Her three boys go into the army, and of Marguerite she says: "Gretl est vraiment mon ange gardien, ne me quittant jamais, et me soignant, toujours gaie, toujours dévouée."
"Châlons étant à deux heures de Paris, les amis viennent facilement." She gave me news of the Paul Festetics, who had recently been there—"Fanny toujours l'esprit aussi alerte et aussi charmant"; of the De B.'s, to whom my heart goes out, "Très-courageux, mais vous pensez si c'est dur de continuer une route ainsi ravagée"; and for me "Nos chemins se Croiseront-ils jamais à nouveau? It does not look like it, hélas."
July 21st.
This evening, from the hill of Tepeyac, I watched the sun go down into a world of purple shadows rising from the mysterious plain of Anahuac. The valley had been stretched out before us like a chart, the hills in light and shadow. We could name each glistening road leading from the great city, and yet, little by little, one succumbed to the mysteriousness of it all—until the whole spectacle became an inner rather than an outer thing.
No rain except for some silver clouds with strange, fugitive effects, just before sunset, that sifted a diamond-like rain for a few minutes over the face of the plain. No wind, but something like a great, cool breathing was about us.
We passed by the richly tiled Capilla del Pocito (Chapel of the Well), of which he who drinks returns, and went up the romantic old stone stairway leading to another chapel. Half-way up are the celebrated "stone sails of Guadalupe," their origin dateless, the hands that put them up unrecorded. They can be seen for miles about, and near by they have a belle patine, and mosses and bits of cactus and a flower or two grow from them. They commemorate the escape from sea perils of Mexican mariners who had prayed the Virgin of Guadalupe to bring them safely into port. When this had come about, tradition has it that, continuing to believe after they were safe in Vera Cruz, they fulfilled their vow by bringing up on their shoulders the rigging of their ship, afterward encasing it in a covering of stone.
There are hooded, shrine-like resting-places as one goes up the broad, flat steps between the beautiful, high-scalloped wall, often a Via Dolorosa, for a cemetery is on the very top behind the chapel that was built on the spot where Juan Diego gathered the flowers, suddenly springing up to be given as testimony to the unconvinced bishop.
A great wooden cross is in the little atrium, and we found an Indian family sitting about it, eating their supper, wrapped in their colored blankets, doubtless preparing to spend the night "at the foot of the cross." There was once a temple to the Aztec Ceres, "Tonantzin, our Mother," on this same spot.
In the cemetery lies buried the body of Santa Anna, he who led his troops against ours.
There is a continual operative magic, some peculiar proportioning of the subjective and the objective here, with correspondences between the seen and the unseen forever making themselves felt.