It must be repeated that the common view of the Empress Charlotte as a valiant woman who took matters into her own hands when the Emperor Maximilian was timorous and hesitating cannot stand. She was, in the first place, a vain woman who took purely frivolous views of Imperial responsibilities; in the second place, a woman who lost her mental balance when she discovered that the position for which she had longed had its duties as well as its pleasures, and its perils as well as its privileges. The legend has grown up that she came to Europe to plead for the life of a husband who was in the hands of his enemies, and lost her reason in despair at Napoleon’s decision to leave him to his fate; but that is not the case. At the time when she started for Europe, Maximilian was still free to walk out of Mexico at any moment; and her purpose in coming to Europe was to ask Napoleon for more soldiers to keep him there against the will of the majority of the Mexican people. Moreover, the first signs of insanity had already shown themselves before her embarkation at Puebla, where, no one could imagine why, she woke up the whole of her escort in the middle of the night and insisted upon their all going with her to call upon the Prefect. That assuredly was the action of a woman whose wits were already taking flight through terror! It used to be whispered that her Mexican enemies tried to poison her, and that the drug, though it failed to kill, drove her mad; but that is another story unsupported by any shred of evidence. Charlotte was simply scared; one needs—and one can find—no other explanation. Warnings to which she attached no importance at the time now rang like alarm-bells in her ear. There was the warning of Louis-Philippe’s consort, Queen Marie-Amélie, who was Charlotte’s grandmother. “They will be assassinated,” Marie-Amélie had said, and repeated daily to her little Court, when she heard of her granddaughter’s adventure. There was the warning of the Archduchess Sophia. “Remember, my son,” she had said to Maximilian—forgetting what she had previously said to the Emperor Ferdinand—when bidding him farewell, “one does not descend from a throne except to mount a scaffold.”