Page:The rise and fall of the Emperor Maximilian.djvu/225

Rh political necessities may sometimes cast a veil, which however, for both good and bad reasons, is bound to be hereditary in the house of Hapsburg. However this may be, the prince does not even like our language, and he congratulated the Emperor Francis Joseph on having, as much as possible, banished it from his court; he does not like our fashions, and he congratulated the Spanish on not having adopted them; but the features in us which he most of all detests, are our ideas and our character.'

Many of the questions which arose between Maximilian and Marshal Bazaine might have been discussed in a more conciliatory way by friendly conversation than by correspondence; but Maximilian often requested the marshal to come but seldom to the palace at Mexico, as the visits of the French commander-in-chief to the sovereign might (so the emperor fancied) be unfavourably interpreted by the Mexicans. When he was residing at the more secluded palace of Chapultepec, he expressed the contrary wish. This very same rule of conduct is met with in the last letters from Maximilian to his minister of war, dated from the town of Queretaro: he expresses in them all his impatience of the French yoke, and his joy at the cessation of the intervention, to which, nevertheless, he owed his throne. This peculiarity, adopted at the very outset of his reign, was certainly wanting in logic.