Maximilian. In the last grand banquet which took place at Chapultepec, before the fatal expedition to Queretaro—a banquet which proved a very Belshazzar—feast to the Empire—many pieces of this porcelain service were broken. I was presented with some of these curious mementoes of that ghostly festival.
If one-tenth of the furniture, etc., etc., said to have been imported by Maximilian really came over at his expense, I am not surprised at the imperial treasury having been bankrupted so soon. I saw more billiard-tables than would fill the largest hall in New York, each of which was "Max's private table;" every saloon in town has one or more, and most of the private houses indulge in the same costly luxury. I have made it a point to knock the balls around—I seldom make a point in doing so—on all of them, and so have possibly played upon his private table somewhere, though where it may have been, heaven knows. His carriages are equally numerous; everybody who can keep a carriage, at all, has one of them. But in a room in the old convent building where the Aztec relics are deposited, I saw the veritable carriage presented to Maximilian when he was on his way to Mexico, by the imperialists of Milan. It is a very large and cumbersome affair, a load for four horses, though it might be drawn on a very good road by two, and as rich with gold and silver plating, plate-glass, silk and embossed enameled leather as it would be possible to make it. Nevertheless, I confess to no envy for the couple who rode in it. At present it is nominally the property of the Republic, but I think that no one has ever ridden in it since the Empire went down in blood, and it is a useless piece of lumber. President Juarez, who is very plain in all his ways, and
