Bedroom of Empress Carlota
Various European workshops · About 1864 to 1867
The imperial apartments of the Alcázar are laid out in a line along the terrace, and the bedroom of Empress Carlota is their most intimate space. A canopied bed hung with pale silk stands against the wall, beside a dressing table, a writing desk and upholstered chairs in the French taste of the Second Empire. Tall windows open towards the garden and the city. Everything is arranged as if the empress had just stepped out, though the furnishings are a careful reconstruction from pieces that belonged to the castle in the imperial and presidential years.
Carlota, born Charlotte of Belgium, was only twenty four when she arrived in Mexico in 1864, intelligent, ambitious and far more decisive than her husband. She took a strong interest in the castle, oversaw its decoration and governed as regent when Maximilian toured the provinces. Look at the small scale of the rooms compared with the grand public salons, and at the objects that speak of a private routine: prayer books, portraits, needlework. The taste is European through and through, with little concession to Mexican craft.
Her story ended tragically. In 1866, as the French withdrew and the empire crumbled, she sailed to Europe to beg Napoleon the Third and the Pope for help. She suffered a mental breakdown in Rome and never recovered, living in seclusion in Belgian castles for another sixty years while her husband was shot at Querétaro. She died in 1927 at the age of eighty six, the last survivor of the Mexican adventure. This bedroom, quiet and sunlit, is where her Mexican life was briefly happy.
Did You Know? Carlota outlived her husband by sixty years and never learned, according to family tradition, that the empire had ended, continuing to write letters to Maximilian for decades.
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