"...Maximilian and Carlota attended private Christmas services in the Chapultepec's imperial chapel rather than the cathedral down upon the Zocalo below, and at a grand family dinner on Christmas Day, he was noted by many - Margarita Clementina, her two elder sons, a number of palace guards - to have been more chipper than they had seen him in quite some time. Grandchildren sat in his lap, and he regaled everyone with stories of the poorer, more agrarian Mexico he and Carlota had found, and then the story of their voyage to the New World, and the half-finished construction of their palace Miramare on the Adriatic, which he had never been able to enjoy. It was a sweet moment but one even Louis Maximilian found strange, for he had never heard his father speak with such yearning for Europe or to "swim below Miramare" so much before.
Maximilian and Carlota went to bed, separately, on the night of December 27th. One of the Emperor's nurses came in to check on him shortly before midnight and found him peacefully sleeping, with a smile on his face. When another attendant came early in the morning, Maximilian of Mexico had expired, still smiling, hands clasped over his chest, his eyes closed and his chin resting gently on his chest, propped up by the pillow. The nurse made the sign of the cross and out of superstition placed her crucifix in his hands, and then called for help: the Emperor was dead, long live the Emperor.
News of Maximilian's passing, aged eighty-six, quickly spread not just throughout the Chapultepec and the other palaces of the royal family, but through Mexico. Church bells rang, and people wept openly in the streets. Vigils erupted across the country, with paintings of the Emperor that looked almost like religious icons a common sight at them. Women wore black well into 1919; churches swelled with attendees praying for the late Emperor's soul, and units of soldiers proactively began riding with a horse that was saddled with two empty boots in the stirrups. Unlike the Imperial family, which had seen his physical decline even as he remained mostly mentally astute, most Mexicans knew Maximilian only as a symbol - a symbol of national strength, of national virility, and of peace and prosperity.
The grieving for Maximilian was thus not just the loss of a man, but the loss of something more than a man - the
Padre de Patria, the father of the country. Maximilian had taken a country beset by civil war and a rotating cast of alternating reformist and reactionary Presidents at one another's throats and modernized it, healed it, made it a co-equal of other powers on the continent. He had ended one conflict and survived another, and Mexico had escaped the Great American War with more dignity than any co-belligerent. In the meantime, the Mexico he left behind was not the Mexico of poverty but rather an increasingly modern one, with bustling cities, factories, railroads, and increasingly aircraft to travel across its vastness. The people of Mexico shuddered to think what their country would be like had he not come along, or if it would even be intact in its current borders what with such rapacious neighbors as those they had.
The funeral would be arranged for late January, but for much of Mexico, all of 1919 was one long funeral, an uncertain hour for what awaited their country, a grim gaze towards the horizon and a future that, after an Emperor who had been on the throne for fifty-six years, so long no Mexican really remembered a Mexico without him, would be strange and unfamiliar to every citizen, in a time and world that through new technologies and ideas was already unrecognizable almost by the year. Mexico's great bridge to the 19th century was at last gone; what loomed beyond, for Mexico at least, remained now in the hands of his son and grandsons.
Maximilian, after all, had done his duty to Mexico and to his family - and with that, with his familiar smile, he had earned his long-awaited and well-deserved rest."
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Maximilian of Mexico
End of Part XI: From These Ashes, Nothing Grows
