He bore no malice, and he did what he could. The Austrian Minister at Washington was instantly instructed to solicit the intercession of the Government of the United States. As a guarantee that, if Maximilian were spared, he would definitely abandon his ambitions, it was proposed to offer formally to restore him to his old status as a Habsburg, and a family council was convoked for that purpose. One of the Archdukes present raised objections, recalling Maximilian’s ambitions as an Austrian Pretender, and predicting trouble; but Francis Joseph would not listen. “That question,” he said, “is not before us. Our only question is: how to save human life.” But Maximilian’s life was not to be saved. The man who had him in his power was a man whose life he had threatened. Juarez might play with Maximilian as a cat with a mouse, but he would not let go. He used fine phrases about it—“high considerations of justice,” and the like; he most punctiliously accorded Maximilian the benefit of all the forms of law. But the law was against Maximilian; there was no way through that Black Decree which he himself had promulgated. Legally and morally alike, Juarez had as good a title to execute him as he had ever had to execute Juarez; and Juarez stood upon his rights. He laughed—or rather the President of the court-martial laughed on his behalf—at Maximilian’s naïve invocation of “the immunities and privileges which appertain in all circumstances to an Austrian Archduke.” The Indians and half-breeds knew nothing and cared nothing for those privileges and immunities. The Austrian Archduke had pretended to be their Emperor, and had killed some of them and threatened to kill others, and for those offences he should be shot. They shot him in the early morning of June 19th, 1867. For Charlotte, who still had occasional glimmerings of sanity, he was “the good Shepherd who gave his life for the sheep”; but for his Mexican subjects he was merely the foreigner who had presumed to come among them and pretend to be an Emperor. Such was the first of the long series of tragedies which were to punctuate Francis Joseph’s personal life; and there is a moving irony in the fact of its occurrence in the very year of his first great political triumph. One can imagine that the shame of it was an even heavier blow to him than the sorrow. A Habsburg, close to the Habsburg throne, tried like a criminal and shot like a dog by Indians and half-breeds; the head of the House of Habsburg unable to help him, and curtly told, almost without the formula of politeness, that his attempt to interfere was an outrage on “high considerations of justice”! Truly Francis Joseph must have felt in that hour that the curse of Countess Karolyi, called forth because he too had tried his enemies like criminals and shot them like dogs, had not been unavailing. CHAPTER XIX