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Updated: June 23, 2025
The town of La Goya, with a population of five thousand, is the next place of importance reached. Here are slaughtered as many as fifteen hundred head of cattle a day. Nor far distant from it is the landing-place for the animals, a pretty spot which M. Forgues sketched en passant.
At this moment a bass drum and a clarionet intervene in the clamor with a delicious French melody, "Ah! zut alors si Nadar est malade!" and the company retire to the ball-room to dance, and also, women as well as men, to smoke immense cigars. Yakaguazu, a large square village near Villa Rica, is visited by M. Forgues.
The spoons and the forks, however, are of more modest material, for the former are made of horn and the latter of iron. After a brief siesta M. Forgues and his companion resume their journey toward Villa Rica. Under a shed on the roadside they see a dozen women, all talking at the same time, and engaged in grating manioc-roots in pails of water.
He loves noise, and in proof thereof, after killing two chickens for breakfast with two separate discharges of a dangerous-looking double-barreled rifle dangerous to him who fires it he announces that the meal is ready with a discharge of one of the cannon at the door a noisy proclamation which causes M. Forgues to jump in his seat.
Throughout South America a passion for fire-crackers and fireworks prevails; and as an example of this mania, M. Forgues relates that when the Argentine troops were on their return to Buenos Ayres after the close of the war, great preparations were made by the authorities to greet them on their arrival at three o'clock in the afternoon with a great display of fireworks.
M. Forgues learns that his chargé lives two leagues out of town, and, hugging his exasperating valise which, we may here remark, was delivered safely to the chargé next day he returns in company with the captain to the steamer, where, seated on the deck, he listens with horror to the stories told by a citizen of divers murders committed in the town and vicinity, one of the victims, a French pioneer, having been slain lately at his quinta, or small farm, just on the other side of the river, by the fierce Indians of Gran Chaco, whose camp-fires, about six miles distant, even while they are conversing, light up one-fourth of the horizon in that direction.
Their teacher informs M. Forgues that of the three hundred and sixty-five school-children in his district, three hundred are orphans.
Indeed, M. Forgues remembers to have seen a Guaranian mother, with her little one straddling her hip, endeavoring to quiet the child's cries by placing between its lips the half-chewed end of her cigar. Among the women of this class marriages are rare.
It is the breakfast-hour, and M. Forgues and his companion stop in front of the first house they reach as they enter the village and utter the traditional Ave Maria, thus requesting the hospitality of the owner. When the Paraguayan gives this response to the invocation of the traveler, the latter may consider himself at home; and so is it on this occasion with M. Forgues.
She has her president, and he has his cabinet, who hold their offices under the constitution of the republic; but from the glimpse that M. Forgues has given us of the submissive spirit of these officials, it is clear that they themselves feel that they govern only by the sufferance of their conquerors.
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