistent. The same could be said of her dowry. What hope was there for her?
Afterward, when they were back upstairs, and the nanny had handed the baby to his godmother, Alicia said, “Sister, you are so right about the importance of education. I really want—”
Pepa finished the thought: “—the best for our Agustín.”
“Yes.” His mother came around behind his auntie, so that she could kiss his curls. He looked nothing like his auntie, but he did resemble his mother, and, so everyone said, he was strikingly like his paternal grandfather, Agustín I.
As his doting auntie carried him back down the stairs, he said in English, “Goo’ bye”.
“Tootle-oo,” his mother said, wigg
ling her fingers.
With his toy bunny, Mimo, in his hand, the baby waved back.
The winter of 1865 saw the first formal ball in the Imperial Palace, and at last, the Iturbides were invited, or as Alicia’s oldest brother-in-law, Agustín Gerónimo, wryly put it, commanded to appear.
On the appointed evening at the appointed time (for they had been advised that latecomers would be locked out), their buggy moved slowly through the throngs of Indians and gawkers. At the main doors of the palace, French Zouaves armed with rifles and batons pushed the crowd back, away from the descending guests. Above the palace roof, illuminated with alternating red and green lanterns, the Milky Way sparkled in a chilly sky. Beneath their mantones, as they called their embroidered Chinese silk shawls, Alicia and Pepa wore gowns of satin and tulle, not new, alas, but re-fashioned by the best mantua-maker in Mexico City, after the latest patterns imported from Paris. Pepa’s décolletage glittered with one of her mamá’s antique necklaces; Alicia wore her grandmother’s rope of pearls, and earrings, a gift from her husband on the birth of their son, which were also of pearls. They had been advised that the protocol of an imperial ball was both strict and elaborate. Gentlemen had to bow, women to curtsey, one could not speak to a Highness unless spoken to. Alicia had only read about such things. By comparison, a White House levée, with its bumpkin of a president, was a rustic pileup. Oh, that Potomac backwater with its third-rate consular bureaucrats, those were as reed birds to real eagles! As donkeys to a Pasha’s elephant!
