by C. M. Mayo
“What do you say, abuelita?” El Mapache grills her for the eleventh time.
Lupe holds the butcher’s knife over her head; it gleams in the candlelight. They are in a shack in back of a barn, beyond the outskirts of the city, up a lonely, muddy trail. No one but a few skinny milk cows knows they are here. Lupe snarls—though her voice is still no bigger than a squeak—“Quit screaming or I’ll cut!”
November 23, 1865
THE CHARM OF HER EXISTENCE
The squeaking wheelis the one thatgets the oil. Yes, and the gears in the Tuileries are grinding too slowly; they want oil. But where, in which cog, to squirt the precious little that he has of it? John Bigelow, the U.S. Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Louis Napoleon, knows himself to be an impatient man, and this, he believes, is his personal cross to bear. Tenacity of purpose: that is the French emperor’s strength, but a brittle one, at least in the instance of this universally unpopular Mexican expedition.
This chill and sluggish late November morning, near waking, Bigelow had dreamt that, with his tin can of oil, he had run up to the gates of the Tuileries and emptied it into a bed of tulips!
Now, at his breakfast table, he pulls at his graying mutton-chop beard, bemused at his own childishness.
“What are you grinning about, old man?” Mrs. Bigelow reaches over the breadbasket for the teapot.
“Hmm, nothing. The preserves?”
“At your elbow.”
“Ah.”
He spreads orange marmalade over his brioche. Across the table, Mrs. Bigelow, a petite, round-faced, and congenitally pleasant woman with a dimple on her chin, steadies her cup on her saucer. Her nut brown hair, combed over her ears, is just beginning to gray.
“Mr. Bigelow?”
“Mrs. Bigelow?” He raises his brioche as he would a flute of champagne.
He is about to tell her his foolish dream, but the children—Grace, Johnny, Jenny—charge in, and the breakfast room is a hubbub of scraping chairs and chatter and forks on plates, Johnny up on his chair shouting, though his mother shushes him, “pass me du jambon! Pass it to me!” Since Poultney’s gone off to school, the little ones seem only more rambunctious. Lisette, their French girl, lowers the squirming Annie into the highchair; Annie, her face a little sun, begins banging her spoon.
Bigelow is facing Johnny and Jenny. The empty chair between them, which no one has the heart to move nor sit in, belonged to Ernst. This is the 126th day since the poor child, only four years old, died of the fever in his brain. His father counts those days like a beggar his dwindling coins, for with each one, the angel’s face grows dimmer in his mind. How cruelly little his father remembers of him. Bigelow is trying, as he does at many odd moments in his days, to conjure a memory of that dear shy child. Ernst would have been sitting here, his mother telling him, elbows off the table, darling, his fingers in the mess of his runny eggs on toast. Mrs. Bigelow interrupts his reverie:
“Are you going to eat your breakfast, Mr. Bigelow, or just moon at it?”
Bang, goes Annie’s spoon. Bang, bang!
Bigelow places his brioche on the plate. “Annie, sweetheart, stop that.”
Mrs. Bigelow reaches across the table and pours him more tea. “Won’t you have an egg?”
Jenny cries, “I want juice, too! Grace took it all!”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
“I’ve got to go.” Bigelow folds his napkin. He kisses his wife and then, going round the table, kisses each child, Grace, Johnny, Jenny on her fat peach of a cheek—and last of all, little Annie, whose cupid’s bow of a mouth is already smeared with chocolate, he kisses on the top of her golden head.
In the foyer Lisette holds his coat open for him. “A bientôt, Monsieur Bigelow,” she says and makes a curtsey he does not notice. He grabs his umbrella and hurls himself out the front door.
From Bigelow’s carriage window, the buildings, swirling in mist, float past like ghosts. How he loved this city once. He used to be fond of quoting Sainte-Beuve, O Paris, c’est chez toi qu’il est doux de vivre—at home with you, life is sweet. Now its streets depress him and especially on days like this one. To see blackened gutters clogged with trash, those pissoirs like standing coffins, he cannot help but sink into morbidly vivid thoughts of Robespierre and guillotines.
To Paris, to this legation, he has given the best years of his career, lobbying against the Confederacy. When the wire came last spring that General Robert E. Lee had finally surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse, he felt as Hercules must have felt after having cleaned the Augean Stables. He took to his bed with the worst grippe of his life, unable to do anything for three days but sip weak broth whilst Mrs. Bigelow read to him from Swedenborg. Only on the third day was he well enough to prop himself on pillows and read his Poor Richard’s Almanac. It took him a month to recover his health, and then in July, on a day so hot that the flowers wilted, and Lisette had to close the shutters against the sun, Ernst died.
And alas, there is one more filth-encrusted stall in this stable: this Mexican imbroglio. He cannot go home, he must shoulder the shovel again. It is November already. When, Sweet Jesus, will it be finished?
French intervention in the Americas, he has made it very clear to the foreign minister, will not be tolerated. Was this not made plain when Washington recalledits minister, Mr. Thomas Corwin, from Mexico? The United States will never recognize an imperial government in Mexico.
“Nonetheless,” Drouyn de Lhuys answered, “you recognized the empire of Iturbide, did you not?”
“That is true,” Bigelow replied. “However, Iturbide was a Mexican, supported by the Mexican army and the Mexican people.” Drouyn de Lhuys seemed to have no parry for that, so Bigelow rammed it in: “Furthermore, Maximilian permits slavery, witness his decree of September 5, forced labor by former slaves on lands colonized by immigrants from the Confederacy, AND—” (Bigelow had to raise his voice to forestall the French minister’s interruption)—“in this Black Decree of October 3, the summary execution of any individual found with a weapon—why, you must agree, sir, these are barbarities against the LAW OF NATIONS!”
“Why do you tell me?” Drouyn de Lhuys examined his fingernails. “What concern is it to France what the government of Mexico decrees? Anymore than—” like a saint engulfed in flames, he rolled his eyes ceilingward—“the decrees of China, or Lapland?”
“Monsieur Drouyn de Lhuys. Does the French Imperial Army have thirty thousand men stationed in Lapland? Has the French Imperial Army backed a new emperor of the Laplanders, shall we say, a younger brother of the king of Poland?”
Drouyn de Lhuys put his thumbs in the pockets of his vest and burst out in loud laughing. “Oof,” he said, “You should be writing novels!”
To think of that scene, the French minister’s arrogance, it makes the bile rise in his throat. Well—Bigelow relaxes his grip on the neck of his umbrella—that’s all there is to it: the United States and France are, à contrecoeur, in a standoff, pistols drawn. Intelligence reports are that the French still have thirty thousand men in Mexico. But in the United States, the same number remain massed at the Río Grande, along with all their artillery, rifles, ammunition, tents, mess wagons, and Lord knows how many hay-munching mules.
Then two weeks ago came tidings of a truly peculiar complication. Seward’s cable from Washington had directed Bigelow to receive Madam de Iturbide, née Alice Green of Georgetown, D.C., who claims that the Archduke Maximilian, soi-disant Emperor of Mexico, has kidnapped her child! Her case revolted him. In sober fact, she had signed away her own child for rank and lucre. But, Seward’s instructions still trembling in his hand, Bigelow had chided himself: Judge not that ye not be judged.
The advice this father gives his own children! To Bigelow, moral snobbery is as offensive as social snobbery. As his wife, who is of the Quaker persuasion, likes to say, You must give everybody one chance!
A light rain has begun falling. Umbrellas bloom al
ong the Champs-Elysées. Madam de Iturbide is expected in his office within the hour. What vulgar class of person might she be? Already Bigelow is steeling himself for the tawdry scene. The gas lamps flicker inside that pastry shop; in its window, a hillock of that red and green bombe mexicaine. Last year, in the more elaborate dinner parties, that was comme ça. No one in Paris would serve that to him. Mrs. Bigelow reported that it is an atrocious concoction sopped through with rum. No, she has not looked well since Ernst died. As soon as this Mexico question has been resolved, he should like to take Mrs. Bigelow and the children home to New York, to their farm at Buttermilk Falls. In the long summer days, he could work on his memoirs, re-read Gibbon and de Toc-queville, this time in the original French. The children could play in the forest, fish, and ride ponies.
Man proposes, God disposes. Patience, Bigelow reminds himself as he steps down from his carriage. He feels the cold drizzle on his face before he raises his umbrella.
He tells himself once again, Patience.
At eleven, just as the clock on his bookcase tings, Madame de Iturbide is ushered in. To his surprise she is dressed most tastefully in dove gray with a black velvet collar. Modest pearl earrings. He rises from behind his desk and comes around to take her gloved hand.
“Oh, I am very much obliged to you, Mr. Bigelow,” she says breathlessly. Does he detect a hint of a Virginia accent?
“Do be seated.”
“Where?”
He thinks, why, she’s frightened as a rabbit. What was she imagining, that he would have her perch on the edge of his desk? “There, Madam. Either one of those chairs will do.”
Her fine fair hair and the way she sits nervously pulling at the fingertips of her gloves, reminds him of a friend of his sister’s, with whom he had once gone strawberrying.
But he returns his attention to his desk. The blotter, the inkpot, his spectacle case: these he aligns with the precision of a surgeon preparing for an operation.
“Yes?” He signals.
She begins in rush, “It is not at all what Maximilian has made it out to be, it is a fraud, you see, it—”
“A fraud?” Bigelow interrupts. He leans back into his chair and makes a tent with his fingers. From across his enormous oak desk, he regards her coolly. “Are they not your and your husband’s signatures on Maximilian’s contract?”
A flush of crimson appears on her forehead. She begins, silently, to weep. “I admit,” she brings out a lace handkerchief, “I had allowed myself to be dazzled, maybe a little, by the prospects held out to my child, but I—I had never imagined that a mother, would be separated from her child in his infancy! And—”
“AND,” Bigelow says, “the indemnity the Iturbide family has been paid?” Like a coon cat in wait for a chipmunk, he stays very still in his chair.
“It has not yet all been paid, but more important, the majority of these assets and pensions had been granted long ago to the Iturbide family and were in arrears. I mean, they were not honored by previous governments.”
“By the Republican government of Benito Juárez.”
“As well as others.”
“But Madam. Pray tell. Why should Maximilian wish to keep your child when you so evidently want him back?”
“Because my son is an Iturbide. Had my father-in-law, the Emperor Iturbide, lived, had his government survived, I mean, you see, my son would be in line for the throne. My son is very popular in Mexico, and he is likely to become more popular when he comes of age, and that is why Maximilian considers him a threat.”
“Your two-year-old babe is a threat to Maximilian?”
“Yes!”
Bigelow closes his eyes, taking this fully in. How ridiculous is the monarchical form of government, he thinks. Out of the age of moated castles and knights in shining armor—bah, the stuff Southerners and women want to read novels about. If they really had a handle on what went on in a European court . . . the interbred mediocrity and sycophancy, the waste, cronyism, despotism, the bald corruption that could make a Boss Tweed blanch!
“But.” Bigelow opens his eyes again. “Tell me, Madam. Exactly. Why did your husband’s family agree to this un—” He was about to say, unnatural intrigue, but he clears his throat. “Arrangement?”
“My sister-in-law is not on good terms with her brothers, she is very ambitious, and has been bribed by the title of princess and a place in Maximilian’s court. My brothers-in-law are here in Paris also, and they and my husband completely support me. Agustín Gerónimo, my husband’s older brother, wrote Maximilian a strong letter of protest.”
“But you and they signed Maximilian’s contract?”
“But not entirely by choice! You see, Maximilian made us to understand that our son could be taken from us by force! Last summer, the order was thrust upon us, with no explanation, to quit Mexico and—”
“Madam.” Bigelow places his hands flat on his desk. He feels a headache coming on. “It would be better, I think, if you were to make a formal statement.” He taps the buzzer on his desk. In an instant his secretary, a stooped young man with the hard-boiled demeanor of a Vermont parson, slides himself onto the chair to Madame de Iturbide’s right.
Madame de Iturbide is still on the edge of her chair, but she speaks now with a voice so sure and clear, it seems to Bigelow as if her throat were lined with polished jade:
“I had sent some of his playthings and a note to the empress commending my son to her protection. I had been promised news every day, but other than a telegram the first night, that he had slept well, nothing. Not one word!” She raises her chin and blinks back tears. “This past summer we were made to understand that our child could be taken from us with or without our consent, and when the invitation to this arrangement was made to us, I never imagined that my son would not have a mother’s care—I had understood that in some years, he would go to Europe for his education. But no sooner had we signed it than we were informed our departure from Mexico was not to be delayed by even one day! We threw together what belongings we could and took the stagecoach to Veracruz, where we were to board a steamship, but when we got to the city of Puebla . . .”
Bigelow waits for her to compose herself.
“I knew,” she said quietly. “I could not continue without my child. I returned to Mexico City in great haste.”
Bigelow keeps one finger over his lips. “Alone?”
“Yes, for my husband and his brothers would have been arrested. I traveled under my maiden name, Miss Alice Green, and in Mexico City I took asylum in the house of my landlady, who is the widow of Gómez Pedraza, a loyal friend of my father in-law.” She pauses here, it seems to Bigelow, for him to take special note of this name.
“Doña Podressa?”
“Exactly. She took me in her carriage to see General Bazaine. He had just received a note from Maximilian, that a solemn contract had been signed and that he should take no notice of my suit. But I pleaded with General Bazaine, I said to him, as a brokenhearted mother, I beg you to write to the emperor again, and enclose my letter to him with your own.”
“General Bazaine agreed?”
“More than that. He sincerely regretted that he did not have the authority to take direct action, but that he would do all in his power to induce Maximilian to give back my child.” She snaps opens her handbag. “Here is a copy of the letter.” She unfolds the letter and hands it across the desk. “It is my own translation from the Spanish.”
Bigelow hooks his spectacles around his ears and begins to read, but not without difficulty, because the handwriting is sharp with pike-like “t”s and cramped, spiked “s”s. He recognizes at once that, naive a creature as she may be, Madame de Iturbide is not a person to be trifled with.
Mexico City, September 27, 1865
Calle de Coliseo Principal No. 11
To His Majesty,
The Emperor of Mexico
Sir:
After my despatch from Mexico the 16th of September, my presence in this city will appear strange
to your Majesty, but a grief that has no bounds, a feeling the most intense known to man, has guided my steps in search of a son who is the charm of my existence.
There is in the life of parents a constant thought, the welfare of their children, and I—poor me—who enjoyed life so much in looking at my child, thought always of his future; his education occupied me as the only mission to be fulfilled by me on earth, and in one of those moments in which I vacillated in regard to the position of my dear Agustín, I came to separate myself from him, thanking your Majesty for keeping in mind the Iturbide family, in which you distinguished very specially my son; but I have wept so over this separation, I have undergone such bitterness during these nine days, that I have no words with which to explain to your Majesty all the magnitude of my trouble. I thought that if I did not see my child, I would lose my mind, and all my family was obliged to take part in that idea, permitting me to return to address the prayer, which I make with a heart full of grief, with a heart that needs a ready consolation; this prayer is to see my child and not to be separated from him in his infancy.
In my dreams as a mother, I never thought that my son should be a prince who would aspire to a crown; my passion was to educate him as a good Mexican, who, brought up with good ideas, might one day become useful to his country; but, very contented with the humble position in which I lived, my happiness knew no limits, and now that your Majesty honors in my child a national memory, am I to separate myself from a child who stands in needs of all my solicitude? What remorse, if I survived this separation, would not the least mishap in the life of my child create in me!
