Chapter XIV

Early in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. “By his fortunate mining ventures at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas,” we read, “he made a fortune of forty million pesos.” One of these millions he spent in building a church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at Cuernavaca. This is all I know about Joseph de la Borde, or, as he was called in Mexico, José de la Borda, except that he died in Cuernavaca at the age of seventy-nine and that his portrait--a funny old man in a white wig and black velvet--hangs among the portraits of other dead and eminent gentlemen in an obscure corridor of the National Museum. It might be interesting to learn what became of the remaining thirty-eight millions; but then again it might not. So I haven’t tried to find out. It is scarcely probable, however, that at a later date he expressed himself more notably than he did in the construction of El Jardin Borda.

It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even if it were not one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French passion for formalizing the landscape--for putting Nature into a pretty strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed. No doubt the result pleased him; it surely ought to have. But just as surely it was not the light, bright, definitely graceful result of which his French mind had conceived. It was always a little precious to speak of one thing in terms of another, but nevertheless there is about a perfect French garden something very musical. The Luxembourg garden is musical, so is the garden at Versailles; musical with the kind of music that is as deliberately academic as it is deliberately tuneful. There was every endeavor to make the Jardin Borda perform on a small scale with the same blithe elegance of Versailles and the garden of the Luxembourg; but it was Mexican at heart. Perhaps it foresaw Napoleon III. At any rate, although it tried to be French, it at the last refused.

The situation, the flora, and, absurd as it may sound, the technic of the stone masons who built the architectural features--the walls, the fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds--all combine to give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican, but French only in the same remote manner in which Shakespeare is Shakespeare when Madame Bernhardt, instead of exclaiming, “Go. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once,” liquidly burbles: “Allez, messieurs; allez immédiatement--sans cérémonie!” It hangs precipitously on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad it is not), and the dense, southern trees--mangoes and sapotes and Indian laurel--with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an opaque and somber canopy. They now are not, as they were intended to be, decorative features of the garden, they are the garden itself; one cannot see the trees for the forest. In its impermeable shade there are long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence--arbors of roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play and splash. In fact, all the masonry, and to retain itself on the hillside the place had to be a mass of masonry, is heavy and simple, and except for the arbors there are no longer any flowers. Where in the days of Joseph there no doubt used to be a dazzling carpet of color, there is now only a tangle of coffee trees. But in Cuernavaca when the purple and red and pink of growing things under a pitiless sun become intolerable, the absence of color in the Jardin Borda, except for its dark and soothing green, is well worth frequently paying the twenty-five centavos the present owner charges as an admittance fee.

In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States--finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy--their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph’s garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery that even at the ages of eight and four sometimes used to affect Don Guillermo and me when we were turned loose to play and to pick daisies in the Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda is tiny, but history has strolled in both of them and they both seem to have beautiful, secret sorrows.

I am not like an American woman tourist in Cuernavaca (it was her first week in the country) who informed me that she sat in the hotel all day because she was so tired of seeing the streets full of Mexicans! “You know, we saw a great many Mexicans in Mexico City,” she added in the aggrieved tone of one who thinks it is high time for a procession of Swedes or Australians. But in Mexico, as elsewhere, there are mornings and afternoons when it is good to be out of range of the human voice and alone with trees, a sheet of water however small, and some animals.

Attached to the grounds is a house--a succession of cool rooms on one floor, and in passing the open doors and windows of the long, denuded sala as one begins to descend the main terrace, it is impossible not to remember for a moment that the place was lived in by Maximilian and Carlotta. It is impossible, too, especially if the white roses and jasmine of the arbor are in bloom, not to pay the unfortunate lady and gentleman the tribute of a sentimental pang. In Mexico one often finds oneself thinking of Maximilian and Carlotta and, on the whole, with a kindliness springing, I am sure, chiefly from the facts that they were young and in love. For politically they were but a pair of stupid mistakes. History has been kind to Maximilian--far kinder than he deserved--but standard and respectable history is so timorous of leaving a wrong impression that it often fails to leave any impression at all. History to be interesting and valuable should be recorded by persons of talent and prejudice or by chambermaids who listen at keyholes.

As it is difficult to believe Maximilian a scoundrel, the other belief most open to one in view of his brief career, is that he was a dull, ignorant, and fatuous young man who thought it would prove more diverting to be a Mexican emperor than an Austrian archduke. His portrait, indeed (the famous one on horseback now in the National Palace), expresses just this with unconscious cruelty. History often speaks of him as handsome--an adjective that even the idealized portrait in question quite fails to justify. Without more chin than Maximilian ever had, one can be neither handsome nor a successful emperor. He was amiable and “well disposed,” but his fatuity revealed itself from the first in the mere fact of his being able to see in himself a logical claimant to the throne of Mexico in the far-fetched and absurd reason that led Napoleon III and the Roman Catholic Church to select him. For he was chosen to adorn this precariously fictitious seat because Mexico had formerly been a Spanish possession and the house of which he was a representative had ruled in Spain before the accession of the Bourbons! Napoleon III naturally was not giving away empires to Bourbons, and Maximilian was supposed “to reunite the Mexico of 1863 with the monarchical Mexico of 1821.” To the party of intelligence, progress, and reform there was about the same amount of right and reason in this as the inhabitants of France would find in a sudden demand on my part to be made their chief executive because my name happens to be a French name.

Maximilian “accepted” the crown on two conditions. That he was pathetically ignorant of at least the subject on which he ought to have been best informed is clear from one of them, and that he was dull becomes almost as evident from the other. The first provided that he should be elected to the throne of Mexico by popular vote; and the second, that the Emperor Napoleon should give him armed aid as long as he required it. Now anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of Mexico knows that a popular election there is an impossibility and always has been. No one in Mexico is ever elected by popular vote, or ever really elected at all. It cannot be done at the present time (1908) any more than it could have been when Maximilian and Carlotta were crowned in the cathedral in 1864. The inhabitants of Mexico, incredible as it may sound, speak more than fifty totally different languages and many of them have never learned Spanish. Some of them in fact--the Yaquis in Sonora and the Mayas in Yucatan--do not even recognize the Mexican Government, are still at war with it and are being for this reason rapidly exterminated, although not as rapidly as would be the case if the military exterminators did not receive increased pay while engaged in the congenial pursuit of extermination. When one considers that two years before the proposed taking of the census in 1910, the Government is planning a gradual and elaborate campaign of enlightenment in the hope of allaying the suspicions of the superstitious lower classes and making a more or less accurate census possible, it is clear that not even a political dreamer could seriously consider the feasibility of a genuine popular election. From what I know of many of the inhabitants, from what I have seen of their complete indifference to anything outside of their villages and cornfields, I think it highly probable that many thousands of them tilled their land throughout the entire, futile “reign” altogether unaware of Maximilian’s existence. Maximilian was not elected Emperor of Mexico by popular vote, although before he learned something about his empire, he no doubt thought he had been.

As to the second condition--when Maximilian staked his entire hope of success upon a promise of Napoleon III, who had on various occasions somewhat conspicuously shown himself to be as dangerous an adventurer and as unscrupulous a liar as most of the other members of his offensive family, Maximilian did something that may be recorded as trusting and unfortunate, but that is only adequately described as dull. Fatuous, ignorant, and dull, he not only failed to pull out Napoleon’s chestnuts, he proceeded to fall into the fire. Except just at first, he was not wanted in Mexico even by the clerical party responsible for his being there; for his refusal to abolish the Reform Laws and restore the power of the Church bitterly disappointed the Church without, however, gaining for him adherents among those who had fought so long to establish a republic. Everything he did was preordained to be wrong. He went without a definite policy and was incapable of evolving one after he arrived. His three years in Mexico were unproductive of anything except an enormous debt incurred largely by the silly magnificence of his court, a great deal of bloodshed and his own execution. He died bravely, one always reads, but so do hundreds of other persons every day. Before an audience composed of the entire civilized world, to die bravely ought not to be a particularly difficult feat. As Alphonse Daudet somewhere says of Frenchmen, “They can always be brave if there are enough people looking.” Life was not kind to the young Austrian, but history has been.

And yet, on the sad, silent terraces of the Jardin Borda one always thinks of Maximilian and Carlotta, and pays them the tribute of a sentimental pang.