by C. M. Mayo
Was there any way to unlock this chapel and go inside?
No. The chapels would not be opened to the public until All Souls, the Day of the Dead.
The lettering of the inscription in the plinth was too small to read from this vantage point. From memory, Ignacio Pérez recited his own translation, and with such feeling that it was no puzzle to guess his sympathies.
Agustín de Iturbide, author of national independence. Fellow patriots, cry for him. Passersby, admire him. Here lie the remains of a hero. His soul rests in the bosom of God.
The singing on the other side of the church had ceased. The priest spoke, the voices chanted; they went on, back and forth, like surf.
Did their guide know anything about the Liberator’s descendants?
There was one, a lady.
Doña Alicia de Iturbide?
He was unable to say if that was her Christian name or not. She lived in the Hotel Comonfort, he knew that. And she was stone-deaf and in a wheelchair.
At the Hotel Comonfort, the concierge made Bigelow understand that the lady in residence was not the one he had in mind. But he was in luck, for Doña Alicia had just returned from the United States and she was staying in the hotel across the street. At that hotel, Bigelow ascertained that she was no longer in residence; however, he might find her at home. Her house, a short drive yonder to the head of the Alameda, was the one directly facing El Caballito, the equestrian statue by Tolsá of King Carlos III.
At said destination, he found such a fine-looking house as would not be out of place in the most elegantly modern of Paris’s arrondissements. But Doña Alicia was not to be found here, either. The porter, by means of gesture, brought Bigelow around the corner. Here was a well-weathered door, by its side a small hole from which hung an unremarkable cord made of hemp, knotted at the end. Bigelow pulled it. An eye appeared in the grate above the handle. Scraping sounds (in a moment, he would realize this was of a stool being removed) and then, the door opened to reveal two children, one dark, the other Spanish-looking, both very untidy and neither in the least intelligible. Presently, a servant appeared, as untidy as those children, her braids as greasy-looking as her apron, but she had a smiling face and patient manner, as well as—this was a boon—knowledge of a few words of English.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Doña Alicia estará aquí, si dios quiere, tomorrow.”
“At what time?”
She shook her head in incomprehension. “Sorry I no understand.”
Bigelow scribbled a quick note, that he and his daughter were at the Hotel San Carlos, and he handed over his card. This disappeared into the apron’s pocket and, with what he took to be polite wishes for a pleasant day, the door closed.
The following morning being a Sunday, Bigelow attended the service at the Protestant church. On his return to the hotel, in the lobby, he found Grace with Madame de Iturbide.
From the sofa by the window, she floated up to greet him—breathlessly— “Mr. Bigelow!”
The years telescoped to an instant. He would have recognized her anywhere: her crown of fine, fair hair, apple chin (perhaps a little bit plumper). He took her hand in both of his. For a long moment—so long that Grace began to shift in her seat—neither let go.
“What a pleasure, what a pleasure,” he said, at last taking his chair.
They took a little tea, and then a long lunch. She would have insisted on having them to her house to dine, Madame de Iturbide said, but the main rooms were undergoing renovations. As a widow (alas, Don Angel had died several years ago), she had been inclined to remain in Washington near her family. It was Mexico’s minister of war who had convinced her to bring her son back to Mexico. Her son was a Mexican, the last of his family, and his country needed him. After a year or so at the Colegio Militar, he would be made a captain and an aide-de-camp. Then, they would see.
It took little prompting on Bigelow’s part for the floodgates to open:
Don Porfirio Díaz?
“A journeyman tailor from Oaxaca, Díaz joined the revolt against Maximilian, and he made himself indispensable to President Juárez in such wise that, after Juárez’s death, well . . .” She took a sip of wine. “Díaz came in with nothing and left the office worth more than a million dollars.”
“A million dollars!”
“More than a million dollars.”
And what of the current president, González?
“His wife left him. She owns a millinery shop, the one around the corner from this hotel.” Madame de Iturbide turned to Grace. “Quite nice hats. Though I am sure you can find better in New York.”
She had unending information and opinions about various personages’ marriages. Don Porfirio Díaz had recently married the teenaged daughter of a lawyer by the name of Romero Rubio. “Un mariage de l’ambition,” Madame de Iturbide summed that up, using the French—which reminded Bigelow of General Bazaine.
Hadn’t Bazaine married a very young Mexican señorita?
“Pepita de la Peña.” Madame de Iturbide knew her well. “But that was nothing compared to his first marriage. Oof!” According to Madame de Iturbide, while serving in North Africa, Bazaine purchased a little Spanish girl and her mother from Mogador slave traders. He had the child educated in a French convent and then, when he judged her ready, obliged her to marry him. But she never loved him. While in the Crimea, she took up with some of his brother officers, and when he was sent to Mexico, used that opportunity to carry on with an actor. Bazaine sent for her; but she refused to come. He insisted. She acquiesced, apparently. The night before she was to depart Paris, she gave a really recherché dinner for thirty persons. “The Count of Montholon, France’s minister to Washington, was one of the guests; he told me these facts. After the guests retired, Madame Bazaine took poison.”
Bigelow looked at his daughter; his daughter looked at the clock. Madame de Iturbide, however, blissfully unaware of her effect on her audience, nodded slowly. “Yes, poison.”
“Bazaine,” interjected Bigelow, “was nonetheless highly respected by several of our senior generals.” He was thinking, in particular, of some things General Sheridan had said.
“Grant was here.”
“Ah?”
“He is very unpopular.”
Bigelow would have liked to steer the conversation back to General Bazaine, for he wanted to know more about the second Madame Bazaine, who a few years ago—after Bazaine’s surrender to the Prussians at Metz and subsequent trial and imprisonment for treason—had orchestrated her husband’s escape from the Île Sainte Marguerite, an exploit so audacious, so cunning, so thoroughly romantic, it was as a chapter out of a novel by Dumas, père or fils. Madame de Iturbide, however, was compelled to make him understand that when ex-President U.S. Grant visited recently, the Mexican government put him up at a house and paid all expenses to the fabulous sum of one hundred thousand dollars. A Mexican gentleman gave an entertainment costing some other fabulous sum, and Grant had not troubled to thank anyone.
“Grant’s ingratitude was shocking,” she concluded.
“Hmmm,” said Bigelow. He had his own grudge against Grant, who in 1870 refused an appointment for his son to West Point as these were reserved for sons of “those who had served the Union during the war”—one of the most galling insults he had received in his life, for what, then, had been his years of service in Paris? But this he did not share.
The next afternoon, Bigelow and his daughter called again on Madame de Iturbide. Her house was as she said, in a state of some chaos. The windows had all been thrown open, to air out the smell of glue and turpentine. The drawing room featured new sofas and an expensive-looking piano, and many bookshelves, their moldings painted a slick-looking asparagus green, but all stood empty—a disappointment, as there were few things he relished more than perusing the libraries of others. In the dining room, the furniture covered by bedsheets, the walls had been only partially papered. The paper appeared to be Oriental in theme. Great curls of it lay on the floor in a
corner.
The servant who had answered the door the other day (wearing a cleaner apron but not cleaner hair) brought in a tray of coffee and strawberry pie with whipped cream.
A round of pleasantries. He told Madame de Iturbide about their visit to the Palace of the Inquisition and the Jesuit colleges. Grace went into raptures about a certain horse she had seen in Chapultepec Park. Bigelow and Grace both accepted another slice of pie.
These many years, Bigelow had been harboring a question. He feared it was impertinent, but the opportunity being a singular one, he went ahead and asked it.
“Why, really, did Maximilian want to adopt your child?”
Madame de Iturbide set down her cup of coffee.
“Carlota had no children. The Austrian doctor in their retinue diagnosed a malformation. There was a doctor in New York, Dr. Sims?”
Bigelow shook his head.
“Well, Dr. Sims was summoned to Mexico. But he said he would undertake the journey only for all expenses and thirty thousand dollars.”
“Thirty thousand dollars!”
“In cash, to be paid prior to his departure from New York.” Madame de Iturbide picked up her cup of coffee. She stirred it, twice, and then set it back down.
“Thirty thousand,” Bigelow said encouragingly. “That was a lot more money than it is today.”
“Maximilian did not want to spend it. General Almonte got up an intrigue, that he should apply to the pope for an annulment.”
“An annulment!”
“Oh, yes, and Maximilian would have done it, too.”
She then told Bigelow about the negotiations Carlota initiated with her and her family, the visits, the bouquets, all the pretty promises. For Grace’s benefit Madame de Iturbide recounted the story of her change of heart in the city of Puebla, her frantic return to Mexico City, her appeal to General Ba-zaine, and her arrest by Maximilian’s Palatine Guards.
The scene of her long-ago interview with him in Paris burned bright in Bigelow’s mind: the oak desk, the overstuffed file boxes, the persistent smell of wet umbrellas. Only a month afterward, in December 1866, he had resigned, at last, and the American community in Paris gave him a dinner, such a dinner—he remembers good friends, Dr. Evans and Buffum, the New York Herald correspondent, raising their glasses of champagne . . .
Having given up his post and returned to New York (it turned out, only temporarily), Bigelow followed the news from Mexico—that poor deluded archduke’s decision to fight on with the last shred of his support, the clerical faction. (Had Maximilian lost his gimbals?) Then the siege at Querétaro, Maximilian’s capture, trial and, no one with a Christian sensibility welcomed this, his execution by firing squad. But Bigelow did not know the details of the Iturbides’ story.
Had Madame de Iturbide been in Paris when Carlota came to see Louis Napoleon that summer?
“It was August 1866.” And she told him, word for word, how she had confronted Carlota in the Grand-Hôtel.
“What an extraordinary narrative! Have you written it out?”
“In part.”
“I would very much like to read it.”
She turned away and lifted the coffee pot.
Bigelow pressed, “I do hope you would consider allowing me to read it.” He was an experienced newspaper editor, and, he mentioned, he was writing his own memoirs.
She said, coyly, pouring, “All my papers are packed away in boxes right now.”
She then resumed her story, how she and her husband and elder brother-in-law returned that autumn to New York, where, in the Metropolitan Hotel, her brother-in-law died. He was buried, next to his mother, the empress, in the family vault in Philadelphia’s church of Saint John the Evangelist. Doña Alicia and her husband took refuge in her family’s country estate in Washington, in the heights above Georgetown. Nearing Christmas, word came to them that Maximilian had relinquished custody of their boy, and the archbishop of Mexico named a steamer that, in the spring of 1867, en route to Europe, would be stopping at Havana. They raced to Cuba, boarded that steamer, and over the vociferous protests of that scheming sister-in-law, took back their son.
Her son was a topic of endless fascination for Madame de Iturbide. She told many stories about his childhood in Georgetown. Bigelow, bemused, indulged his hostess. He, himself, was blessed with a tribe of offspring. He was inordinately proud of each and every one and could imagine the pride a parent must feel for an only child. And, too, her voice had that cooing quality, that accent unique to the old Maryland families, which she shared with Mrs. Bigelow. That said, Mrs. Bigelow and Madame de Iturbides’ characters, it seemed to him, could not have been more different.
Not until two days later, at a dinner dance at the Mexican foreign minister’s, did Bigelow and Grace first meet the young Iturbide. He wore a beautiful uniform, and all eyes upon him, his adoring mother’s most of all, he danced, youth in the prize of life, with flawless élan.
THE END
THE STORY OF THE STORY OR, AN EPILOGUE BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once upon a time, or, I should say, more years ago than I would like to count, I was invited to a lunch in Mexico City. There in the dining room was an unusually handsome antique portrait of a youth—perhaps English?—cradling a rifle. The scenery included a nopal cactus and, upon a hill in the background, as in a Renaissance portrait . . .
Was that Chapultepec Castle?
Yes, my hostess told me, as our bowl of salad came out in the arms of the muchacha.
And who was the boy?
Agustín de Iturbide y Green, the prince of Mexico.
I had never heard of him. This astonished me. I was recently married to a Mexican, and I considered myself well educated. I realize now that we supposedly well-educated Americans rarely open our minds to the rich complexities of our southern neighbor. In part this is because we are lulled into an illusion that we already “know” Mexico. Our media drench us with ready-made images: the wetback; the bandido and the bullfighter and the mariachi; the narco-trafficker; the corrupt official with his Rolex, his yacht, his weekends in Vegas; the pobres in their sombreros and huaraches; the ubiquitous unibrowed Frida, and those sugar-sand beaches bereft of people other than, perhaps, long-limbed blondes in bikinis.
A prince! This meant an aristocracy, a theater for power: social, political, financial, economic, military. Certainly, revolutions have erupted in opposition to the idea, but it can be said that for many people a monarch and, by extension, the royal family serve as a focal point for the identity and unity of a nation. To most Americans and Mexicans today, this idea is absurd. But as I write these lines, the Belgians still have their king and the United Kingdom its queen.
These days, usually, one can satisfy one’s idle curiosity with an Internet search. Back then, my search yielded nothing.
A few months later, halfway through reading Jasper Ridley’s Maximilian and Juárez, I came upon the chapter “Alice Iturbide.” My surprise at finding my own countrywoman, long ago, at the apex of this Mexican aristocracy— both antagonist and victim, motivated and blinded by who knew what medley of ambition, avarice, love, borrowed patriotism or naçveté—so intrigued me I knew at once I wanted to explore and expand the story into a novel.
Writing a book is like climbing a mountain: one step at a time eventually gets you to the summit, though perhaps, once, twice, or a hundred times, you might have to overnight in heavy weather, or retrace a deadend route and begin anew. In my case, before reaching much of any altitude at all, I fell, to use a Mexican expression, into an eggplant patch.
The eggplant patch was my initial reading of the main works on the period. In these the story of the little prince is either erroneously or so faintly told as to be—well, it wasn’t anything to hang a novel on.
This is surprising, given the impressive quantity of research into the Second Empire, well documented in historiographies, most recently, Mexican historian Erika Pani’s El Segundo lmperio:Pasados de usos múltiples (2004). In addition, the rise and f
all of the Second Empire, Carlota’s descent into madness and Maximilian’s last days and execution, have been told and retold in movies, TV series, documentaries, as well as plays, operas, musicals, epic poems, and novels—but never, apart from a couple of problematic articles, has the story of the little prince been told on its own.
Back to that eggplant patch. Ridley claims that Alice first married Agustín Gerónimo, eldest son of the Emperor Iturbide, and then after his death married the second son, Angel. In the Washington, D.C. Marriage Records I found the marriage of Alice and Angel of June 9, 1855, but never anywhere any evidence for her supposed first marriage to Agustín Gerónimo and in fact, as ample documentation in the Iturbide Family Archives in the Library of Congress shows, the elder bachelor brother traveled with Angel and Alice from Paris to New York, where after many years of ill-health he died in December 1866. (There, for anyone who wants to see them, are the microfiches of bills from New York’s Clarendon Hotel, one Dr. John Met-calfe, and for the conveyance of Agustín Gerónimo’s remains to Philadelphia, where they were interred in the family crypt in Saint John the Evangelist.) As for Angel, according to a privately printed Iturbide family genealogy, he died in Mexico City in 1872.
The best-known work on the Second Empire—and the first based on research into Maximilian’s archive in Austria’s Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, Egon Caesar Conte Corti’s Maximilian und Charlotte—offers what I now believe is an accurate account of the Iturbides’ tangle with Maximilian, but in the sum of a single page.
Maximiliano íntimo: El Emperor Maximiliano y su corte, one of the indispensable eyewitness memoirs, by Maximilian’s secretary, José Luis Blasio, similarly relegates the Iturbides to the briefest of mentions and, further, claims that “the little Agustín, then five years old, was the son of Angel de Iturbide, who had passed away, and an American woman.” Three strikes there: the child was only two and a half years old, Angel was quite alive enough to have affixed his signature to Maximilian’s contract, and—poor Alice! She did not even rate the mention of her name.