It is in life as it is in travelling, that you go sometimes with such unreflecting interest in the mere passing-by of the incidents of Time that you arrive unaware of your destination, and look back with dismay on the change and the distance. It was so I went from the democracy of our French class-room to the estate of Royalty in Spain. The mere journey itself was an excitement; and it was at once, even in France, almost a Royal progress, because of the number of Spanish ladies who had come to Paris to conduct my mother to the Court, to say nothing of the other people who had attached themselves to our suite for various reasons of their own. At the seaport of San Jean de Luz a Spanish warship awaited us, with the sailors on the yards, the colours flying, and the cannon firing a salute. This seemed to me very jolly, and I watched with curiosity; but I must have been a little withdrawn from it in my mind, for I remember noticing with amuse{23}ment how much more excited for us my governess was by the crowds and the spectacle. It is usually the looker-on who most enjoys these pomps. The Royalty must preserve the dignity of effigies to endure the stares. And I was disappointed because I was not free to move about and be unconscious; because I could not be spoken to by those who were outside the circle of attendants; because the personages who were allowed to greet me all made the same congratulations with a formality that wearied.
Even on board the ship I could not go about and see the sailors. I had to remain in the Royal cabins, or move with the others among the standing salutes of officers who could not speak or be spoken to. We had lost the freedom of private persons; we had become like commanding officers in a world governed by the army regulations of Court etiquette; we could not go anywhere without sending word ahead so that life might be put on parade for us. Our meals were ceremonies. We attended a very long and formal Mass that was celebrated for us on board. And I remember, as my one real pleasure on the ship, that I had to sleep in a saloon on a billiard-table, where a mattress had been spread for me, because there{24} were not enough Royal cabins to accommodate us all.
But as soon as we arrived at the Spanish port of Santander I forgot everything in the excitement of a reception that amounted to a carnival. With a staff of officers and dignitaries in uniform, and a troop of cavalry as escort, we were driven in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, through streets of which I could not see the fronts of the houses—they were so covered with the reds and yellows of flags and bunting that were dazzling in the vivid sunlight of Spain. There were crowds on the pavement, in the windows, on the balconies, and even on the house-tops; and they pelted us gaily with flowers tied in nosegays with weighted stems so that they might be accurately thrown. They threw at us doves with their feet tied to long strings, so that they could flutter but not escape. We warded off the flowers with our parasols, and standing up in the carriage I caught at the doves, while my mother, who feared nothing in the world, kept crying out, in a nervous terror, that she would faint if one of the birds touched her with its flutterings. She had the sort of horror of them flying that one has of bats. And this excited me.{25} And the more excited I became, the more the crowd laughed and cheered and pelted us. If Spain were going to be all like that, I should be happy. It seemed impossible that these could be the same people who had driven my mother away with hisses. The realisation that they were truly the same made it seem, for the moment, that we were all playing a part in a spectacle without sincerity. The thought worried me as it passed.
We were being driven to the cathedral of Santander, where a Mass was to be celebrated and the Te Deum sung in thanksgiving for our return; and there, at the church door, the bishop in his robes waited for us under a canopy borne on poles by four young priests—the sort of canopy that he walks under in processions of the Corpus Christi, when he carries the Host through the streets. My mother, my two sisters, and I were taken under this canopy with him, as if we were something sacred; and we were solemnly escorted, by priests and acolytes, with music and singing and candles and incense, up the aisle to the sanctuary, where four throne-like chairs had been prepared for us before the altar. As I watched the priests and the people, I wondered{26} whether they were sincere in this appearance of accepting us as sanctified by some sort of divine right.
From the cathedral we were taken to an official reception at the Mairie, and then to the Royal train that my brother had sent to bring us to Madrid; and we were started on our railroad journey with cheering and congratulations, in great state, among officers of the Court and personages of the Government. It was a journey that lasted all night, and the train was stopped at every station so that we might smile and bow to the crowd. At first I enjoyed it; it was exciting. But when it grew dark and I was tired and wanted to sleep, I found I had to wake up to be shown to the people, who came even in the middle of the night to see us pass. I rebelled. My mother insisted. “Very well,” I said, “I’ll make silly faces at them, and they’ll think you have an idiot for a daughter.” My mother was furious, but she knew that I would do it, so she left me alone, and I slept.
I had learned that we were not going direct to Madrid, but to the palace of the Escurial, in the mountains, a little distance from the capital. It was not considered wise that my mother should go to Madrid, because her presence there might encourage
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The King’s Study in Escurial
{27}
the formation of a party in her favour as a rival to her son, and because it was necessary to avoid any appearance that the King was taking directions from her in affairs of State—in short, because the men who had recalled my brother were willing to have my mother and her children in Spain, but were not willing to have her rule there. This fact, for me, rather took away the sweet odour of sincerity from the incense that had been burned for us; but it did not seem to make any difference to my mother, who accepted such considerations as matters of course.
My brother met our train at a station some distance from Madrid, and we had a little family reunion that was very happy. He was so glad to have us and we to have him. My mother insisted that he must scold me for threatening to make faces at the people, but he laughed and would not. He joked and chatted gaily with me, as we used to in the old school days that seemed already so far away; and he promised that in a little time he would be able to have us with him in Madrid, where we should be very jolly together.
He accompanied us to the Escurial, which we approached from the mountains, so that we looked{28} down on it. It was built in a square, with a wing coming out of one side like a handle. “What a funny palace!” I said. “It is the shape of a frying-pan.” My brother told me that this was intentionally so; that Philip II. had dedicated the palace to St. Lorenzo, who had been martyred on a gridiron; and the shape of the building was designed to remind the kings that if they were wicked they would be fried in hell. I enjoyed with him the charming na?veté of the symbolism. He was no more illiberal than I about his religion. Indeed, I think he was the only King of Spain who did not constantly go to confession.
Half of the Escurial was a monastery and a school, where the monks taught; for Philip II. had been fanatically religious, and he had lived there as “Brother Philip,” even while he conducted the war in the Netherlands and sent the famous Armada against England. The tombs of the Royal family were all here—to make it more cheerful—and new tombs were waiting for us, the daughters of Queen Isabella, so that I might regard my own sepulchre. I regarded it with amusement, because it seemed to me a childishness to make a daily bugaboo of death.{29}
It appeared that we were not put in our tombs immediately after dying. We were placed first in the crypt, in a chamber called the pudridero, until decay had reduced our bodies to bones; and my brother whispered to me that in the pudridero reserved for Infantas so little care had been taken during the revolution that the bones had been mixed up together, and he had had to have them sorted for burial as best he could, rather haphazard. The thought of the poor Infantas in their fine tombs, with the bones of each in the tomb of another, set us laughing again. I thought that the Escurial was a very pretentiously funny place, and I enjoyed the tour of it with my brother as a great joke.
Next morning, before I was up, an important-looking officer in a gorgeous uniform of red and gold came bowing with dignity into my bedroom, and spoke something in Spanish. I could not understand what he wanted, and I tried to make him understand that I did not want him. He kept repeating himself deferentially, but with the air of a dignitary who knew his rights, until I ordered him out of the room with a gesture that he could not mistake. He went, much offended, and I hurried to my mother’s room{30} to ask her who he was. She explained that he was an important Court official; that his sole duty in life was to carry slops from my wash-table—which was upholstered in red and gold to match his uniform; that this was a privilege which he valued highly, and that I had probably hurt him very much by denying him the right. I was indignant that any man of intelligence should be doing anything so absurd. My mother did not sympathise; it was an affair of Court etiquette. I refused to have a man coming to my room. She insisted that I must. “Very well,” I said, “if he ever comes in there again, I’ll beat him with something.” And although my mother was angry with me, he never did come in again.
This proved to be a sample of much of the formality that made life difficult at the Escurial. We had not only, now, the ladies-in-waiting to be with us always; as soon as we came out of our bedrooms in the morning we had ushers also to precede us everywhere; and if we crossed a hall a guard accompanied us and waited at the door. The Escurial is one of the most magnificent of palaces, with huge rooms of state as high as chapels, richly furnished and hung{31} with tapestries and paintings. I found these rooms excellent to skip in, since all the furniture was arranged along the walls, as in ball-rooms; but I had to make friends first with the ushers, to persuade them to stand aside and let me play, otherwise, I suppose, I should have had to skip in a procession, with an usher marching in his uniform solemnly ahead of me and a lady-in-waiting behind!
I had no studies here and no playmates; my sisters were older than I, and they did not like my active games. I soon found the Escurial depressing. It was chilly in the mountains after sunset, and there was no way of heating the palace in those days except with fireplaces, that might as well have been burning out of doors. The view from the windows was desolate, for there were no trees, and the hills were bare. I saw no visitors but personages speaking Spanish, who came to see my mother formally; and to these we children were shown to satisfy curiosity. They all congratulated us on being back in the land where we had been born. I wondered why they expected that to make us so happy. After all, I did not remember being born there. As for the Escurial, it was picturesque, no doubt; it was magnificent; it{32} was as historic as a public museum; and if I had been a tourist, sightseeing, I might have admired it as much as tourists do Versailles. But I do not think that even a tourist would be happy if he had to live permanently imprisoned in the magnificent discomforts of the palace of Versailles—especially if his only recreation was to skip in the Hall of Mirrors under the eyes of a uniformed museum guard.
Then there came to us a formidable relative, a princess to whom her royalty was a religion; and a new trouble began for me. I offended her unconsciously with every word—and, when I was not speaking, with every action. It appeared to her that I had not at all the manners of a princess, nor the mind. She set herself to instruct and counsel me, severely.
She tried to impress it on me that, with my brother on the Throne, every word I uttered had importance; that it would be weighed and studied and repeated. Therefore I must not express opinions of any sort about public affairs, or personages, for fear I should say something that might be used to make difficulties for my brother. It was a duty that we owed the Crown to have no opinions at all, except about mat{33}ters that could have no public bearing or affect the popularity of the King.
Similarly, we could have no special friends, for fear of arousing jealousies that might embarrass the Throne; and in order to avoid even the appearance of having favourites, we must not show any special sympathy or antipathy for any person. We must be the same to all, and unvarying in our manner from day to day, so as to avoid comparisons. It was a duty that we owed the Crown. We must perform all our social and religious duties and observe all the etiquettes of Court life to the same end—that no act of ours, either of omission or commission, should make difficulty for the King. We must not only avoid the occasion of scandal, but we must efface ourselves so efficiently that even the most innocent gossip could not find its source in us. It was a duty that we owed the Crown. I must not say that I found the view from the Escurial desolate; it might be construed into an offensive criticism of the country. I must like everything and everybody, unless the King expressed a wish to the contrary in a particular instance. It was a duty that we owed the Crown.{34}
At first she bewildered me with the sort of fright that comes on a child confronted by a dictatorial schoolmaster and a new lesson to learn. She talked and talked, and I did not understand her. Then I began to think her absurd, because her pomposity was stupid, and her self-importance made me smile. When she told me that every word I uttered would be weighed and repeated, I thought to myself, “No! People can’t be so silly as that! Or if there are such people, why worry about them? It isn’t worth the thought.” And the idea that I must not have opinions or friends was repulsive to me, because it was a restraint of spirit that would cramp me. After hearing it all from her, over and over, again and again, I decided that she was not a very clever person, and that she had exaggerated trifles. I knew that my brother would not expect such things of me, and I decided to pay no attention to her.
But the difficulty is that, no matter how liberal-minded a King may be, many of the people who devote themselves to the servilities of Court life are inevitably narrow; and though my brother had been recalled to the throne because he was a Liberal, his Court could not be so. My sisters and I, having{35} been educated in France, were suspected of Republican tendencies of mind that would be as offensive as bad table manners in the Court. The clerical influence, though it was not strong with my brother, was very strong with my mother, and the ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, and the nobility in general; and I suppose it was evident that I was not a pattern of young devoutness. I spoke Spanish so clumsily that my brother had laughed at it and advised me that it would be unwise for me to attempt to speak it to visitors until I was more proficient. I did not know what was going on about me, but I imagine it was for such reasons as these that it was decided my mother should take us to the palace of the Alcazar in Sevilla, where we could learn Spanish and be purged of foreign habits of thought. And there, too, my mother would be still farther away from influencing the politics of the capital.
So, within a few months, we left the Escurial for the Alcazar, and I went from the chilly monotony of a Northern Court to the oppression and ennui of an Oriental harem. Even yet, if the sun shines too brightly and the summer day is hot, I am overcome with melancholy—as a Russian who has been in{36} prison in Siberia might be when he sees the snow fall. Those endless, idle, unhappy days!
As we drove to the palace from the railway station I noticed that the street windows of the houses were all barred. Thieves, then, must be very bold in Sevilla? I was told: No; the bars were not in the windows to keep burglars out, but to keep the young girls in, and to allow them to speak safely with their future husbands, who came courting below in the streets. How picturesque! Since I had never been allowed to speak to a man alone, even through a grating—unless it was a priest in a confessional—I did not feel sorry for the young women of Sevilla. I did not understand that the bars were symbolical. I stared at the flat-roofed Southern houses and the barbaric colours of the costumes, and the crowds that did not cheer us as we drove by, but sang in chorus to the accompaniment of unseen guitars, and uttered sudden shrieks with sad, impassive faces, like Arabs, to express their joy. And the gates of the Alcazar closed on us without any ominous echo to my ears.
The Alcazar is a Moorish palace of great beauty, with walls and ceilings all covered with intricate patterns of carving and bright colours, so that it was{37} like coming to live in a palace of the Arabian Nights. The inner courtyards are Oriental, cooled by fountains. The garden around the palace is Oriental, in tiny squares and flower-beds, with short paths, and no place for one to run. And around the garden the high wall is Oriental, a true harem wall, over which one could not see. In all the rooms of the palace there is not one door; and when we had hangings put up in the Moorish arches of our bedroom doorways the servants were surprised. They did not understand the desire for privacy. Sentinels and guards were on duty everywhere; a man even walked all night under my bedroom windows; and whenever we went into the gardens the trumpets were sounded—Heaven only knows why!
It was a life in which there was nothing to do, nothing to see—a life designed for Southern women who are content to loll about on cushions and grow fat. We were not expected to go out at all, except in carriages, with an escort, down staring streets, and, indeed, it would have been impossible to walk through the crowds that gathered. I could not ride horseback without a lady-in-waiting to go with me; and all the ladies were too fat to ride, even if they{38} had known how. The best exercise I could get in the garden was to jump the flower-beds—to the amazement of everybody—or to skip up and down in one place mechanically. It was as much worse than the Escurial as the Escurial had been worse than the Palais de Castile; and when it came home to me that this, now, was to be my life for ever, I felt that I should go mad.
Every afternoon my mother gave audiences to the ladies of Sevilla; but what good was that? Even with us children they did nothing but curtsy, and kiss the hands, and look at us, awed, as if we were not human. They could not say anything to us, and we did not know what to say to them. Generals came to salute my mother, and remained for dinner; and every day one officer of the guard had luncheon with us; but we girls were not allowed to speak to men, except to exchange formal words of greeting under the eyes of the governess.
One day, the governess being absent, I got into conversation with an officer at the table, innocently, when he had been speaking about “the bath of Maria Padilla” in our garden. It was a large stone bath that had been built by Pedro the Cruel for this Maria
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Gardens of the Alcazar, Seville
{39}
Padilla when she had lived at the Alcazar; and I had longed to have it filled with water so that I might use it. The officer told me that once, after Maria Padilla had bathed there, Pedro the Cruel, in a jest, had invited a courtier to drink some of the water to show his devotion, and the courtier replied, “I’m afraid if I tried the sauce, I might get a taste for the partridge.” I thought this very clever of the courtier, and I repeated the story to my governess, after dinner, and she was horrified. It was the last opportunity I got to speak with the officer.
And I did not get the bath. Indeed, at that time it was difficult to get a bath of any sort, except a sponge bath, piecemeal. The ladies-in-waiting declared that it was sinful to bathe; and when I laughed at that they argued that it was indelicate to take off all one’s clothing at once. (I imagine that their antipathy to bathing must have come from the feeling against the Moors, who had so long been the conquerors in Sevilla, since it was part of their religion to bathe.) I finally got my way by persuading a doctor to give orders that I must have cold baths for my health.
These, then, were some of the material restrictions{40} of our life. The mental restrictions were even more hopeless. There were no books to be had. If I wrote a letter, it had to be read by the lady-in-waiting to whom I gave it to post. We had an old professor to give us lessons in Spanish, and we studied painting and music, and acquired the ornamental accomplishments and fundamental ignorances of young ladies who are not expected to have minds and not allowed to develop any. Religious instruction went on always. We heard Mass in the palace every day, and we should have had to go to confession and communion every day, too, if I had not insisted that I would not go oftener than once a month. My sisters were both most devout, and they did not sympathise with my rebelliousness. When I complained of the imprisonment of our lives, they counselled me, affectionately, to bow to the will of God and to accept with pious resignation the trials to which Providence had appointed us. I should have been happier, no doubt, if I could have done so; but Providence had also appointed for me a temperament that made resignation impossible, and I continued to obey the will of God by chafing and complaining and struggling to escape.{41}
With the arrival of March came a new horror of heat; and as the summer progressed it seemed impossible to live through each new day. The sun was unendurable. The soldiers on guard had to be changed every quarter of an hour, and many of them were taken from their posts fainting. The birds fell dead from the trees in the garden. The air was full of an odour of melting asphalt, and even at night the pavements would be so hot that they would burn the soles of the shoes. Indoors the sealing-wax would melt on your writing-desk. And the mosquitoes! To study, or to write, we had to sit under mosquito bars, or we would be so pestered that we could not work. I was unable to eat. I lived on lemon and water, ill with the heat and with longing for the cool, green freedom of our country summers in Normandy—with the grey-blue skies and the grey-green fields, and the shade of the deep, hedge-hidden byways. How I yearned for them! As one yearns for the comfort of health in the semi-delirious miseries of fever! I would say to myself, “Oh, if Spain would only have another revolution!”
Then one of my sisters, who was less robust than I, became seriously prostrated. They were afraid{42} that I, too, might collapse, because I would not let them give me food. My mother had quarrelled with my brother about some political differences, and she wished to take us to France; but since the King was unmarried, and one of us—or one of our children—might inherit the throne, it was not permitted to us to leave Spain, for fear of foreign influences. We were prisoners for life! It was decided that we should join our brother in Madrid, and our mother should go away to France without us. I was never to live with her again, but I parted from her without anxiety, since at last I had my wish—to be with my brother.