Charlotte remembered these things, and remembered also the stories she had heard of the savage temper of the Mexicans: Indians and half-breeds who had no bowels of compassion, but were capable of torture as well as murder. Those memories, and the apprehensions roused by them, were so many haunting phantoms; and the news which Charlotte heard when she landed at St. Nazaire, and the circumstances of her reception at Paris, were like a further series of evil omens. At Saint-Nazaire she was told of the catastrophe of Sadowa; and at Saint-Lazare she found no representative of the French Court awaiting her on the platform—an omission not the less painful because it was due to a misunderstanding. There would have been no such misunderstanding if Napoleon had not been indifferent. An Empress whose regard Napoleon valued would not have been left to drive to the Grand Hotel and ask for a bed in that great caravanserai. The Empress Eugénie, hearing of her arrival, hurried to see her at the Grand Hotel, and the two women cried together. General Castelnau, who was in attendance on the Empress, tells us that when she left Charlotte’s apartment her eyes were red. The interview with Napoleon himself followed; but, though he kissed Charlotte’s hand with proper gallantry, he would do nothing for her. He was “gentle but obstinate,” as his mother, Queen Hortense, had always declared him to be. When Charlotte knelt at his feet, sobbing and supplicating, he was moved to kind words, but he would make no promises. The Mexican expedition, he pointed out, had become unpopular in France. It had already cost him too much money and too many men. He must get out of it—as he probably had always meant to do from the hour at which he had inveigled Maximilian and Charlotte into their false position:— “Then we shall abdicate,” said Charlotte, believing that this menace would intimidate the Emperor. “Yes, I suppose you had better abdicate,” was Napoleon’s polite reply. That was all she could get out of him; and she got still less out of his Ministers. One of these, indeed, begged her to grant him permission to retire, “lest your Majesty’s eloquence should induce me to make promises incompatible with my position as a Cabinet Minister.” It was Maximilian’s sentence of death if he still insisted upon obeying his mother’s injunction: never to descend from his throne unless pulled off it to mount a scaffold. Charlotte, in full flight from her terror, hurried to her old home at Miramar; and Miramar was only a halting-place on the road to Rome.