THE POLITIC WAX-CHANDLER

A Legend of Mexico

BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA

Caramba!' exclaimed José Jamon de la Ycarregua, of the Calle Santa Isidra in the city of Mexico, wax-chandler. 'Caramba he repeated, pulling off his sombrero, inspecting it, and replacing it on his head with a dissatisfied countenance. 'Cré Caramba! this country of Mexico is going to the Devil!' The prefix cré could not be justified on any grammatical grounds, but it added force to the expletive which followed.

There were naughtier words in José Jamon's vocabulary than 'Caramba,' which is a comparatively mild form of adjuration; but he did not care, being a respectable wax-chandler, and withal a politic man, living in good relations with the ecclesiastical authorities, to say anything of a decidedly objectionable nature. Indeed, swearing may be subjected to the nicest tests of good manners, and I know a lady who sometimes says, 'Dash it!'

To the Devil are going los Estados Unidos de Mejico,' José Jamon muttered once more, inverting the former order of his phraseology. To the Devil, al Diablo rubio.' The Red Devil is a very terrible demon to the Mexican mind, well-nigh equalling in awesomeness the dreaded 'Gaspodin Tchort' or 'Lord Devil' of the Russian peasants.

José Jamon de la Ycarregua was a wax-chandler, and a politic man-hombre de pequeñas palabras, pero de muchos pensamientos -but it needed not to be wizard to discern that the United States of Mexico were going very rapidly indeed to Mephistopheles. They had been tending Tophetwards for a very long time, almost indeed from the period when New Spain had shaken off her allegiance to the Castilian crown. José Jamon was well stricken in years, and he remembered a score of Mexican dictators. His recollection, perhaps, failed him as to the precise number of Mexican revolutions and pronunciamientos which he had witnessed, seeing that their name was Legion; but in conversing with him on bygone events he would say, reckoning on his fingers, Ah, that was in the days of the Cura Morelos, Almonte's father; that took place in the reign of poor Don Augustin Yturbide; stay, Comonfort must have been in power then; unless it was just after Santa Anna's second return to power. remember; and then Bustamente was President; long before Miramon, and our present excellent Gefe del Gobierno, the absolute Constitu

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tional President, Don Benito Juarez, whom Heaven protect!' For blowing hot and cold as expediency prompted, and rendering implicit obedience to the powers that were, José Jamon de la Ycarregua had few rivals among his countrymen. Had he been in England, he might have gone into the Church, and solicited with perfect propriety the next presentation to the vicarage of Bray.

The Calle Santa Isidra leads out of the more spacious Calle de las Santas Tripas, and, as every one acquainted with Mexican topography must be aware, terminates in the Plazuela de los Angelos. Nearly every street, lane, court, and alley in this city of bandits and cut-throats has something to do, nominally, with saints or angels. José Jamon had kept a wax-chandler's shop at the uppermost corner of the Santa Isidra-the south-west corner, looking towards the Portal and the Cathedral-for fifty years. Behold him, standing on his door-step, grumbling: a long, lank, gaunt, ill-conditioned man. His skin had the texture of that imitation of shagreen which the Japanese make from paper. (They are going to start a railway soon, from Jeddo to Osaka, those ingenious Japanese; and, of course, the rails will be of papier maché, and the sleepers of cardboard.) His complexion was dun-coloured, in some places approaching to a chocolate hue, and was chequered on his forehead and just above his cheekbones by permanent patches of bile, which secretion likewise held chronic possession of what should have been the whites of his eyes, of which organs the pupils were black as sloes, and coruscated in quite an Inky Way of twinkling. The veins of his neck and of the backs of his hands resembled whipcord; he had not an ounce of muscle to spare; and this physical condition, common enough among the natives of Mexico, he owed to the rarefied atmosphere, to extreme abstemiousness in eating and drinking, and to excessive smoking. Europeans settling in Mexico do not often succeed in getting into this living-mummy habit of body. They have not gone through the necessary training; they will drink brandy-and-water, forgetting that two glasses of dry sherry are an ample allowance for a Mexican diner-out; and the end of it is generally apoplexy. Brandy 'pawnee' is the curse of the European in hot climates, and its abuse may be equally pernicious among mountain ranges. Is not this place the White Man's grave?' I asked the captain of a West-India mail steamer once. 'No,' replied the friendly skipper; that is,' and he pointed to the brandy-bottle on the cabin table. The heat of the day was sweltering, so we both took forty drops' more pleasant poison in the shape of fine champagne cognac and iced water. Another nail in your coffin,' observed the friendly skipper as he took his 'tot.' I thought, when I went on deck, and looked at the white houses of St. Thomas baking in the sun, that some of us might need when we died as many coffins as Mr. Banting gives to a prince when he is buried-lead, inner oak, outer oak, Spanish ma

hogany, and Genoa velvet to cover all. I am sure some of us have laid in a stock of nails sufficient to decorate a sarcophagus for the Colossus of Rhodes.

The hair of José Jamon de la Ycarregua was iron-gray, and cut close to his head for coolness; and neither beard nor moustache wore he. Let me whisper in your ear ere, ethnologically, I dismiss him, that he was a pure white Spaniard, and had not a tinge of Indian blood in his veins,- —a rare circumstance indeed with a middle-class Mexican. As for his dress, it was half a summer and half a winter costume-consisting of a monstrous sombrero of gray felt, rivalling a cart-wheel in the vastness of its circumference, and with its low crown encircled by a pudding,' or hoop of felt, well padded to keep off the rays of the sun. But for its weight the pudding would be a better guard against sunstroke than a puggree. Being a respectable man, José's sombrero was galonado; that is to say, the under part of the brim of his hat and the encircling' pudding' were curiously embroidered in gold thread and green silk with representations of the maguey or cactus leaf, and of the eagle sitting on the nopal' or prickly pear, which forms the heraldic cognisance of the Aztec Republic. He wore a round jacket of some shaggy material not unlike our imitation astrakan,' and which was profusely decorated with silver sugar-loaf buttons; he was destitute of waistcoat; his trousers were of white duck, scrupulously starched; but a thick scarf of silk of variegated hues was bound round his loins, and the vest beneath his fine linen, frilled, and puffed shirt was of flannel. You must wear woollen all the year if you wish to live in Mexico. In the morning and in the evening you might fancy yourself on Primrose-hill in the middle of March. From ten o'clock in the morning until three in the afternoon no very great stretch of imagination is necessary to cause you to picture to yourself that you are in the stokehole of a P. and O. steamer in the Red Sea, in the middle of July. Is anything else necessary to show how José Jamon de la Ycarregua completed his costume,' as they used to say in the three-volume novels? Yes; this: he wore patent-leather shoes. There is never any mud in Mexico city, save only in the rainy season; and then nobody stirs out of doors except the Indians, who generally go barefoot. At other times, a lady may walk from one end of the town to the other without peril of smirching the soles of her pretty white-satin slippers. It is the driest place in the world, simply for the reason that it is situated on a mountain plateau many thousand feet above the level of the sea, and that the contents of all our City Commissioners of Sewers' mud-carts would be dried up in an hour by rarefaction. With impunity, then, did José Jamon parade his varnished slippers, in the assumption of which there might have been a spice of coxcombry. The Mexicans are not only the most polite but the best-dressed people in the world.

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guerrilleros, or highway robbers, are dandified, though ragged; and murderers march to the garrote in white-kid gloves. It is notorious that the country is nationally in a state of chronic bankruptcy; yet an astonishing amount of gold and silver is apparent in the shape of ornaments on the garments even of the common people. Cosas de Mejico. They are, in many cases, as curious and more incomprehensible than the cosas de España.

But why, it will be asked, was José Jamon de Ycarregua, that nattily-attired Mejicano-that most respectable of wax-chandlers, that most politic of men-incited to utter the profane exclamation of Caramba' ? What was the trouble with him?

José Jamon's affliction amounted to this-that his business had been constantly declining for a very long time, and seemed to be approaching an entire standstill. As a seller of wax-candles, he had been accustomed to drive a very lively trade in tapers and cierges, which he supplied to the multitudinous churches, convents, and nunneries of Mexico. In Holy Week he was accustomed to reap a harvest of gold ounces; nor were his gains habitually less gratifying at Christmas-time, when the demand for his tapers, to be used at nascimientos, was ordinarily immense. José Jamon had thriven on wax for the better part of his life, and it had brought him abundant honey. He had been long a widower; but there remained to him one pledge of his deceased señora's love—he occasionally corrected her with a lasso or a stirrup-leather-in the shape of his daughter Pepita, now a sprightly brunette of some eighteen summers. José Jamon had acquired a very comfortable competence, when, in an evil hour, he was induced to invest his savings in the newlydiscovered adit of a silver-mine in the province of Leon. The silvermine turned out to be a swindle; and when, at the conclusion of twelve months, the entire concern irremediably collapsed, José awoke a sadder and a wiser man, and the loser of sixty thousand dollars. The world lay before him to begin again; but, unfortunately, it was not the same world as when he first knew it and made wealth out of wax. Mexico had gone to the Devil many times since his youth, but she had always managed to come back again; this time it seemed probable that she would never return. Benito Juarez El Indio'a cowherd, they say, in his childhood, then a pettifogging lawyer, then judge of the Supreme Court-had become, by an extraordinary 'fluke,' President of Mexico. He was the Coryphæus of the Puro,' or Radical-Liberal party; and the watchword of that party in 186was 'Death to the Church!' The enormous ecclesiastical property, which had hitherto been respected by every party however anarchical, which had been uppermost in Mexico, was confiscated; the monasteries were suppressed; and thousands of monks, who had not been of much service from a spiritual point of view, but were utterly useless in any secular employment, were turned loose on the SECOND SERIES, VOL. II. F.S. VOL. XII.

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streets of Mexico. This was shortly before the intervention of the European powers in the affairs of Mexico-an intervention which cost Napoleon III. many milliards of francs and all his prestige. It cost Maximilian of Hapsburg his life. With the Indio' Juarez in supreme authority, patriotism and highway-robbery were at a premium, and piety and the wax-chandling business fell to a melancholy discount. 'Tis true that mass and vespers were said every day in the churches; that the nuns had not been interfered with; and that there still existed a permanent proportion of devout old ladies, lovesick maidens, and superstitious Indians, always ready to purchase tapers to burn before the shrines of their favourite saints; but these candles were of the cheapest-mere waxen dips. And moreover, José Jamon had rivals and competitors, who stole his trade away from him. Foremost among these rivals was an abhorrent German, by the name of Stöffelbaum: a fellow who had come out to Vera Cruz with a cargo of lucifer-matches, meerschaum-pipes, and Bavarian beer; who had worked his way up to Jalapa, where he had established an agency for the sale of antibilious pills-a bringing of coals to Newcastle it seemed in the outset; yet the speculation proved a very profitable one, for the Mexicans near the coast, in perpetual dread of the yellow fever, will buy any kind of quack medicines. Stöffelbaum subsequently had contracted to light the city of Puebla with kerosene oil; and finally had arrived in Mexico, and organised a vast candle-manufactory, the success of which almost broke the heart of José Jamon de la Ycarregua, besides nearly making him bankrupt into the bargain. Were not all these troubles, political and commercial, sufficient to make the wax-chandler (although the most politic of mankind in general, and wax-chandlers in particular) dissatisfied and ill-conditioned ?

Other causes of choler were working in José's mind. As though he had not enough chagrin to aggravate his already superabundant bile, that mischievous little minx of a daughter of his, Pepita, must needs fall over head and ears in love with a Moussou.'

A Moussou' in Mexico is a Frenchman, just as he is a 'Mozzoo' with the Russian peasants, and in England a Mounseer' with our own vulgar mobile. The Gaul in Mexico is very cordially hated, and the dislike to him, general and individual, is of a date long anterior to the French intervention in '62-3. Un perro,' a dog, and 'un Frances,' a Frenchman, are convertible terms in New as in Old Spain. The Moussou of whom Pepita Jamon de la Ycarregua had become enamoured was a sprightly good-looking young fellow, as impudent as a cock-robin (the most impudent bird I know: the jackdaw is merely saucy; the raven rude; and the swallow impertinent), called Dubreuil; and, confound his impudence! he was the leader of the orchestra at the Teatro Yturbide. A fiddler, forsooth, to dare to pay court to Doña Pepita Jamon de la Ycarregua,