Last night we dined at the handsome French Legation in the Calle Roma. The minister and his wife are away, and in their absence the chargé d'affaires, De Vaux, is living there with two friends, a Mr. de Vilaine, very au courant with Mexican matters, and who has large mining interests in Taxco and Colima. He showed us some interesting silver ingots from a little mill at Miramar on the Pacific coast, made up after the manner of the early Spaniards.
A young man, D'Aubigny,[1] in business here, completes a pleasant trio, and we had a very agreeable dinner. The retiring Spanish secretary, Romero, just appointed to Teheran, and his Viennese wife were also there. Romero bears testimony to race, and his long and elegant silhouette fitted into the charming rooms most harmoniously; but a tall, distinguished-looking man, whose name I did not get, ought to have been hanging, clad in a ruff and velvet doublet, in a gilt frame among the Velasquez in the Madrid museum.
The Belgian minister, Allart, who has been here during the last several years of Don Porfirio's glory, took me out. The conversation everywhere turns on the political situation, suppositions as to the abdication of Diaz, prophecies as to how and when Madero will arrive, if the city will offer resistance, and each one's little plan of campaign in case of siege.
There is a temporary narrow-gauge railroad running from the arsenal to the Buena Vista station, across the beautiful Paseo, for the expedition of men and munitions if necessary, which Allart told me appeared last March in the night soon after Limantour's return. Nobody seems to know exactly what forces are at the disposition of the Federal government. The newspapers get rich on the situation, however, and certainly it enlivens the dinners.
May 20, 1911.
The Madero forces are in possession of the ports of entry at Juarez and Agua Prieta, and can collect the customs which, as one minister said, would be spent in fancy by all, but in reality by the usual nearest few.
I saw some Mexican suffragettes the other day whom I wish their American sisters could have gazed upon. They were armed with bandoliers full of ammunition crossed over their breasts, and it did look like bullets rather than ballots among the sisterhood here.
N. has photographed the patio and corridor, and I will send you some copies as soon as possible.
Yesterday I called with Mrs. Wilson at the house of Mrs. Nuttall, of philological and archæological fame, who is away. It is the celebrated but ill-omened house[2] that Pedro de Alvarado, Cortés's beloved, hot-blooded, dashing lieutenant, built just after the Conquest, when Coyoacan was the favorite spot of the high-born and high-handed survivors. It has a most artistic façade, pink, with the pink of ages, and decorated with a lovely lozenge-shaped design.
One enters through a great carved wooden door, with an old shrine above it, into a beautiful courtyard with patches of sun and dark corners, and going up a broad flight of outside stairs one finds oneself on a wide Bougainvillea-hung veranda.