Carlota, The Woman Who Ate Roses
Flanders Literature Flanders Literature Flemish Literature Fund Dutch language literature from Belgium Flemish author Flemish illustrator Translator D...
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When I was getting to know my daughter-in-law, she told me that as a child she had very many questions about Belgium, because at primary school she’d been taught about Mama Carlota, who came from there. I felt embarrassed, because I had no idea who she was talking about. Later I vaguely remembered a family tree from the history books: Charlotte, the youngest child of Leopold I. If you look her up on the internet, you learn little more than that she was fleetingly Empress of Mexico, as the spouse of Maximilian, a younger brother of the Austrian emperor, Frans Jozef, and that she was mad. The more I looked into her tragic life, the more angry I became about the male tunnel vision of many of those who have written about her. I decided to tell her story in a novel, as fiction, but in a way that never deviates from the truth.