The Empress Quotes

“Now, she realized it was the voice of a man only capable of loving muses, in love with unconsummated love; a man incapable of loving flesh and bone. At least, not her flesh, or her bones.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“women do what is necessary when it matters.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Constanza no podía creer que”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, Carlota

“she considered Bombelles to be affected, but above all, false; next to him, Judas was a holy man. He looked at people with his head tilted, narrowing his already small eyes, and when he spoke, he kept a forefinger over his mouth, like children do when they lie.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“It doesn’t matter where you come from; what matters is where you go.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“A woman wears many disguises, dear, to defend an idea. To survive. Mine is that of a self-sacrificing wife. There are nuns, there are prostitutes, but we all choose what we want to be under the mask.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“The beauty of the country isn’t important, child, what matters is how stable its foundations are.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“A princess, she told herself, cried without tears.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“How could she have fallen in love with a man with so little character? Where was his courage? His desire to conquer the world? Had they ever been there, or had she imagined them? She tried to remember what had attracted her to this man.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“She was alone. It appeared that would be the constant in her life. Though she was always surrounded by people, she was beginning to recognize the worst loneliness of all: the one felt in company. She had only herself. There was no one else.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“It seemed impossible that a statesman like Maximilian couldn’t see the absurdity of his enterprise. What sane man, noble or otherwise, decides to cross the ocean to govern a land that doesn’t belong to him? Not even animals do that.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“When Sebastian entered the room to add wood to the fire, Max stopped breathing. Then he coughed. And often, at that precise moment, he would remember he had some unfinished business somewhere else. Sebastian then left the room moments later. Carlota, in her most private thoughts, wished that someone would look at her in the way Maximilian looked at Sebastian”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Because Carlota’s sin was to always love in quantities that were too great: a husband unable to love her back, a son she never knew, a country snatched from her, an absent family, a lover lost.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“they embraced in commiseration not only for Carlota’s death but for an entire life wasted.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Salvador left the Convento de las Capuchinas heartbroken. He’d always known that his brother was as straight as an arrow. A man who could stare death in the face unruffled. A man unafraid of dying because he’d mastered the art of living.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Her wounded conscience would never recover from the onslaught. Her soul would drag its chains of guilt and punishment for eternity. That was why she was so supportive of Carlota’s prohibited love: to forgive herself. To give the empress back a little of the life she was stealing from her one sigh at a time.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“With shame and humiliation, the Habsburgs, unable to refute the evidence, declared the marriage between Maximilian and Carlota to be void; the alliance had been doomed from the start.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Carlota never imagined that Leopold II, her Machiavellian brother, was plotting meticulously to declare her marriage void on suspicion of failing to consummate; that way, Carlota’s entire fortune, in the event of mental derangement, would go to her brothers and not her husband. Everything would remain in the house.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“They’d been tricked, manipulated by Napoleon and Eugénie de Montijo, and his idiot of a brother-in-law had believed the Mexicans really wanted an emperor. The Mexicans had had emperors, Aztec ones. If anyone was mad here, it was Maximilian. Philippe’s poor sister was a woman in love with a weakling, nothing more. He mulled it over. And the child? What should they do with it? Without doubt, they should pass it off as a Habsburg. It had been done in every royal house since time immemorial; there was no reason to change now.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“The chance to transcend history. Nobody knew then that, in Mexico, glory and failure were two sides of the same coin that turned perilously.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“To Austria. A man ready to sacrifice himself, like Christ among the thieves on the cross. A man groomed to be a replacement for a throne that wouldn’t come to him by line of descent. A man naïve enough to believe that the hundreds of letters the Mexican notables delivered represented the sentiment of a people, a people publicly recognizing its inability to govern itself, a people out of their senses to the point of absurdity. They needed such a man, and Eugénie knew exactly who that man was.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“an idea of the nation that had been lost.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“There they were, on the other side of the ocean from Mexico, making a final attempt to rescue”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“Though she was always surrounded by people, she was beginning to recognize the worst loneliness of all: the one felt in company. She had only herself. There was no one else.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“is not France that wages war on you. It is the empire. I am with you; you and I are fighting against the empire. You in your country, I in exile. Fight, battle, be terrible, and, if you believe that my name may serve you, make use of it. Aim bullets of freedom at that man’s head. Brave men of Mexico, resist. Victor Hugo”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“eyes,”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress

“The queen leaned back in her chair with sadness, thinking to herself that intelligence was, sure enough, the cousin of pride.”
― Laura Martínez-Belli, The Empress