December 18th
Just back from a gira in the city. Immense crowds around the Banco Central. This is the clearing-house for all the state banks, and each person waiting outside had state bank-notes to exchange against those more attractive ones of the Banco Nacional.
I see Cardinal Rampolla is dead. I thought of his magnificent appearances in St. Peter’s, that tall and slender form, that proud and beautiful profile, the head held high—a fit frame on which to hang the gorgeous vestments. I remember the disappointment of our various friends when Austria vetoed his election at the last conclave. I wish he might have had it; but now that he has passed through the door I would not call him (nor any one) back. The old Roman days came so vividly to my mind—and many besides Rampolla who are no more.
Elim is sitting by me, writing in two colors all the words he knows—Gott, kuss, bonnemaman, papa, mama. He has just asked “Who handed me down from the clouds when I was born?”
I am giving a luncheon at the Chapultepec restaurant on Friday for Colonel Gage and the Cardens.
The Mexican papers take great pleasure in likening Woodrow Wilson to Napoleon III., with comparisons of the Mexican policy and Sedan!
The reception yesterday did not have the snap and go of the first. We got there about six, going in almost immediately to tea, spread, as usual, in the long gallery. I stood at the table between von Hintze and Hedry, the Austrian chargé.
It seemed to me, as I looked around the table, that each minister had some strange, battered-looking female by him. They proved to be the wives of Cabinet Ministers, who change so fast that it is impossible to keep track of their better halves, produced only on this single occasion. Moheno, however, was able to produce a very pretty wife, smartly dressed, with magnificent pear-shaped emeralds dangling from her white ears, and a most lovely young daughter.
The President was preoccupied and vague, drank no healths, and his frock-coat seemed longer and looser than ever; indeed, the servants had just begun to pour the champagne when, his wine untasted, Huerta gave his arm to Mme. Lefaivre, with a gesture of putting the function behind him, and, the banquet almost untouched, we all filed out behind him. He was evidently terribly bored and thinking of other things. And, anyway, he isn’t the man to conduct things twice in the same way. He stopped as he was leaving the salon and told me he had muchas muy buenas cosas (many good things) to say of N. “Only good things, even in my absence.” With that, he left the festive scene and the affair rather fell to pieces. N. had a dinner at the club for Colonel Gage, who was at the reception in morning coat. He had purposely not brought his uniform, being wary at touching the official note, which might re-echo too loudly in Washington.
I went to the Simons’, who were having a dinner for the captain of the Condé and his staff lieutenant. They were big, good-looking Frenchmen, who had been at the reception in all their glory of gold braid and decorations. Through a motor trip and a punctured tire they had missed the audience arranged for them by their minister with Huerta, and to atone they had gone looking especially official.
Yesterday I went out to see Mother Semple at the American Convent of the Visitation. Until two years ago she had had a large and flourishing school at Tepexpam. There came a Zapatista scare, thirty or forty bandits dancing around the convent one night, shooting off pistols and screaming out ribaldries. Fortunately nothing precious was broken, but the nuns were ruined, as the parents withdrew their little darlings. Now they are trying to get the school together again in a house at Tacubaya, which, though very picturesque, with an old garden and a sunny patio, is not at all suited to the double purpose of community life and school. They have dreams of selling the big property at Tepexpam for a barracks. The government may get the barracks in these days of taking what one sees, but I doubt if the nuns will ever get the money.