December 17th
Another reception is to be held at Chapultepec this afternoon. I keep thinking of the four incumbents who have lived and breathed and had their being there since we arrived—Diaz, de la Barra, Madero, and Huerta. With the exception of the first two, each lived in a separate society. The members of one don’t spill over into the other. At Señora Huerta’s reception there was not a face, except those of the chers collègues, that I had ever seen there before—no homogeneity, no esprit de corps. “No me gusta” (“I don’t like it”) seems a sufficient reason for not standing by the administration, whatever it may be.
It is strange how little trace is left of those who have lived there, suffered, and grown great. There is scarcely a Maximilian souvenir or a Diaz recuerdo, not a thing of de la Barra, nor any vestige of Madero, except his planchette and his library, consisting of vegetarian and spiritualistic literature, which confronts Doña Carmen Diaz’s collection of works of piety. Of course there is nothing of Huerta; his shadow has scarcely even darkened it. It was planned in a most extravagant way in 1783 by one of the viceroys, Galvez, who had the beautiful, white-skinned, red-haired bride. It was unoccupied during many revolutionary years, then refitted for Maximilian. Later Diaz used it as his summer residence. Poor Madero lived there during the sixteen months of his incumbency, and I remember him pacing up and down the terrace in that robin-egg-blue vest of his, with a visionary but indestructible smile on his honest face; really mentally, as well as bodily, lifted above all the realities of life.
The “Hill of the Grasshopper” has always had a habitation on it. Montezuma lived there, “king and gentleman,” and many of the old ahuehuetes7 are supposed to be contemporaneous with him. At any rate, the view that entrances my eyes is the same that his looked on. The whole valley stretches out before one, fringed by those lovely mountains. Sunsets, sometimes in golden tones and sometimes in silver, flood the valley, giving the white points of the volcanoes the most dazzling effects of light imaginable; and then there are luminous enchantments, dissolving distances, an intermingling crystalline blue and rose. How can I express its beauty! People say the light is more wonderful in Greece, but this is my “high light.” Even in the afternoons of the rainy season, when the clouds are banked high, there is always an iridescence to the grays—gray with red or blue or yellow or violet in it—never the dull tones of our rain-clouds.