I enclose letter of the 17th from Aunt L., who has just been to Juchitan, saying that the town looked very battered. The jefe not yet back. Among domestic items she says a large packet of cranberries has arrived; after thirty years of Mexico, it is not quite so commonplace as it sounds, but rather as if a denizen of a Vermont village had received a crate of mangoes.
December 22d, Friday.
N. and I went to call on Monsignore this morning. He is stopping at the Hotel Iturbide. He was out, but I took a look about the imposing patio, three-storied, colonnaded, and pierced with large, beautifully carved doorways and windows. It was started on a magnificent scale for the Emperor Iturbide, who paid the usual Mexican penalty for power at the hands of the usual Mexican patriots before it was finished. 'Tis known that as a hotel it leaves to be desired; the dust of revolutions and ages covers the spacious corridors. There are strange silences when you call for hot water, or any kind of water, for that matter. And you eat somewhere else.
Yesterday another reception at Chapultepec. Madame Madero is much changed from the simple-appearing woman of the Von Hintze dinner. I see she naturally inclines to a somber richness of dress—dark velvets, dull brocades—which I think fit her passionate, ambitious, resolute temperament, though sometimes overpowering to her small physique.
Yesterday she had on a deep-blue brocaded velvet, with some sort of heavy, lusterless fringe, and there was a decided though still discreet gleam of jewels. That air of coming from the provinces, but nice provinces, is somewhat gone.
The President slipped in quietly, later, without the playing of the national hymn. There was quite a musical program. Madame Esmeralda de Grossmann played beautifully on the harp. It appears she has an international reputation. The daughter of —, attired in a very tight-skirted, lemon-colored satin dress, trimmed with swan's-down, one of her pupils, started to play, broke down, was further discomfited and finally routed by irate paternal glances. Angela Madero sings charmingly with natural style, and gave Massenet's "Elégie" delightfully. One is continually interested in the composition of the presidential receptions, which means so much more than appears. Madero's father and mother were there, with various daughters and sons and sons' wives.
The Vice-President, young, tall, dark-skinned, black-eyed, black-mustached, regular of features, without, however, any perceptible color of personality, was accompanied by his wife and a contingent of satellites, moving wherever he moved with the regularity of the heavenly bodies—no intention of revolving alone in the unknown social orbit. The Corps Diplomatique was out in force, and the Protocole, Carmona, Nervo, Pulido, etc., also Don Felix Romero, chief of the Supreme Court, and his wife, Judge and Mrs. Sepulveda of California, naturalized Americans, with a handsome daughter. But beyond these I did not see any of what might be called "pillars of society," or, indeed, anything remotely resembling props to uphold the new order. We presented Monsignor Vay de Vaya, who struck the international note in the pink-and-white-and-gold salon des ambassadeurs, whose spaces were known to those princes of his monarchy, Maximilian and Carlota.
December 23d, evening.
The Christmas tide is flowing full about the Alameda, where the Indians have again stocked their puestos with reminders of the season. We have just come from a little tournée between the rows of booths hung with lanterns of every size and color, the odor of la race cuivrée mingling with the more familiar scent of freshly cut pine-trees. Tiny plaster and terra-cotta groups of the "Three Kings" abound—a white man, a negro, a Mongolian in various fanciful garbings—shone on by the largest of stars, and all sorts of "Holy Families," especially the "Flight into Egypt," where the burro seems to have come into his own.
On all sides were great piles of peanuts, fruits known and unknown, highly colored sweets, heaps upon heaps of fragile potteries, and charming, pliable baskets, brought to the city from mountain fastnesses or distant plains by Indian families afoot.