Mr. Lloyd Bryce, so cultured and agreeable, has been appointed minister to Holland. With his beautiful wife and their gifts of fortune they will make a representation in a thousand.
Mexico seems to me the best of the Latin-American posts, the most important to the United States, the most interesting, the most accessible. We are lucky to have got it, though I didn't feel so on the night of the 10th of January, when the friendly porter of the Hotel Bristol (in Vienna), as I was coming down-stairs for one of the usual petits soupers, said to me: "So Madame is going to leave us?" When I asked, "Where?" he told me it was Mexico, having seen the Paris Herald before we had! It was like hearing we had been transferred to the moon.
Penn Cresson, secretary at Lima, is passing through, en route for Washington. He says Peru is far; but he brings some very attractive photographs of his abode there, and it all depends, anyway, on what you take to a place yourself—the heart and brain luggage—whether you like it or not.
Yesterday we started to call on Madame Bonilla, whom I had met at the Del Rios', and for whom Mr. Cresson had messages from the British consul-general and his wife in Lima, formerly in Mexico. Madame B. is an Englishwoman, and I had heard much of her great taste and the really good things she has picked up.
When, on going to the address I thought was hers, we got into a hall with a life-size negro in plaster-of-Paris, draped with a pale blue scarf, and holding out a gilt card-receiver, placed near the door, and to whom we almost spoke, I was a bit taken aback. An Indian servant somewhat stealthily showed us into a dull-red dadoed room with a waving, light-blue ceiling, and many enlarged family photographs in black frames hanging against the walls. I saw C.'s interest wane as to the giving of the message, and when, after ten minutes, a large magenta-robed, hastily dressed, startled-looking dark lady appeared, we could only make our excuses. After much courtesy on her part, murmurings of à la disposición de usted, and more excuses from us, we got the address next door, where we found the kind of interior we were expecting, drank the freshest of tea brought in immediately by an accustomed servant, and poured by a charming lady never surprised at five o'clock.
We fingered bits of silver, hearing just how they had been acquired, looked at the marks on the porcelain, admired some gorgeous seventeenth-century strips of brocade, all to the accompaniment of questions about mutual friends and the inexhaustible "Mexican situation." Suum cuique.
August 12th.
Last night, dinner at the Danish Legation, where things are well and carefully done. I again sat next the Acting Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Carbajal y Rosas, a huge man with a black beard, and intellectual in our sense of the word. He talked very interestingly about Mexico and affairs here in general. In regretting certain things, he gave me a quotation from Taine to the effect that it is un pauvre patriotisme que celui qui s'imagine que l'on doit excuser les crimes de son pays, simplement parcequ'on en est un citoyen.
He and President de la Barra are great friends; and he thinks that after this coming electoral term (six years) he should be President again—himself, I suppose, as Minister for Foreign Affairs. Now De la Barra, who is the candidate for the Vice-Presidency of the Catholic party, which is to be reorganized with a modern and republican program, could not be elected, even if he wished. The Madero wave sweeps everything else before it, though De la Barra is filling a very difficult situation with dignity and tact. He is called el Presidente Blanco (the White President), for evident and creditable reasons.
As we sat about the handsome, methodically arranged rooms after dinner they seemed filled not alone with Scandinavian household gods, but with the atmosphere of the north, and as entirely detached from Mexico as a polar bear carried to southern seas on a block of ice. The portrait of Mr. L.'s father, the author, and other portraits of distinguished men of an unrelated race, watched us from the walls. Even the old pieces of silver and the bric-à-brac were but remotely connected with this present existence, and Mr. L.'s glass-doored bookcases were filled with Scandinavian literature. He is à cheval between Mexico City and Havana, but in Havana they live in a hotel, keeping the "Saga" here.