When Maximilian returned to his capital, after a journey of great peril, he ordered the construction of several high-roads, granted lands and privileges to two or three railroad companies, founded a good many schools, and set on foot a Mexican Academy of Sciences.  His own taste for natural history was so great that he gave some foundation for the charge made against him that he would frequently shut himself up in his workroom to stuff birds.  He devoted great attention to improvements in agriculture, and planned a manufacturing city, and a seaport on the Gulf of Mexico which he intended to call Miramar.

His wife was an indefatigable helpmeet.  She wrote all his European correspondence, but resented the interference of the French, and could be curt and energetic when the occasion called for self-assertion.

An American gentleman who saw her at a court-ball at this period thus describes her:  “She was imperial in every look and action.  The dignified and stately step so well suited to her station, and with her perfectly natural, would have seemed affectation in another.  She did not seem remarkably tall, except in comparison with others.  Her voice possessed a refinement peculiar to birth, education, and superior natures.”

But while the emperor and empress were laboring for the improvement of their realm, the Juarists were increasing in strength, and banditti carried on their enterprises with impunity up to the very gates of Mexico.  Day after day the stage was robbed between Mexico and Jalapa.  The Marquis de Radepont, a quiet traveller, saved himself by killing half-a-dozen highwaymen with his revolver; but the Belgian ambassador, on his way to announce to their Imperial Majesties the accession of Leopold II., the brother of Carlotta, was robbed of all his jewelry and money.

In consequence of these disorders the emperor signed, on Oct. 3, 1865, in spite of the remonstrances of Marshal Bazaine, the French general-in-chief in Mexico, an order to the civil and military authorities to treat all armed guerilla bands as brigands, and to apply to them the utmost rigor of martial law.

This was at once interpreted into permission to shoot all prisoners; and three promising young Juarist generals who had fallen into the hands of one of Maximilian’s commanders were shot immediately, leaving behind them pathetic farewell letters to their friends.  Maximilian did not foresee that he was signing his own death-warrant when he put his hand to this act of severity.

Juarez himself, with a body of his followers, had retreated to the frontier, ready to pass over into Texas if the French attacked him.  But the French were too few and too scattered to occupy a vast region of country where every inhabited house was a refuge for their foes.  Moreover, the interest of Napoleon in the empire of Mexico was at an end.  He hated a long war at any time, and was always ready to abandon an enterprise when he could not carry out his projects