Over a thousand Belgians braved a raging blizzard in Brussels last week, trudged on foot four miles behind a coffin draped with the flags of Mexico and Belgium.
Thus they paid homage to a lady great in sadness, Marie Charlotte Amelie Augustine Victoire Clementine Leopoldine, daughter of the late King Leopold I of the Belgians, once Empress of Mexico. Her story: At 17 she was the radiant bride of the Archduke Maximilian whose brother was Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary; at 23 Empress of Mexico, set beside Maximilian upon that throne by the Emperor Napoleon III of the French; at 26 a distracted woman, kneeling before Napoleon III, begging him to deliver her husband from the revolted Mexicans, crying when Napoleon III declared he could do no more: "My Fate is what I deserve! A granddaughter of Louis Philippe should never have trusted herself to a Bonaparte!"
Thereupon she fainted, and, when she recovered was found to have lost her reason so that she did not know her husband was murdered a year later (1867). Mercifully unconscious of his death during the 60 years of her madness (up to her death at 86, last week) she was always expecting the Emperor Maximilian to reurn to her, would sometimes don court regalia in expectation of his coming, and say, "He will come soon. He will come very soon now."
Lady of sadness, Death came to her in a white wintry robe. Eight young officers bore her coffin to the royal crypt in the Laeken Cháteau, near Brussels. Albert, King of the Belgians, and the Royal Family paced behind it slowly to the sad measures of Chopin.