A diplomatic dinner is announced at the Foreign Office for Sunday, the fifth of November.
Elim is waiting to blot bonne maman's letter, so I must close. He is clasping the famous cow Mrs. Townsend gave him two years ago. It has resisted all assaults, all displacements, and is still the best beloved. Three hoofs, a horn, and all its trappings are gone, but it is still a "fine animal." He has just said, "I am so glad on my mama," so you see his English is progressing. We have come from a morning walk in beautiful Chapultepec park with Baroness R. He loves to pick the wild flowers or run over the grass with his butterfly-net. The whole park is a garden of children as well as green things.
Yesterday a considerable portion of the festive Corps Diplomatique, in its European branches, was poisoned with mushrooms at the — Legation. Reports began to come in, disquieting at first; but it became a screaming farce when it was discovered that no one was going to die, except probably the galopina at the aforesaid Legation.
I am sending a post-card to-day of the Hotel del Jardin. As you will see, it is a place for a lot of "local color." Unfortunately they are building over half the old garden with newfangled high constructions. Sir Fairfax Cartwright[18] stopped there ten years ago. With its big rooms opening on the veranda facing the garden, it was, in the old days, the favorite resting-spot of travelers and arriving diplomats, and a vast improvement on the colorless, uncomfortable, "modern" hotels which spring up like mushrooms, and are about as permanent. At the Hotel del Jardin the cozy fashion still prevails of having the partitions between the bedrooms reach up only half-way.
But the old order is certainly changing. In what was once the vast area of the Franciscan church and monastery, built by Fray Pedro de Gante, where schools flourished, and councils took place during several hundred years, now arise great, steel-framed office-buildings on the "American plan."
In the old days the Church of San Francisco was entered from the street of San Juan de Letran, in which the Hotel del Jardin is. The monastery, seminaries, etc., were suppressed, in 1856, by Comonfort. Since then the ground has been steadily cut up into streets and for city buildings, until only the Church of San Francisco itself remains, with its perfectly charming façade, entered immediately from the busy Avenida San Francisco, through a little palm-planted garden with a broad, flagstoned walk. It was once the most important church in Mexico, but now its large spaces are empty of treasures and worshipers, and the strong light coming through the lantern of the dome shines in on bare walls. The tide of worship of our day sets to San Felipe next door. Cortés heard mass in San Francisco, it is said, and there his bones were laid in 1629, the date of the splendid interment of his last descendant, Don Pedro Cortés.
This was the occasion of a gorgeous military and religious procession headed by the Archbishop of Mexico. The coffin containing the Conqueror's body was enveloped in a great black-velvet pall, borne by the judges of the royal tribunal. On either side was a man in a suit of mail. One bore a banner of sable velvet, on which was blazoned the escutcheon of Cortés. The other carried a standard of shining white, with the arms of Castile in gold. The viceroy and the members of his court followed, in splendid array, with an escort of soldiers, their arms reversed and banners trailing, all moving to the beat of muffled drums.
In 1794, the body of Cortés was removed to the hospital of Jesus Nazareno, one of his foundations, in a crystal case with crossbars and rivetings of silver, also in solemn state, under the greatest of the viceroys, Revillagigedo.
In Cortés's most interesting and very human will he had ordered that wherever he might die, his body was to be laid to final rest in the convent at his beloved Coyoacan. His bare bones, however, seem as restless as when clothed with living flesh, and after his death in Spain, when his remains were brought back to Mexico, the authorities placed them first in the Church of San Francisco at Texcoco, where his mother and one of his daughters lay. Now there is no certain record of their resting-place. Does not romance and tragedy hang about it all?
A long letter comes from Marget Oberndorff. Her husband has just been appointed to Norway, and they are thankful to be in Europe for their first ministry.