But then he smiled a trifle; for his recollected joys now came to comfort him, most of them surely for the last time. Of course he would remember Charlotte again and again, right up to the end, but so very many images of her did he possess that few could return at all, let alone more than once. How pretty she appeared in Lombard dress! He had loved to watch her planting flowers in the Alameda; at first she had been so much happier in Mexico than at Miramar, where he preferred not to remember her. So he flew there all alone, hovering like a fly or miniature ghost over the gold and purple bindings in his library, the busts of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Homer, the quill pen over the four-bezeled folio and the inlays of his writing-desk. If only he could always have been a fly! Smiling, he caressed the two silver candlesticks which Fray Soria had lent him. His guards gave him all the tapers he could burn. Once upon a time, he and Charlotte had lit ever so many candles at Miramar. He used to deck four Christmas trees with gifts for the poor children of Trieste, and watch shyly from the window. The flickering flames reminded him of tropical butterflies. He could almost hear the twitterings of his aviary. Now he remembered how he had stood away from the Mexican deputation there on the parquet floor of Miramar; he would have sent them out and returned to the orange seedlings he was propagating in his glasshouse, had it not been for unhappy Charlotte in her snow-white crinolines, and Charlotte in her yellow silk, with the Order of San Carlos glowing on her breast, descending the ballroom stairs in Mexico, even the Liberals applauding her (Miramón still wore epaulettes and a tapering dark vest embroidered with golden ivywork); Charlotte undoing her hair at Cuernavaca — oh, yes, Cuernavaca, with his orchids and birds, and that rose-grown old house, Charlotte weeping again in Cuernavaca, among the fountains and orange trees, and the door in the garden wall through which glided the gardener’s daughter Concepción, with her long blue-black hair outspread on her naked shoulders, while Charlotte signed decrees for him in Chapultepec. Smiling, Concepción pulled her shift over her head. She opened her arms. He was riding beautiful Mexican horses one after the other; he was commanding the Novara, with Trieste’s lovely pastel edifices beneath summer rain-clouds off to starboard, coming home to Miramar, mooring between stone sphinxes at the landing, where even the Italians cheered him and Charlotte awaited, dressed in white, smiling adoringly, gazing down into the clear green sea. Soon they would be in their separate rooms, gazing down the steep mane of treetops at Miramar. He and she, Their Mexican Majesties, were riding in through the arch to accept the fruits of Mexican gratitude. Her white fingers were curling round his elbow as they descended the staircase, he appropriately overtowering her, she comprising a tiny-headed cone of many skirts. But perhaps he had never been so happy as when he had gone botanizing and insect-collecting in Brazil, wearing a white suit and a green-veiled hat. He remembered the butterflies he had captured there, and the trophy-bulbs and saplings he had collected for his gardens at Miramar. What if he had followed his inclinations then, and trekked forever deeper into the Matto Grosso? Charlotte would have been sad, of course. Besides, the oxhide slave-whips employed upon the blacks were abominable; he had prohibited those in his own Empire. For the last time he was welcomed by his hordes of loyal Indians dressed in white, waving fern-garlands; yes, he abolished peonage throughout the Empire; once more Miramón was decorating him with a bronze medal on behalf of the Mexican Army; the Pope received him; Trieste glowed after a summer rain; Concepción opened her thighs; he became Admiral of the Austrian Navy; and in the rising sun he rode down from Chapultepec in his sombrero and grey charro outfit, and on the edge of the road petitioners were humbly waiting; often some young mother with a child in her arms begged him to spare a son or husband from the firing squad, and he was rarely as joyful as when he could oblige her (Bazaine got furious, of course) — but this memory likewise had some present pain attached to it; before its claws could catch him he fled to that time when he was young and voyaged through King Otto’s Greece; there were slave-wenches exposed for auction in the market at Smyrna; that was the first time he had seen so many undressed females in one place, and realized the unbearable attractiveness, actually quite bearable, of sin (it provided particular pleasure to remember it here, because a well-bred Mexicana hides all but her eyes behind her reboso); then he visited Maria Amalia de Gloria, his first and truest love, who had died of consumption during their engagement; but tomorrow’s rifle-barrels were staring at him, round and shining like a jaguar’s eyes. Quickly he remembered the silent golden clocks with blue enamel numbers, the pretty clocks at Miramar; and again and yet again he remembered Concepción in Cuernavaca, eighteen years old, with the blue-black hair.
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