The Empress of Farewells: The Story of Charlotte, Empress of Mexico

Delightful and anctedotal. If you're already familiar with the subjects, then you'll enjoy the author's presentation of some heretofore undisclosed "facts" as well as insightful speculations to explain the ill-fated royal couple who claimed Mexican territories as their God-given right. Having read letters of accounts from the ladies of the court and compared them to libraried American minutes of the Congressional attention on the "Mexican Problem" during the Civil War era, the author's focus on the human sides of the royal couple and the cause that brought them together is icing on the cake. Since the revolutionaries of Mexico habitually killed the captive officers and freed the women to wander and make it on their own, once can only imagine what drove the Empress - at one time called the Dove by the Mexicans - to the brink of madness. Read by a warm fireplace...

I suppose I can't legitimately say whether or not EMPRESS OF FAREWELLS was properly researched...because Prince Michael of Greece gives no evidence of his research in any kind of real bibliography. The lack of an index or table of contents is also glaring. Despite tossing about the names of several royal families, he includes no genealogical charts. Finally, while he refers to a photograph of the Empress on pg. 217, describing the severe facial expression seen in most of her photos, not one such representation is included in the book. Which is a great disappointment.Despite these drawbacks, FAREWELLS reads like a fairy-tale (except, of course, for this princess's doomed, insane existence for the last decades of her life). The Emperor Maximilian is an inscrutable character: was he gay? Did he find Charlotte physically unappealing? Because their marriage was never consummated. Charlotte is depicted as intelligent, brave, imperious, and stoic, and her time in Mexico was filled with revolution and intrigue of all kinds. Bottom line, Prince Paul (who may or may not be somehow related to the Empress...I'd know had he provided family trees...) delivers an easily-read biography of a tragic royal character.