by C. M. Mayo
As for the Iturbides, their plan was to remain in Paris for the duration. At some point, Angelo and Alicia hoped to be reunited with their son, in Paris or Havana or New York, and then they could go to Washington, to stay with Mrs. Green at Rosedale. From there, Angelo will petition President Juárez for permission to return to Mexico.
May, June, July: the days of summer had drooped by, each slower, hotter, emptier than the last. And then, in August: this bomb—a crater a hundred miles wide—Carlota was about to land in Paris!
But in those summer months, France, and, in fact, the entire face of the continent, had changed. Austria had been defeated at Sadowa—or, König-grätz, as the Prussians called it. At the cost of thirty-five thousand casualties, Bismarck’s war machine had delivered the German Federation to Prussia— Prussia, bristling with bellicosity—and where, the newspapers went wagging, were thirty thousand of France’s soldiers? Oof! On the far side of an ocean! Louis Napoleon, backed into a corner, had been compelled to announce a withdrawal from Mexico, but the logistics of transporting so many men, horses, and matériel are complex. However urgent, it will take months, and however painful, it will take money to get them all home. A chorus of voices laments, so much treasure, so many lives lost, and all for what purpose? The Austrian archduke has proved himself inept and the Mexicans, unworthy people, unwilling to stand up for themselves. La plus grande pensée du règne—as Louis Napoleon called his Mexican expedition, an intervention energetically promoted by his Eugénie, his Spanish Catholic wife (beholden to Rome)—has degenerated into an unmitigated calamity: military, political, diplomatic, and financial. France has been dishonored, thoroughly undermined. The newspapers are baying: Which bankers, which war contractors, which cronies have fattened their pockets at the citizens’ expense?
For Louis Napoleon, stricken with kidney stones, the subject of Mexico is the last one he can bear to hear about. The ghastly, unbelievable news that the empress of Mexico was on her way to Paris sharpened the agony of his suffering. By the time she had made her way out of the Montparnasse railway station, and in fulminating consternation, checked into the Grand-Hôtel (taking the entire first floor, paid for with the emergency funds for Mexico City’s dike repairs), Louis Napoleon was writhing in his bedsheets, wishing, praying to sweet Jesus he were dead.
But for Alicia de Iturbide, had the miracle she has been begging God to send finally come? Because confronted with the true facts, by herself, in person, surely, Carlota, who will have no reason to keep the baby, will give him back!
Angelo dashed a letter to Maximilian: again, he begged for the return of their child, he reminded that they had not been paid since February, he said, my wife’s health has been failing and, I fear, with no end to her grief, the consequences could be fatal.
General Almonte presented Angelo’s letter to Carlota. She did not acknowledge it. That was two days ago.
“Do not lose heart,” Madame Almonte had counseled Alicia, with a powerful squeeze to her arm.
Extricating herself from Madame Almonte’s clutches, Alicia drew herself up and spoke as the daughter of the naval officer that she was: “I shall not lose heart until the day I die.”
But Madame Almonte was genuinely trying to help. Fortunately, as Monsieur Eloin had been sent on a mission to Vienna, a Mexican in the empress’s retinue, Count del Valle, had taken charge of Her Majesty’s schedule. Madame Almonte had assured Alicia, with yet another vice-like squeeze to her arm, We will get you in. It seemed a solid assurance, for Madame Almonte, resuming her duties as chief lady-of-honor, was now close by Carlota’s side, all day, every day—indeed, Madame Almonte, and the one other lady-in-waiting, Madame del Barrio, accompanied the empress on her visits with Eugénie and her ladies. Count del Valle, however, remained unshakable in his refusal to assign a slot to an Iturbide. The empress was besieged by bankers, merchants, diplomats, supplicants of a thousand stripes; such ungrateful subjects as those Iturbides, he said, were unworthy of their sovereign’s time. General Almonte’s personal intervention achieved nothing but a strange intelligence, that Carlota had a fixed idea that Bazaine instructed the Iturbides to appear in Paris precisely to humiliate her.
“No,” General Almonte had protested to the empress. “The Iturbides are here because His Majesty sent them here. They have been resident in this city since late last year.”
In the empress’s salon, a mirror with a gilded frame stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Carlota, standing near the window, happened to turn and therein she saw that her crinolines—it was no help they were black—were a mess with wrinkles. Mathilde had ironed them, but the clothes had been in a trunk for weeks, and that trunk, stupidly, loaded upside down. Carlota met her own eyes with familiar loathing. Your pissy little problems. Stinking sinner. You deserve to die. She was hearing voices again, louder, sometimes roaring in the core of her brain, though now they subsided to a low hiss. For having just had two cups of coffee, she felt strangely sleepy.
Her Majesty turned back to General Almonte, addressing the space about a foot above his head.
“Conspiracy surrounds us. We are aware—” her eyes fluttered—“of their connivance with Bazaine.”
“No, but—”
“When you visited St Saint Thomas . . .” Her tongue felt thick. “On Saint St Thomas. . . . What. . . . tell me . . . what did you talk over with Santa Anna?”
“Your Majesty, with all due respect, I have already answered that question.”
“You . . . may. . . . leave us . . . now.” With a swish, she turned her back on General Almonte. In the mirror she saw that General Almonte did not walk backward out of the room with the proper respect for his sovereign. He had, for the first time, turned his back on her.
General Almonte was so mortified by Her Majesty’s ingratitude that he fell sick. Perhaps, his abdomen distended, he really was growing a tumor.
And now what? Angelo and Alicia turned to Madame Almonte.
Madame Almonte allowed that, no, Carlota would not be going to Belgium because she was protesting King Leopold II’s halt to the recruiting of volunteers for Mexico. Her Majesty’s relations with her brother, strained by the negotiations over their father’s inheritance, were very bad. Neither was Carlota going to Vienna, because she was protesting Kaiser Franz Joseph’s withholding the Austrian volunteers at the docks at Trieste. Her Majesty’s relations with her brother-in-law were very bad also. Carlota had not shared her intentions, Madame Almonte said, but she guessed that, most likely, once business was concluded in Paris, Her Majesty would go to Rome. Mexico’s consul in Rome, Galloti, had finally found the courage to comply with Maximilian’s summons to Mexico; who knew?
“And Father Fischer?”
“Father Fischer has already departed for Mexico.
“When can I see the empress?”
“My dear,” Madame Almonte soothed, patting Alicia’s hand. “You must have patience.”
Patience! For Alicia, the Almontes were a repository of the most unattractive presumption, grasping naïveté, self-serving meddling, and inflated amour propre; these were a pair of fish far out of water, and if they were now lying prone, exhausted, on the verge of extinction, she had no pity and no patience, for them, for anyone.
Alicia leveled her gaze at the wife of Mexico’s ambassador, as she would at a servant she was about to dismiss. “Carlota can receive me tomorrow, or else.”
“Or else what?”
“I shall confront her in public.”
“Where do you pretend?”
“Where it suits me. What’s more, I shall bring with me, as my witness, Mr. Buffum, the correspondent for the New York Herald.”
You could be arrested.”
“You forget, I have already been arrested.”
Alice’s tone won her no affection from Madame Almonte, however, the latter was eager to do a favor for her family. Don Angel, especially, could be claimed as an old friend from Washington—this when friends were growing scarcer by the day.
&nbs
p; Madame Almonte therefore related Alicia’s dangerous ultimatum not to that complacently arrogant Count del Valle, but to Count Bombelles; not only had he been the head of the Palatine Guard, but he was the most trusted of Maximilian’s camarilla, and, here in Europe, responsible for Her Majesty’s personal security. Consequently, after the empress retired for the evening, Bombelles slipped the appointment book under his jacket. Madame Almonte and Bombelles rendezvoused in the Salon des Dames, this quiet corner of the lobby, secluded from general view by the bank of palm trees and the one-way windows. Bombelles’s breath smelled of beer.
“Let me see it,” said Madame Almonte. Bombelles hesitated; Madame Almonte wrested the appointment book out of his hands. She quickly read through the schedule for Monday, August 20, and seeing a wide-open space at ten o’clock, wrote in, MADAME DE I.
“You are welcome,” Bombelles said coldly as he pulled the book back.
“You should be thanking me”
They exchanged vulpine stares. Then, at the same time, they both huffed.
And so it is that Alicia’s interview with Carlota is today at ten o’clock. With impatient flicks, Alicia goes on fanning herself. She stops, suddenly, and leans over the table for her orangeade. But the sticky-sweet liquid has turned disagreeably warm. On the other side of the one-way window, an extravagantly dressed young woman swans up the stairs.
“Isn’t that Adelina Patti?” says Madame Almonte.
Alicia pushes at the scrap of mint floating upon the surface of her orangeade. “I wouldn’t care if it was.”
“Really? Adelina Patti?”
“She is completely overrated.”
“I know people who would give their right arm to hear her sing.”
“I heard her sing once. I walked out.”
“Really!”
Alicia looks over Madame Almonte’s shoulder, to the clock that stands sentry at the foot of the staircase. Four minutes to the appointed hour. Alicia last saw Carlota when she and Pepa came to retrieve the baby—eleven months ago.
Alicia, barely listening to Madame Almonte’s prattle, jiggles her ankle: three and a half minutes more.
She smacks the fan closed. Two.
And one day, a black, black day, Alicia had driven the point of her manicure scissors through Carlota’s carte de visite—it was the one of the empress in profile, with flowers in her coiffure. Then, because Alicia had ruined it, and she was ashamed, she tore it in two, and then she tore those two pieces into tiny pieces and she threw them all into the stove. I hate you, I hate you, she cried over and over, sobbing into her hands.
One . . .
Madame Almonte says, “I saw Alexandre Dumas the other day.”
Alicia tucks a stray curl behind her ear. She smooths her skirt. “Do I look disarranged?”
Madame Almonte dips her head, the better to spy through the palm fronds (Bombelles has gained the stairs). Distractedly, she offers, “You look lovely as always, dear.”
Alicia pats the side of her head. “My hair?”
“Your hair looks fine.”
Alicia rises and throws back her shoulders. Deep inside, she feels a riptide of strength.
“Go,” Madame Almonte says, giving Alicia an utterly unnecessary nudge.
Not five minutes before Alicia de Iturbide appears in the corridor outside the empress’s reception salon, Frau von Kuhacsevich came upon the empress’s wardrobe maid.
“Ach, Matty! Guess who I just saw down in the lobby having a tête-à-tête?”
“What do you mean?”
“La Almonte and La Iturbide. They were conferring.”
From behind an armload of petticoats, Mathilde Doblinger, her forehead beaded with sweat, simply looked at her.
The Mistress of the Imperial Household lowered her voice. “Matty, they were having a private conversation. I overheard some of it.”
At just this moment the empress’s personal physician rounded the corner. “Grüss Gott!” Young Dr. Bohuslavek bowed deeply to the Mistress of the Imperial Household, kissing her hand before, stiffly, offering Mathilde, a mere maid, a nod—though the doctor’s and the maid’s relationship has developed into one of far greater respect and mutual confidence than Frau von Kuhacsevich has yet intuited. Over the weeks of a difficult journey made more dangerous by haste, Dr. Bohuslavek has been made acutely aware of the multitude of concerns for Charlotte. She is young—younger than himself—and, fragile female, burdened with responsibilities that would make a Bismarck stagger. Insomnia, nail-chewing, lace-tearing, crying jags, poor appetite, disjointed speech, and extended brooding silences: a diagnosis of hysteria is not contraindicated. Upon his own counsel—as a medical doctor, he need consult no one—least of all the patient, as she is the most likely to resist it—Dr. Bohuslavek prescribed a sedative. Mathilde has been dosing the empress’s coffee, two drops per cup.
Frau von Kuhacsevich whispered, “Doctor! Guess who I just now saw in the lobby, tête-à-tête?”
His hat was back on his head. “Dear lady, I beg your pardon, I cannot tarry.”
“I have to go, also.” Mathilde hurried away down the hall.
“Well!” Frau von Kuhacsevich pipped to herself as, with a subtle click, the door behind her unlatched. It was the door, an ornately carved and gilded confection of white and rose pink, to the antechamber of the empress’s reception salon. The door swung in, revealing a patch of flowered carpet, a length of wainscoting, and then a lunette table crowned by an overflowing fruit basket—the morning’s offering from the Tuileries. In a rustle of crinolines and a waft of the most expensive perfume, out came Madame del Barrio, the empress’s other lady-in-waiting—the only one who had accompanied her from Mexico. A generation younger and of a markedly different social provenance than La Almonte, Madame del Barrio, who could pass for French, was dressed in a delphinium blue frock with the same style ruffled sleeves with lilac grosgrain trimmings as the ones Eugénie wore the other day. Neither was her coiffure what she wore in Mexico: comme il faut, combed back close to the ears, with two expertly shaped and shellacked “loaves” rising straight up from the forehead and back over, very like ram’s horns; these tapered, just behind pearl-and-sapphire pendant earrings, not into points, but the flourish of a foursome of sausage-like ringlets.
“Ah, bonjour!” Madame del Barrio continued in French: “I thought I’d heard something.”
Frau von Kuhacsevich, suddenly self-conscious, tugged at her lace cap. “Guess who I saw down in the lobby having a tête-à-tête?” She dropped her voice to scarcely a whisper: “La Almonte and La Iturbide.”
“Ah!” Madame del Barrio covered her mouth with her fingers.
“I overhead some of it.”
Madame del Barrio pulled the door shut behind her. “Pray tell.”
“Come!” Frau von Kuhacsevich hurried Madame del Barrio down the corridor and around two corners and, pushing aside a trolley with the leavings of someone’s breakfast, into the service stairwell. In less time than it would take to bring a cup of coffee to boil, the pair of them piece together a story too scrumptious to question, that La Almonte—in league with General Bazaine, who is, in turn, therefore, in league with Santa Anna, and in receipt of millions of dollars to render the Mexican Empire with the least possible resistance, and has been conspiring with the Iturbides who are conspiring with Bazaine, whose Mexican wife’s family wants Louis Napoleon to abolish the throne and make Mexico a protectorate so that they can all go on enriching themselves by importing dressmaking supplies and whatnot without paying customs duties, has—Frau von Kuhacsevich interrupted—poisoned Count del Valle.
“What!” Madame del Barrio said.
“You did not know he has been indisposed?”
Madame del Barrio’s earrings trembled.
Frau von Kuhacsevich whispered: “A laxative.”
No need to speak a word: both ladies vividly recall Monsieur Langlais’s mysterious demise. Monsieur Langlais, who had been preparing the budget and, in so doing, delving deep into th
e customhouses ledgers, had been seen all around Mexico City and in Cuernacava; then, suddenly, he was dead. It could have been a heart attack, but it could have been, well, it was rumored that a well-known apothecary shop, one very near General Bazaine’s office by the way, had been broken into, and a quantity of strychnine stolen. Carlota herself claimed to have been poisoned in Yucatan. There had been, to date, three attempts on the emperor’s life. Pistols, bombs, knives, snake venom, arsenic—around a throne, anything was possible.
“But,” asked Madame del Barrio, “what has this to do with La Almonte and La Iturbide?”
“Guess who is the empress’s ten o’clock?”
In her astonishment Madame del Barrio does not even cover her mouth. She concludes at once that, with Count del Valle indisposed, it is Bombelles who must be in charge of the empress’s appointments. Bombelles, Madame del Barrio had learned from her first day onboard ship, is an aficionado of late-night drinking, billiards, and dice games, as is Frau von Kuhacsevich’s husband, the Purser of the Imperial Household. These Austrians live in each others’ pockets, as it were, for they have been together, attached to Maximilian’s household, since before Maximilian’s marriage. Madame del Barrio, alas, does not speak German. She switches to Spanish.
“Válgame Dios.”
Frau von Kuhacsevich answers in her unique amalgam of Spanish and Italian, “Debemos de presar nuestras orejas a la parete. We must press our ears to the wall.”
“But it is ten, we must hurry!”
“No, we are exactly where we need to be.” Frau von Kuhacsevich removes her earring, tucks it into her pocket, and places her cheek against the wall. This is somewhat more troublesome a maneuver for Madame del Barrio, however, because of her coiffure.