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We sent Antonio on with the horses to Cuernavaca, and started by the Diligence early one morning, accompanied by one of our English friends, whom I will call as every-one else did Don Guillermo. It is the regular thing here, as in Spain, to call everybody by his or her Christian name. You may have known Don Antonio or Don Felipe for weeks before you happen to hear their surnames.
However, as we had no special authority from our own commanding general, and as we knew nothing about the terms of the truce, we were permitted to occupy a vacant house outside the guard for the night, with the promise of a guide to put us on the road to Cuernavaca the next morning. Cuernavaca is a town west of Guantla.
After General Huerta saw General Porfirio Diaz off to Europe at Vera Cruz, he returned to the capital and placed himself at the disposition of Don Francisco L. de la Barra, Mexico's new President ad interim. President de la Barra dispatched him with a column of soldiers to Cuernavaca to restore peace.
After his arrival he underwent some annoyance caused by the Audienza, which had exercised the power in his absence, and which had instituted law-suits against him, and he also found himself in conflict with the new civil junta on the subject of military affairs. The Marquis della Valle withdrew himself to Cuernavaca, where he had immense estates, and busied himself with agriculture.
The next day we went into Cuernavaca. After a day's rest at Cuernavaca our party set out again on the journey to the great caves of Mexico. We had proceeded but a few miles when we were stopped, as before, by a guard and notified that the terms of the existing armistice did not permit us to go further in that direction.
Figueroa's men, though they had to cover three times the distance, struck the main body of the rebels first and got badly mussed up in the battle that followed. General Huerta's column did not get away from Cuernavaca until the second day of the fight, and did not reach the battlefield in the extinct crater of Mount Herradura until Figueroa's rurales had been all but routed.
The examiner set out, by easy stages, because he was conveying a woman who had lately become a mother one of his two maidservants, with whom he traveled, whom he had secretly married while in the bay, a little before landing at Vera Cruz; and the said lady died, a few days after leaving Acapulco, and was buried in the town of Cuernavaca.
Colonel Paolino Lamadrid did not live to stand by his sovereign in the last heroic hour of the empire. He was killed early in January, in an unimportant engagement at Cuernavaca, one of Maximilian's favorite residences, situated some fifty miles from Mexico, and which had already fallen into the hands of the Juarists. Colonel Lamadrid was ordered to recapture the town.
So complete was his mental collapse that it was said, and by some believed, that during their residence at Cuernavaca, prior to the departure of the Empress, a subtle poison known to the Indians of that region, and the action of which was through the brain, had been administered to the imperial couple.* * An attempt is said to have been made upon his life in July, 1866.
Military possession was taken of Cuernavaca, fifty miles south of the City of Mexico; of Toluca, nearly as far west, and of Pachuca, a mining town of great importance, some sixty miles to the north-east. Vera Cruz, Jalapa, Orizaba, and Puebla were already in our possession.
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