The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

by C. M. Mayo

  The carpets having been removed for cleaning and repair, their footsteps echo. Pale light from the inner patio splashes the tiles. They walk into the shadow of a massive Venetian chandelier; past the portrait of the Liberator (that ageless Mars, doppelgánger of Murat, a hand on the hilt of his sword, the other forever pointing to his Plan of Iguala), and then, La Prima falling just behind one, into the Iturbide Salon where the small crowd of guests, who are of the third, fourth, and other ranks, await, having been divided by the Master of Ceremonies: gentlemen along the windows; ladies along the opposite wall. There are but two ladies: a banker’s wife and daughter, a creature out of a fairytale and with freckles on her nose. The archbishop. Ambassadors Campbell-Scarlett and von Thun. Ah, Baron Stefan Herzfeld.

  “My good man.”

  “Your Majesty.”

  Herzfeld: one’s long ago aide-de-camp, one of the finest men in the Austrian Navy. As the Mexican Empire’s consul-general in Vienna, Herzfeld had achieved little, but then, with Franz Joseph, it might have been easier to squeeze blood out of a turnip. Brave, loyal, handsome Herzfeld: unlike so many others—Gallotti, one’s consul in Rome; and in fact, so many Mexican expatriates who bethought an empire a fine idea unless they might actually have to set foot in it—Herzfeld was unafraid to come to Mexico.

  The Master of Ceremonies advises that the table is ready; one strides into the dining room, and the orchestra strikes up the National Anthem. (Short a violinist, one observes.)

  The footman who pulls out one’s chair is in green velvet. Is this a third-class lunch? No, one specified second-class, in which case the footmen should be in black, with black stockings. In the centerpiece, the edge of one petal of a Phalaenopsis orchid has browned. And the water goblets: some appear to be as much as ten centimeters closer to the salt cellars from one place to the next. Well, Frau von Kuhacsevich has gone to Europe with the empress; things are bound to slip.

  One turns to La Prima. “And how is the little cousin?”

  “In the garden.”

  One clears one’s throat. Louder: “How is he?”

  “Dr. Semeleder has pronounced him good as new.”

  “No runny noses?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I shall be taking him with me to Cuernavaca tomorrow.”

  “Am I to go as well?”

  “No.” One turns to the banker’s wife. Not the freshest peach on the tree. For the menu—consommé with quail egg, huachinango in garlic-butter sauce, duck à la Périgaux, salad with walnuts and truffles, Tüdos’s pièce de résistence, fruit of Lake Texcoco, cuisses de grenouille—one has no appetite. One is served one’s plate of unbuttered rice and boiled chicken, Dr. Semeleder’s hair shirt for the palate. One pokes the fork tines at the meat. Cardboard would be more appetizing. (One did press Dr. Semeleder, might one have a bit of sauce? Verboten!) It is nearing three o’clock: the dining room, despite the lamps, has turned into a sea of gloom. Thunder cracks overhead. One allows the footman to remove one’s plate. The meal, thank God, is finished, and in record time.

  But no siesta for the weary—back to the office, where Herzfeld, expert navigator, has undertaken to chart a course through the finances. One leaves Herzfeld with his pencils and clacking abacus and escapes to the window. Below a blackened sky, the Plaza Mayor, emptied of people, is awash in rain. Mud bubbles up from the hole for the last of the four new fountains. Ojalá, as they say, God willing, the landscaping will be completed before month’s end. This was one of the last projects for which there was funding. It cheers one to see it proceeding. When one first arrived, this plaza, heart of the nation, was a shadeless stretch of Sahara and this palace, so-called, a fetid hulk (its ground floor had been used as a jail and some of the walls were still covered in graffiti). General Almonte could not have moved heaven and earth in a day, but, man alive, how difficult could it have been to arrange a room or two with cots, clean linen, and washbasins? The emperor of Mexico had had to spend his first night in this palace stretched out on a billiard table! Its empress had had to sleep fully clothed in a chair. As one had remarked to Charlotte, there is a shamelessness in poverty—and poverty is not only material; it is also aesthetic.

  As water makes a desert bloom, so it is with the Teutonic sensibility applied to Mexico.

  It has been gratifying in the extreme to show Herzfeld the multitude of improvements, all fruits of less than two and a half years: this Plaza Mayor; this palace—every room luxuriously appointed; the Museum of Natural History and the National Museum and the National Theater; the Paseo de la Emperatriz; the refurbished zoo, the decor and landscaping in Chapultepec Castle . . . Truly, one has shaped Mexico City into a world-class capital.

  Charlotte’s eyes had a powerful shine. To throw away your magnificent work would be an ungodly sin. Days of glory are to come! Great glory! Hold fast, Max. Have faith!

  Near sunset the sky begins to clear and with it Maximilian’s melancholy. Feeling years younger, he invites Herzfeld up to the flat-roof, which extends the entire length of the palace. The air, moist and breezy, smells metallic. Behind the towers of the cathedral, the rain-washed sky is a parfait of raspberry and mango, to the north, fast-moving shreds of mist.

  “Welcome aboard,” Maximilian says.

  Herzfeld squares his heels. “Thank you, sir!”

  To the southwest, in the coppery distance, a flock of water birds hangs in the sky like a snake. To the east rise the darkening silhouettes of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. As they stroll, Maximilian points out the more prominent domes: the Archbishop’s Palace, the College of San Ildefonso, the Convent of Santa Inés, the Hospital de Jesús where, “Did you know? Cortez’s bones are mortared into the side wall behind the altar.”

  Below, in the Plaza Mayor, a clattering as Sawerthal’s orchestra sets up for the evening’s concert: horns and flutes catch the light. The street that divides the plaza from the forecourt of the cathedral is a patchwork of shining puddles, one large enough to reflect the façade tinged with alpenglow, an image that—as an Indian tameme, carrying a gentleman on his back, sets out across its expanse—wavers and then dissipates.

  Herzfeld has long ago learned to synchronize his pace to Maximilian’s. (Onboard ship, the archduke’s all-weather exercise was one dozen laps from stem to stern.) It might seem, at times, that Maximilian walks quickly, but his pace, in fact, is languid. What gains him ground is the length of his legs. Easily distracted, however, he slows, stops, and more often than not, loses count of the laps.

  Pigeons, unsettled, fly above the Plaza Mayor like some vast unraveling scarf.

  “Over there—” Maximilian points with his cigar out to the west. “That is the Palace of Buenavista, a gem of Neo-classical architecture by Manuel Tolsá. Look sharp, you might see one of its finials.”

  Herzfeld adjusts the focus on his spyglass. “Affirmative.”

  “To give you an idea of things, where we are standing now was the site of Montezuma’s palace, the center of the island city of Tenochtitlán. And that, where you see that finial, was the shore, where one of the causeways went out over the lake.”

  “The Indian Venice.”

  “The Egypt of the Americas.” The sky’s colors have deepened into the fieriest reds: ox blood and pomegranate. “You know, Herzfeld, I sometimes think the Spaniards made a mistake to drain the lake.”

  “It must have been so beautiful, the water reflecting the sky.”

  “You understand me perfectly.”

  At the two men’s approach, sparrows spray into the sky. Suddenly, Maximilian halts. He puts a fist on his hip. “Do you remember Naples? The sunset from the Capodimonte? Until I saw these Mexican sunsets, I would have said that sunset was the most ravishing on earth.”

  “Yes, this—”

  “Or,” Maximilian interrupts, “the sunset from the Kasbah of Algiers, do you think?”

  “Do I think, sir?”

  “Yes, what do you think, Herzfeld, after these Mexican sunsets, which was the most sublime on ea
rth, the sunset from the Capodimonte or the sunset from the Kasbah of Algiers?”

  “I would have to say, neither. For me, Funchal.”

  Maximilian looks at Herzfeld with utter incredulity. “Funchal?”

  “Funchal, sir.”

  “Ha!” Maximilian shakes his head, laughing. “Have it your way.”

  The polka music has begun; they stroll on with a lighter step. What did Herzfeld think, would they manage to lay that transatlantic cable? What were the latest developments in Hungary? And Serbia? The situation in Lombardy? What was Herzfeld’s opinion of the Prussians’ so-called “needle-gun”?

  Austria is at war with Prussia—but Austria has an ally in France. It will be a minor conflict, over by summer’s end, certainly before the harvest, didn’t Herzfeld think?

  No, actually, Herzfeld feared it would turn into a widening conflagration. Austria would need him.

  “You would not consider it inadvisable for me to abdicate?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Well, Herzfeld.” Maximilian tried to make a little joke. “You also think my Totonac bowl is decorated with a—”

  “Centipede.”

  “Caterpillar, Herzfeld. That is a caterpillar.”

  The concert concludes with a march by Donizetti: a Niagara of violins. With a spatter of applause, Maximilian and Herzfeld have arrived back at the stairwell. The cavity exudes a mildewy smell. The air has turned colder. In the breeze Maximilian holds onto the brim of his hat.

  “Was that a dozen?”

  “Nine laps, sir.”

  Maximilian drops his cigar and crushes it under his boot heel. “I have decided to take a vacation in Cuernavaca. We’ll kedge over there, only a couple days’ journey. It is the most enchanting village, you will fall in love with it. It is not so low as the hot-lands, nor high as this Altiplano; it sits, therefore, in a bowl of eternal springtime. My gardens are abloom with roses. What’s more, this is the week, the single week of the entire year, when the Diethriaanna, a butterfly of the Nymphalidae family, is most numerous. Crimson and black, and on the underside of the hind wings are the most distinctive markings: two eighty-eights.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “Professor Bilimek prefers to call those markings, ‘the twin infinities.’ You know, Herzfeld, when you see a thing like that you know there is a God.”

  “Indeed there is, sir.”

  Maximilian takes a step down, and Herzfeld moves to follow, but suddenly Maximilian changes his mind. He comes back up onto the roof, and with a deep breath, swiveling his head all around, he takes in the sky. Then, he elbows Herzfeld.

  “Funchal?”

  “Funchal.”

  “My good man!”

  August 20, 1866

  IN THE GRAND-HÔTEL

  It reminds Alicia of Washington, the air so stagnant and dense in the Salon des Dames, this secluded corner of the lobby of the Grand-Hôtel, where, by means of one-way windows, ladies can, with complete privacy, observe the comings and goings—the sort of thing that makes hayseeds go all agog. Madame Almonte’s insistence on this venue for a meeting in itself is peculiar.

  Polish a penny ’til it shines like the sun—it remains apenny. This saying of Mrs. Green’s comes, unkindly, into her daughter’s mind, as still cackling with laughter, Madame Almonte brushes a tear from her cheek.

  Madame Almonte may be wife of an ambassador, and chief lady-of-honor to an empress, but Alicia reflects, her deportment has all the polish of a Kentucky schoolteacher’s. Recounting the perfect mess of the empress’s arrival, Madame Almonte has to set down her glass of orangeade; yet again, she rocks back in her chair, helpless with laughter. Alicia, fanning herself against the heat, gives a tight-lipped smile. She has already heard about the fantastic string of humiliating mix-ups—hasn’t all of Paris? The telegram announcing the empress’s arrival landed at the Mexican legation only shortly before her ship docked at Saint Nazaire. Relations between Maximilian and General Bazaine had so deteriorated that Bazaine was not even informed of the empress’s departure; he read about it in La Sociedad. From San Luis Potosí, where Bazaine was on a tour of inspection, he immediately sent Louis Napoleon a telegram, but as Le Moniteur called the story of the empress’s departure a hoax, there had been no one from Paris, save the Almontes, to receive Her Majesty on the quayside. The mayor of Saint Nazaire could find no such thing as a Mexican tricolor, so—Almonte assured him it was better than a French flag—he ran a Peruvian flag up the pole! The French foreign minister, apprised of the horror show, was livid; Carlota, apoplectic. Madame Almonte’s laughter is not malicious, no: Alicia recognizes a quintessentially Mexican sense of humor. It is, against naked humiliation, the only armor one owns.

  Alicia, however, is not Mexican. Her sense of humor is a mild one. Perhaps this, after all, was the thing she’d given up for Lent. And Lent—over for everyone else ages ago—it just drags on. To hold her child in her arms: the longing inside her is a suspended screech—and a clanging of worries. Everything is turning to ashes! O Moses, won’t Madame Almonte just shut up?

  The ghoulish laughter grows louder: Then, after rushing ahead to Paris to prepare, Madame and General Almonte went to receive Carlota at the Mont-parnasse railway station, while the French—Drouyn de Lhuys, the whole party, all gussied up in their uniforms, the bouquets of flowers, red carpet, court carriages waiting to whisk the empress to the Tuileries—went (she throws out her hands), for reasons known only to themselves, to the Gare d’Orléans! Madame Almonte claps her hands and tosses her head to the side: torrents of laughter. This in the lobby, hushed as a church, of the most fashionable hotel in Paris! The clerk at the theater-booking desk has leaned out over his counter, to have a long-nosed look.

  Alicia sips her orangeade and then flicks open her fan. If she were that clerk, or just another tourist happening through here, she’d take Madame Almonte for a Turkish lunatic. Why does Madame Almonte feel the need to make such a scandal? And wear such appalling shoes? Comfort for her bunions is all she cares about, it seems. And that mantilla, in Paris, what mauvais goút. Well, it’s August; being here at all is mortifying in the extreme when tout le monde has gone to Biarritz, or to shoot in Scotland or Sweden. Mr. Bigelow and family, having more bourgeois tastes, are on an excursion in the Alps. Alicia is not glad about much of anything, but she is glad, grateful, now that she thinks about it, to be absconded behind this one-way mirror and phalanx of palm trees.

  On the other side of the glass, the doorman helps another party in. Alicia had saluted him by name, but he did not recognize her. Has she changed so much since she was resident here? She feels no affection for this place: it is too big, too impersonal, and, moreover, the scene of some of the most cheerless days of her life. At the end of February, when they discovered their pensions were frozen, to economize, the Iturbides removed to an arrondissement so obscure she cannot bring herself to pronounce it. The boardinghouse (for that is, properly, what it is) has walls the color of tobacco spit and a proprietress who looks like the sort of person who would conduct séances. Alicia has been suffering from head-splitting migraines; Angelo, the gout; Agustín Gerónimo’s cough thunders through the paper-thin walls. As for Agustín Cosme, he seems to have fused his shirtsleeves to the zinc of the counter in his tavern. Angelo, breaking protocol, has begun sending entreaties directly to Maximilian, who seems impervious to embarrassment, nor has the “archduke” a shred of compassion, so, why should she? In a curio shop on the Rue des Ecoles, one day, she found a voodoo puppet. She has been sticking hat pins in it.

  It was not until late last spring, when General and Madame Almonte arrived from Mexico, that the Iturbides learned the true gravity of their situation. To Angelo, Almonte spoke plainly. The experiment was finished. He had known in February, with the news that Louis Napoleon had announced his schedule for the withdrawal of his troops. But what about the Mexican Imperial Army? Angelo asked. Almonte put on the face of a man discussing the death of his own child. Oh, there had been money f
or decorations and jewels, for balls and theaters, but not for officers’ salaries. Not rifles, blankets, kettles, boots. The Mexican Imperial Army was broken. What little there was left of it would disperse—he snapped his fingers—like that. Almonte put out one fist. “The Army of the Mexican Republic, here.” He put out the other fist, then opened it, wiggling his fingers. “Caciques here.” Then, he clasped his hands together. “This is how it will be.”

  Being dispatched to France as Mexico’s ambassador, Almonte had as much as won the lottery, for he would not be in Mexico in the end, when the Juaristas would want the satisfaction of having him shot. Of course, Maximilian wanted Almonte out of Mexico because he considered him a rival. That had been Maximilian’s great mistake, Almonte told Angelo, to have kept him at arm’s distance, bestowing upon him honors but not power, inviting him to dinners, to balls, every glittering reception, but listening more to the orchestra than to his advice. Maximilian should have trusted Almonte (here he thumped himself on the chest). Why, why did Maximilian put foreigners such as that Belgian Monsieur Eloin, Father Fischer, and the French, first? This was Mexico! Foreigners might be better educated, they might have the fancy manners, but did they understand Mexico? Not even Bazaine, sharp as a fox about guerrilla warfare, understood Mexico—no, not in the gut.

  Yes, Almonte admitted to Angelo, on his way to Paris he had stopped on the island of Saint Thomas to meet with Santa Anna—a meal and a smoke with an old comrade-at-arms. Santa Anna had trouble walking; the stump of his leg had become excruciatingly tender. Yes, Santa Anna was trying to get up a coup, but more out of habit than in all seriousness. The old warrior is bored, don’t you see? He cannot raise the capital or the support—the only support that matters—of the United States.

  And Almonte himself?

  The Iturbides had noticed, Almonte had developed a habit of licking the sides of his mouth. It was most unattractive and, behind his back, commented on.

  Madame Almonte confided to Angelo that the general’s abdomen was chronically swollen; his hip joints painfully tender. He was leaving blood in the chamber pot. They expected that Maximilian would set up his court-in-exile at his castle in Trieste. His courtiers’ pensions would have to be paid, well, somebody had to pay them, by Vienna. Madame Almonte had begun studying her guidebook to Trieste.