Calling cards and firing squads
THE LAST PRINCE OF THE MEXICAN EMPIRE
By C. M. Mayo
418 pp. Unbridled Books $26.95
Reviewed by Jack Shakely
At the dawn of the age of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, the carte de visite was wildly popular. These cheap—and ubiquitous—two-and-a-half by four inch photographs on card stock, now almost forgotten, were printed by the hundreds of millions. People used them as calling cards, and no person of wealth or social status would go visiting without one. They were collected by society’s elite the way boys would collect baseball cards a few generations later. Exotic people, places, and events were brought for the first time before the curious eyes of the civilized world.
The carte de visite is mentioned often in C.M. Mayo’s The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, and for good reason. There may have been nothing more exotic, more bizarre perhaps, than the royal court of the short-lived French puppet empire of Maximilian and Charlotte. And because their Mexican Empire rose and fell at precisely the same time as our own Civil War took place, there is not one American in a hundred thousand who is even vaguely aware it ever existed.
Maximilian’s reign, if you could call it that, the “Thousand-Year Mexican Empire,” lasted less than four years. It began in ennui, ended in a whimper, and made few footprints in between. As the book notes almost as an afterthought, Maximilian winds up in front of a firing squad, which is far less exciting than it sounds, a fate Max could easily have avoided. But he would have had to make a decision, an intellectual task for which he was singularly ill-suited. So he ends up dithering both emotionally and physically from one place to another until Benito Juarez puts him out of his misery.
The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire isn’t really a story of Maximilian, however, nor, curiously, is it a story of the little prince Agustin Iturbides y Green. In fact it isn’t really a story at all, which is both its charm and its downfall.
The Last Prince is a fascinating collection of snapshots—like the cartes de visite—drawn out and described in exquisite fashion by an author whose keen eye for detail and ability to tell us what she sees are occasionally breathtaking. Tableaux after tableaux are rendered to the last fold of black taffeta, the last rustle of tulle. Melons, mangoes, raisin cakes, and bon-bons are piled high in our imaginations. We can see the liveried servants in their green velvet breeches and buckled shoes. Princess Iturbides, the aunt of the little curly-headed heir apparent, standing in her severe gray dress, is described as “militantly pious.” Beautiful.
I was so seduced by the lavish descriptions that I was hundreds of pages deep before I began to realize that many of the characters were simply being picked up, examined in detail, then set aside, as though Mayo was moving on to another carte de visite. The kitchen servant Lupe, so lovingly sketched that we can smell the bacon, taste the natal, gets her twenty pages, then disappears, with one three-paragraph exception, forever. So does the loutish Lieutenant Horst, ignominiously assigned to watch over little Augustin. After a few pages describing a skirmish in Chapultepec Park—bak—he too vanishes from the book. The dashing young cavalryman Baron d’Huarte doesn’t even show up until page 310 and gets dispatched by a bullet in the brain on page 330. The reader is not able to articulate exactly what d’Huarte was doing in this album of cartes de visite in the first place.
Well into the novel, author Mayo sends us a warning, either intended or not, about “The Last Prince”:
General Francois-Achille Bazaine, supreme commander of the French Imperial Forces in Mexico, is no novel reader. He remembers once, years ago, being told about a novel that was fashionable with intellectuals and other pointlessly affected people, which described, over the course of hundreds of pages, a whore’s fall from one of the towers of Notre Dame. How the pins in her hair came loose one by one, her gown went thus-way, and on and on in the most convoluted and microscopic detail. He had permitted his first wife, Marie, to read him a few pages of the opening chapter. He would have traded those ten minutes for an hour of torture.
There is nothing even remotely torturous about reading The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. There are moments of sheer brilliance, passages as well written as any you are likely to find in modern literature. But there is no action, no narrative flow, no fill-in-the-gaps story that make historical novels spring to life. C. M. Mayo is a well-respected travel writer and editor of both English and Spanish. Her short stories have been praised and won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Despite its flashes of genius, however, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire seems an evocative, well-researched collection of cartes de visite that doesn’t quite rise to the level of novel.
Jack Shakely is a Senior Fellow at the Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at
the University of Southern California and author of the historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet.
