The legend has grown up that she came to Europe to plead for the life of a husband who was in the hands of his enemies, and lost her reason in despair at Napoleon’s decision to leave him to his fate; but that is not the case. At the time when she started for Europe, Maximilian was still free to walk out of Mexico at any moment; and her purpose in coming to Europe was to ask Napoleon for more soldiers to keep him there against the will of the majority of the Mexican people. Moreover, the first signs of insanity had already shown themselves before her embarkation at Puebla, where, no one could imagine why, she woke up the whole of her escort in the middle of the night and insisted upon their all going with her to call upon the Prefect. That assuredly was the action of a woman whose wits were already taking flight through terror!
It used to be whispered that her Mexican enemies tried to poison her, and that the drug, though it failed to kill, drove her mad; but that is another story unsupported by any shred of evidence. Charlotte was simply scared; one needs—and one can find—no other explanation. Warnings to which she attached no importance at the time now rang like alarm-bells in her ear. There was the warning of Louis-Philippe’s consort, Queen Marie-Amélie, who was Charlotte’s grandmother. “They will be assassinated,” Marie-Amélie had said, and repeated daily to her little Court, when she heard of her granddaughter’s adventure. There was the warning of the Archduchess Sophia. “Remember, my son,” she had said to Maximilian—forgetting what she had previously said to the Emperor Ferdinand—when bidding him farewell, “one does not descend from a throne except to mount a scaffold.”
Charlotte remembered these things, and remembered also the stories she had heard of the savage temper of the Mexicans: Indians and half-breeds who had no bowels of compassion, but were capable of torture as well as murder. Those memories, and the apprehensions roused by them, were so many haunting phantoms; and the news which Charlotte heard when she landed at St. Nazaire, and the circumstances of her reception at Paris, were like a further series of evil omens. At Saint-Nazaire she was told of the catastrophe of Sadowa; and at Saint-Lazare she found no representative of the French Court awaiting her on the platform—an omission not the less painful because it was due to a misunderstanding. There would have been no such misunderstanding if Napoleon had not been indifferent. An Empress whose regard Napoleon valued would not have been left to drive to the Grand Hotel and ask for a bed in that great caravanserai.
The Empress Eugénie, hearing of her arrival, hurried to see her at the Grand Hotel, and the two women cried together. General Castelnau, who was in attendance on the Empress, tells us that when she left Charlotte’s apartment her eyes were red. The interview with Napoleon himself followed; but, though he kissed Charlotte’s hand with proper gallantry, he would do nothing for her. He was “gentle but obstinate,” as his mother, Queen Hortense, had always declared him to be. When Charlotte knelt at his feet, sobbing and supplicating, he was moved to kind words, but he would make no promises. The Mexican expedition, he pointed out, had become unpopular in France. It had already cost him too much money and too many men. He must get out of it—as he probably had always meant to do from the hour at which he had inveigled Maximilian and Charlotte into their false position:—
“Then we shall abdicate,” said Charlotte, believing that this menace would intimidate the Emperor.
“Yes, I suppose you had better abdicate,” was Napoleon’s polite reply.
That was all she could get out of him; and she got still less out of his Ministers. One of these, indeed, begged her to grant him permission to retire, “lest your Majesty’s eloquence should induce me to make promises incompatible with my position as a Cabinet Minister.” It was Maximilian’s sentence of death if he still insisted upon obeying his mother’s injunction: never to descend from his throne unless pulled off it to mount a scaffold. Charlotte, in full flight from her terror, hurried to her old home at Miramar; and Miramar was only a halting-place on the road to Rome.
What comfort she expected to find at Rome it might be difficult to say. The Pope, so far as his temporal power went, was the mere creature of Napoleon; even more dependent on the support of Napoleon’s bayonets than Maximilian himself. Perhaps Charlotte expected him to intercede with Napoleon; perhaps she expected him to work a miracle—she was quite mad enough by this time to take the pastoral staff for a magician’s wand. At Miramar, as at Puebla, her proceedings betokened irresponsible frivolity. She paused there to give a fête in celebration of the anniversary of Mexican independence: that independence for which the Mexicans were, at that very hour, fighting against her husband. She told the President of the Trieste Chamber of Commerce that Maximilian might, in the course of the next year, “take a little trip to Europe,” in which case he would not fail to pay a visit to Trieste. Francis Joseph sent his brother, the Archduke Louis Victor, to see her there; but sympathy was all that he could offer. He lay at the proud foot of the Prussian conqueror, and was helpless.
So Charlotte at last went on to Rome, and there the crisis came. There was no lack of ceremony, no lack of consideration. The Pope received her in a manner befitting her rank, and went to her hotel to return her visit. She went to see him again, and then, in a Vatican ante-chamber, broke out into a violence of word and action which permitted of no doubt as to her mental state, though the attempt was made to mask the truth:—
“The words ‘mental alienation,’” wrote an official, “have been pronounced. The truth is that the Empress is in a state of excitement which indicates serious nervous agitation, but does not preclude the exercise of her reasoning faculties. This excitement is specially remarked whenever Mexico and the Mexicans are mentioned in her presence.”