March 7th.
At the Chapultepec reception to-day one felt the tension.
Madero was walking up and down the terrace with his new private secretary, Gonzales Garza, clad in some sort of a dark suit, with a conspicuous peacock-blue vest, doubtless a family offering. His glance was more than usually visionary and introverted, his unacquisitive hands were behind his back; but can Mexico be governed by a well-disposed President from Chapultepec terrace? He has a way of avoiding facts, which, in the end, are sure to hit somebody as the national destinies take their course. One can only hope his sterling honesty will see him safely through the snares that are spread everywhere.
As I talked with him on the sun-flooded terrace above the gorgeous valley, with all Mexican creation at our feet, though he had his usual smile, I noted many wrinkles, as he stood bareheaded, and it was difficult to fix his eye, an honest eye.
The new Minister of the Interior, Flores Magon, took me out to tea. He is a huge, square-faced Zapotec Indian, rather portly—which they rarely are—with straight, black hair, a strong jaw, and observant eyes. The foreigner on the other side of me—whether his tale be true or apocryphal I know not—related that on his last visit to Madero, as he was about to sink into an inviting armchair he was hastily asked not to take it, for at that moment it was occupied by George Washington! As his surprised person was suspended over another and was half-way down, he was waved to still a third, for in the second was sitting Jean Jacques Rousseau! After which, fearful of incommoding other illustrious dead, he remained standing. Si non e Verdi e bene Trovatore.
Madero has a certain natural inclination toward the French, fostered by those years at the Versailles Lycée, without, however, any of their logic or genius for facts, and he often converses vaguely, but admiringly, about the French Revolution. They say he sleeps with Le Contrat Social under his pillow. He has not a single suspicion of the Anglo-Saxon mind, nor of that composite and extremely personal affair we call the national conscience; and still he is supposed to govern his country after our pattern. The whole seemed unrelated to the situation.
In fact, I told Aunt L., as we came away, that I didn't think the loggias and terraces are good for his psychology. You have no need for the firm hand when you are looking out upon a valley swimming in a strange transparency, where the hills seem of purest mother-of-pearl, inevitably leading to golden streets, not black heaps of earth peopled by passionate, starving human beings.
Am now off to the Red Cross. It is temporarily stationed in a beautiful old Spanish house, with a garden, and a large patio and fountain in the middle, and doors opening on to it, in the Calle Alamo, a once fashionable part of town. Mexico was almost the last country to join the Red Cross organization.
March 11th, evening.
At the reception at Chapultepec I found I had, by a curious chance, arranged with Madame Madero to make a novena with her to the Guadalupe shrine. Whatever reliance she may have had on accidental spirits in the past, I now see her having recourse to the one Great Spirit, the Cause of Causes. I don't feel unassailable by the chances of life myself.