ertheless, in all matters of government, always a representative of the highest type of absolutism or imperialism, and in devotion to the Catholic Church an extremist, even almost to the point of fanaticism. The first of these assertions finds illustration in his establishment of a court, with orders of nobility, decorations, and minute ceremonials; the construction and use of an absurd state carriage—modeled after the style of Louis XIV—and still shown in the National Museum; and worse, by the proclamation and execution of an order (which subsequently cost Maximilian his own life), that all republican officers taken prisoners in battle by the imperialists should be summarily executed as bandits; and, second, by his walking barefoot, on a day of pilgrimage, all the way over some two or three miles of dusty, disagreeable road, from the city of Mexico to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
When the attitude and demand of the United States, on the termination of the rebellion, induced the withdrawal of the French forces from Mexico,
rants drawn on the national Treasury in 1865 for sums expended in Vera Cruz, Córdoba, Orizaba, Puebla, and Mexico, for fireworks, illuminations, triumphal arches, etc., amounting in all to one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars; thus proving, at least in a degree, that what were at the time regarded as, and claimed to be, spontaneous manifestations of popular enthusiasm on the part of the Mexican people, were in reality but skillfully arranged devices on the part of the agents of Louis Napoleon.
