My Recollections of Maximilian by Marie de la Fere

A free book-- download it here. It's been in rough form on-line for sometime but I've updated the introduction and formatted it as an ebook. (Tip: If you're using an iPad, click on "open in iBooks.")

From the new introduction:

It was the distinguished historian of Mexico, Robert Ryal Miller, who told me about this circa 1910 English language handwritten manuscript long-languishing in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Very generously, as was his way, he wrote to me, knowing that I was doing archival research for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, and recommended that I look it up on my next visit to the Bancroft.

There is always something magical about touching old paper, running one's finger along the faded ink, but it turned out that I had to read "My Recollections of Maximilian" on microfiche-- reeling a tape through a cranky old machine in a dark room. The handwriting appeared to be that of an older person, elegant but cramped, smallish, and set down in a first draft, as if jotted one afternoon on whatever paper might have been handy, and only after being repeatedly pressed by some younger friend. In places, here a word, there a sentence fragment, were impossible to make out. But reading it was well worth the trouble, for, among so many other things, it gave me insight into the Mexican monarchists' passionate feelings for their unlikely emperor,Maximilian von Habsburg.

Younger brother of Austria's Kaiser Franz Josef, Maximilian was shanghaied by pie-in-the-sky promises into serving as the puppet emperor of Louis Napoleon's so-called Mexican Expedition. For Mexicans, this Austrian with the beautiful uniforms and splendid red beard who ended his young life in 1867 before a firing squad in Querétaro, shouting, "Viva México!" is a figure of endless fascination, ridicule, scholarly reconsidersations, gossip, paintings, operas, musicals, movies, and, of course, novels. Adding to the beguilement, his wife, the arrogantly beautiful Carlota—granddaughter of France's King Louis Philippe (the one who abdicated in 1848), daughter of King Leopold of Belgium, sister of Leopold II (of Congo fame), and first cousin to Queen Victoria— went raving mad in the Vatican and spent the rest of her long life—she died in 1927— sequestered in a castle in Belgium. >>READ MORE

Dancing Chiva's Maximiliana, Richard Salvucci on How Google Disrespected Mexican History, and Catherine Clinton on Mary Chestnut

This blog has been quiet lately because I've been preparing the launch this fall of several e-books, including a few works of Maximiliana, and the e-book of my novel in Spanish translation, El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano. (View the complete catalog here and watch my brief video about e-book cover design here.) My original intention with this blog, to share my research on (most) Tuesdays, remains firm, and to be sure, I still have many books and archives and individual documents to comment on-- so be sure to check back again next Tuesday.

This Tuesday, two notes in one. First, I'd like to recommend an article by Professor Richard Salvucci about the unfortunate fate of a very important archive of Mexican newspapers. It's news in itself, but in a broader sense, it illustrates the fragility of digital archives.

Second, a note about Mary Chesnut, author of a diary, first published posthumously in 1905 in a bowlderized version as A Diary from Dixie, and later in expanded and annotated editions, including the Penguin Classics edition introduced by Catherine Clinton. While Mary Chestnut had nothing to do with Mexico, as a writer of historical fiction, I needed to immerse myself in the vocabulary and syntax of the time. Some of my characters, most notably, the American mother of the prince and Mrs Yorke (mother of Sara Yorke Steveson), would have been contemporaries of Mary Chesnut, so hers was one of and certainly the most vivid of several memoirs I read, taking careful note, as might a poet. (As I like to say, a novel is a poem.) I had long planned to make a note about Chesnut's memoir in this blog but historian Catherine Clinton's splendid essay about her, "Queen Bee of the Confederacy," came out recently in the New York Times Opinionator, so, that covered, I warmly recommend that to you... and I'll move on to other subjects. Next post: next Tuesday.