The Sun.
London, England, 1867-09-07 00:00:00

Maximilian's Charlotte.

In a letter to a contemporary the writer says :
Deeply impressed, as all persons must be, by the
tragic history of the
young Emperor of Mexico and
his wife, I have thought it might interest your
readers to know that which King Leopold of Bel-
gium himself narrated to me with respect to the un-
fortunate Empress,
his daughter, some years ago.
Speaking of her beauty (she was then but a dark
slender child), he said, "I think she will be the
handsomest princess in Europe ; f
happiness.' Then, after a pause, and with the
grave smile so peculiar to
him,
hteh aatdcdoeudl,d
~ bringo u
know I cannot flatter myself my Queen wished to
marry me ; and for myself also I will say nothing;
we both had other views. But every day since our
union has taught me more and more what an ex-
cellent and amiable person she is ; and about our
children she has said many amiable things. It
was her wish that tha tame of Charlotte should
be given to our daughter. She said, ' I know your
heart was given to Princess Charlotte of England ;
it is a love with many sad and touching memories
attached to it. I would like that our child also
should bear that name of Charlotte ; and I pray
have nothing of the destiny of her
except your affection.' "
whose Caro
King Leopold has been spared seeing the fatal
dslnieammeayit
was
termination of his daughter's destiny, and the result
of that enterprise in Mexico, which, with his usual
sagacity, he energetically opposed and strongly dis-
approved. But the luckless name has once more
been connected with strange and unexpected misery
in his family.
The present generation of the English public
have been so urged and called upon to lament the
more recent death of the Prince Albert of Saxe-
Coburg that the far deeper tragedy of the death of
Princess Charlotte (when in a single night Prince
Leopold of Saxe-Coburg saw his young wife, his
infant son, and his splendid future vanish like a
dream before morning, and the whole succession to
the English throne change as by some stroke of
magic), has faded out of men's memories, being, as
King Leopold himself touchingly expressed it, " too
much forgotten."
There is, indeed, no one left to remind or harp
upon that string of a Royal sorrow ; nor did the
man who had that sorrow to bear speak much of it
to any one. But, among the rare allusions made by
him to the past—when his first love was laid in the
grave in the bloom of her youth, with the baby
heir by her side who should have been King of
England—was the anecdote I have related of his
Queen's desire that her child should be called by his
first wife's name. That fair and amiable Queen of
the Belgians is long since dead, and the wisest of
European monarchs, King Leopold, has also de-
parted from this changeful world, without seeing
the tragedy played out which so fulfils the descrip-
tion given iu Byran's dream of the two lives—

"The one
"To end in madness; both in misery !"
Let us pray that the day may yet dawn which
may restore peace and intelligence to the mind,
though it cannot remove sorrow from the heart, of
Maximilian's widowed Charlotte—the namesake of
that Charlotte so lamented among us only a gene-
ration ago, but now too much forgotten.