Negrete remained inflexible, and Luisa Martínez fell, pierced by royalist bullets.
SOR JUANA INEZ DE LA CRUZ.
If there is one literary glory among us, universally recognized and applauded, it is Sister Juana Inez de la Cruz, most virtuous nun, inspired poet, and pre-eminently admirable for her prodigious learning.
Sister Juana was a privileged being; her beauty captivated all hearts; her intellect astonished her contemporaries.
The life of that surprising woman is almost a fairy tale.
She was born near the slopes of those giants, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, in a country place called San Miguel Nepantla, in a humble inn known by the name of la celda, at eleven o’clock in the night of Thursday, November 12, 1651. At three years of age she had coaxed the teacher of her sister to teach her to read; she was not yet seven, when she had written verses and addresses to the Santisimo Sacramento, in order to win a book which had been offered as a prize; she came to Mexico, where she devoured the few books which her grandfather owned; in twenty lessons with her teacher, Martin de Olivas, she learned the Latin language; she begged her mother to dress her as a man, that she might study at the University; later, young and beautiful, as lady-in-waiting of Doña Leonora María de Carreto, then the vice-reina of New Spain, Juana de Asbaje charmed the gallants with her witcheries and astounded the learned with her knowledge.
One time, the Viceroy Antonio Sebastián de Toledo, Marquis of Mancera, desired to convince himself whether the learning of that lady