Court Life From Within

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 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 naïveté 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.

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 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 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 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 matters 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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.

CHAPTER III

PULLING THE STRINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY

We arrived in high spirits at the royal palace, and I was glad to find it not only gorgeous, but most comfortable. It had been built by Charles III.—as everything in Madrid seems to have been built—but my brother had had it modernised with those conveniences of heating and plumbing which our antique splendour had hitherto done without in Spain. He had allotted a whole wing to us three Infantas (my sister Pilar, my sister Paz, and I), and we each had our own maids and servants from Sevilla, so that we made quite a household. He had installed in another wing my sister the Infanta Isabel, whom I hardly knew, because she had not been with us in France during the revolution. She was to take our mother’s place towards us. She had been married at sixteen to a prince of Naples; she had lived all her life among the forms and traditions of royalty, and she was genuinely devoted to their maintenance. I should have been afraid for my new liberty if I had not foreseen that her direction over us would be tempered by my brother’s indulgence. I knew that he had as much impatience as I for what we called, jocularly, between ourselves, the “singeries” (monkey tricks) of royalty. And so I began, with great expectations, what proved to be the happiest period of my life.

I was able to rise early, because my brother was always up at half-past seven, to ride in the Casa Campo for an hour, and I rode horseback with him—to my great joy. Then, at nine, we girls had our lessons while he met his Ministers. Early rising is not a Spanish habit. My mother, when she was Queen, had met her Ministers after the theatre, at midnight, and worked with them more in the nighttime than during the day. And my brother’s Ministers had protested against his nine o’clock Cabinet meetings; but he had won them to it with the smiling and tactful determination that always secured him his own way.

At midday we lunched with him, the whole household together, a score at table, with ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, officers, and aides-de-camp; but, on account of the presence of the latter, conversation was always formal. It was different on the afternoon drives. Then we were alone, for he drove himself, and I sat beside him; there were just the two servants on the rear seat, and no one to overhear us. Best of all were the visits I paid him in his apartments, where it was not considered necessary that I should be followed by a lady-in-waiting, since I was under the protection of the King. The guards only took me across the public gallery in the centre of the palace—a soldier on each side of me and an officer in front, because in this gallery some attempts had been made to kill my mother when she was Queen—and the ushers, who led me down the halls, left me when I entered my brother’s antechamber. He had collected a large library for his own use, and he made me free of it on condition that I should not tell any one. At last I had books! And more than I could read.

What adventures! I was most eager for history and philosophy, because my mind had been denied access to facts, and I read all that I could find, indiscriminately. It was probably my brother who directed me to Kant, his own education having been chiefly German, in Vienna. But my personal favourite among the philosophers was Emerson. I suppose it was his sturdy doctrine of self-reliance that appealed to me—his insisting that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind—and, although I have not read him for years, I still remember him with the glow of my pleasure in his words. For poetry I had no appetite. French poetry seemed to me very light, without ideas. And fiction, English fiction particularly, to which my sisters were devoted, interested me but little. I wanted things to be true. I could not read Balzac; I do not know why.

With Shakespeare I had an odd experience. We studied him with our governess to perfect our English, and of course I realised that his verse was beautiful; but when his kings and queens spoke their lines they seemed to me to be playing parts that had been written to make fun of the claims of Royalty. My governess was indignant when I told her that. She said it was not true; that the speeches were meant to be taken seriously. “But no!” I would cry. “Don’t you see? Shakespeare is making fun of us. He knew we were not so, but he could not tell it in those days. He is laughing at us. He knew it was absurd.”

And when we read Hamlet I argued with her: “There! He has made a mad prince who talks foolishness. If he had respected Royalty as much as you say, he would not have written it. If you have an idiot in your family, you do not let people see him. No; he is laughing at his pompous kings.” And my governess scolded in vain. I still feel the same about Shakespeare’s Royalties.

Outside of my books I began to be most interested to understand the conditions in Spain itself. Why had there been a revolution? And why had my brother been called to the throne? I was told that my mother’s rule had been too “clerical”—that the priests had had too much power—and that when the Republicans had failed to provide a stable Government my brother had been welcomed as a liberal King. But the story of the way in which he came to be proclaimed seemed to contradict this reasonable explanation.

The ladies of the Court, it appeared, had merely given money to soldiers in the army to cry “Viva el Rey Alfonso!” when General Martinez Campos called out to them one morning, “Viva el Rey!” General Campos had then telegraphed to my brother that the army had proclaimed him King. My brother admitted to me that he had received the telegram as an invitation to an adventure, and, being fond of adventures, he had accepted it.

He rode into Madrid, a boy of seventeen, on a spirited horse, followed by the general and his officers. The horse, excited by the crowds, pranced and curveted; the crowd cheered his riding, and the more they cheered the more he made the animal caper. Every one admired him. He had—what is a valuable asset for a King—a very winning smile, and he smiled and rode his way into the hearts of the people. From the palace he announced to the Parliament that he had been proclaimed King, and the Parliament accepted him on behalf of the country. The only opposition came from the Carlist rebellion, led by Don Carlos, a rival claimant to the throne. My brother went at once to the war, and the rebellion was put down. General Campos and his family were rewarded with lands and titles, and my brother remained securely on the throne.

I thought it was a strange thing that a King could be made in Spain on the strength of a shout from a few soldiers; but it was the only explanation that any one could give me. When my mother had been dethroned, the Republicans had first chosen as King a Prince Amadeo of Savoy, son of Victor Emmanuel. But after a brief reign Amadeo resigned the crown and left the country. He told me himself that he had never found out why the throne had been offered to him, nor why his rule had been rejected. It was all a mystery to him.

Similarly, I found that the way in which my mother herself had come to the succession was as peculiar as all the rest. When her father, Ferdinand VII. was taken with his final illness, there was a Salic Law in Spain by which his brother Carlos would be his heir and successor. But an old enmity existed between Don Carlos and my mother’s aunt, the Infanta Luisa Carlota. She had said to him, “You’ll never reign.” And he had laughed at her. But when the King was plainly dying of paralysis, she put before him a paper that she had prepared, abolishing the Salic Law; and, placing a pen in his hand, she took hold of his fingers and began to sign his name to the decree. The Prime Minister, Calomarde, seeing what she was doing, put his hand over hers to stop her. She stopped long enough to strike him a blow on the head that dazed him. When he recovered himself the document had been signed and King Ferdinand was dead. Calomarde bowed gallantly and said to her, in the words of a Spanish proverb, “A fair hand can do no wrong.” She

replied, “No; but it can strike, eh?” And the law against the succession of a woman having been thus repealed, my mother came to the throne, an infant, under the regency of her mother, Queen Maria Cristina, and protected by her aunt. Don Carlos made war upon her, but he was unsuccessful.

This story my mother told me herself. I was puzzled to know why no one but Don Carlos had objected to such a manner of changing the succession. I got no explanation. Like the proclaiming of my brother and the summons to King Amadeo to rule, it was a mystery. Did it all mean, then, that no one but the Royal claimants cared who was King in Spain? Was it that the apparent Government in Spain, as in most countries, was not the real Government, and that the actual rulers of the country did not worry about who was in power in Madrid, since the power was impotent?

I found in talking with my brother that he was very interested in his work and the problems of government—but puzzled to know how to do anything to help the people—and saddened by conditions that he could not improve. He used to say, “I do not understand this country yet, but I shall find a way to do something with it after I have reigned over it a little longer.” He had no faith in the politicians, and when one party lost office and another came to authority, and I asked him if this would improve matters, he replied: “No. It makes no difference. They are the same dog with different collars.”

He was apparently very popular, and no one openly opposed him; but one could see that much of the common show of loyalty was a pleasant make-believe, designed to flatter. Once when we were visiting a town together, driving in a carriage with the mayor, the boys in the street kept screaming “Viva el Rey!” so shrilly that my brother, who was trying to talk with the mayor, could not make himself heard. “It is too bad,” he said to the mayor. “They scream so loudly that I cannot talk with you as I wish.” The mayor replied, with simplicity, “Ah, your Majesty, if I had known that you would wish to talk with me, I would not have paid them so much.” And thereafter, whenever I saw a people very enthusiastic in welcoming a king, I wondered how much they were being paid.

At another time my sisters and I were making an excursion in the mountains, and we were accompanied by a mayor who had provided us with the donkeys on which we rode. Whenever we came to a village, the children first, and then the older people would come out and cheer us. And they cheered us by name. “See!” the mayor would say. “See how popular you are! They know you all.” As there were four of us, and we had never been in the district before, we were astonished and very much flattered! And the mayor beamed. At every village it was the same. “Viva la Infanta Isabel! Viva la Infanta Pilar! Viva la Infanta Paz! Viva la Infanta Eulalia!”—each as we came. And the mayor, delighted and smiling and bowing, kept repeating: “But see! It is really wonderful! You are all known. You are so popular!”

After a time I wished to try my sister Pilar’s donkey, and I asked her to change with me. The mayor objected. No, no; I must not do it. It would not be right. “What?” I said. “Is it forbidden by Spanish etiquette that I ride my sister’s donkey?” And I insisted. Then the mayor, seeing that I was determined, explained, in angry confusion that we could not change donkeys because our names had been clipped on their tails, so that the people might know who we were! And at the next village I watched the boys come behind us and read our names on the donkeys’ tails before they set up their shouting!

I thought it very clever—though such a joke on us—and I soon found that it was typically Spanish. They were very ingenious at playing such little tricks of deception. One of the oddest happened when we were making an official visit to another town, and driving again with another mayor. As we proceeded slowly through a crowded street, suddenly a boy ran into the roadway and dived between the wheels of our carriage. We were afraid that he would be killed, and we shouted to the driver, who pulled up his horses. The boy crawled out between the opposite wheels and ran away, but before we could start on again another boy did the same thing. This alarmed me so—with the fear of running over some one—that I wanted to stop altogether. How could one drive through a town where the children did such mad things? I would not go. The mayor assured me that it would not occur again, but I refused to believe him. How did he know? If these two boys would do it, why not others? Finally, to calm me, he admitted that he had hired these two boys to throw themselves under our wheels. But why? Because we were in front of his house, and his wife and family had wished to have a good look at us, and he had devised this charming plan to stop the carriage under their windows.

With a people whose simpler citizens are capable of such subterfuges, you may believe it was not easy to discover the truth of what was going on in the intricacies of Government. The truth, as far as I was ever able to discover it, was this.

In Spain there was an elaborate system of what is called “bossism” in the United States of America. But in Spain it had been carried to its final perfection. In every small community there was some wealthy person who controlled the machinery of public administration. He chose the persons who were to fill the elective offices, and the election returns were changed or manufactured to certify the election of his creatures. In office, then, these men obeyed his orders. Taxes were levied, the laws were administered, and justice was dealt out, as he directed, for the benefit and protection of himself and his friends. All the officials, ostensibly appointed or elected to represent the people and carry out the popular will, represented only the “cacique” (as he is called) and obeyed only him.

Over the smaller caciques were bigger caciques, with more power and a larger following, just as, in the United States, over the boss of a city there is a state boss. But in Spain the people had become quite unable to free themselves, and there was an absolute administration of the functions of Government for the benefit of the office-holders and the wealthy men who put them into office.

A change of the party in power at Madrid made no difference. They were, as my brother said, “the same dog with different collars.” They all obeyed the caciques.

As in America, all indirect taxes fell most heavily on those least able to bear them. The rents, the cost of living, the necessities of life were high; wages were low. No poor person ever dared to go to law. There is a Spanish proverb that “Lent and prisons are made for the poor.” Money ruled, and ruled everything.

Along with this rule of money went a rule of the priests. Spain had been for centuries the outpost of Christianity in the war with Mohammedanism. In the age-long struggle against the Moors the Church became the symbol of national freedom to all Spaniards; their faith and their freedom were both threatened, and they fought for both together. The wars for the possession of America kept the same aspect of religious wars, because they were waged against a Protestant nation; and down almost to modern times the Government and the Church were such partners in being that it was impossible they should separate.

Now, with peace and commercial development, the problems of Government had become wholly political, and the priests were as busy in politics as were the caciques. The State not only maintained all the churches and buildings of the religious orders, but paid salaries to the priests and the monks and the nuns. They were all, in this respect, officials of the administration, drawing money from the public revenues, so that they conspicuously benefited by the plundering of the people. Therefore, whenever discontent with the Government gathered head in rebellion, it was inevitably an “anti-clerical” revolt, even though it had no concern whatever with religion. That was not only very unfortunate for the State, since it made reformation difficult by making it seem anti-religious; it was also very unfortunate for the Church, since it directed popular dissatisfaction against the priests instead of against the misgovernment.

So the people of Spain, although they were almost as free to vote at elections as the people of the United States, had really no voice at all in their own government. When they revolted they made a useless “anti-clerical” revolt that took them nowhere, because they got involved in a quarrel about religion and the burning of churches. When a Republic was declared, with the aid of the army—which was Republican because the aristocracy did not even serve as officers—the system of misgovernment continued under a new name.

It made no difference to the caciques whether there was a King or a Republic; they ruled. If the army proclaimed my brother King, the Parliament, for the caciques, accepted him in the name of the people. It did not matter; he was powerless, simply because he could only act through the officials of the State who were largely responsible for the conditions. I think the caciques would rather have a king than a Republic, because the throne could be made a scapegoat in case of revolt. And, though jealous of the influence of the priests with the people, they were always in partnership with that influence to protect themselves.

I write this explanation here as if it were something that I and my brother and everybody else understood. As a matter of fact, we none of us understood it. How should we? We were strangers to the country. There was a Chinese wall around us, to keep us from learning anything that the administration did not wish us to know. My brother was very young—at this time only nineteen. (It is significant how the Government of Spain prefers young sovereigns.) And the poor people of Spain, who might have told us if they had not been dumb, did not even know themselves what was wrong.

My brother worked very hard, trying to oversee those departments of the Government that were most easily watched, such as the army and the navy. He did not trust to official reports, but went himself to see if the reports were accurate. It was on such visits that we had our adventures with the mayors.

Once when we were out driving, he said: “Let us go to the French hospital. I must inspect it. We will go without warning, so that they will not be able to prepare appearances for me.” So we drove to the hospital, and when we entered and it was seen that the King had arrived a man who had been paralysed for years was so startled that he got to his feet and walked. A miracle! And I thought if it had happened a few centuries earlier it might have made my brother a saint. Who knows? I might have had a little shrine myself.

He gave audiences every afternoon to whatever persons wished to see him, whether to present petitions, or merely to pay their respects, or what not. And his patience with everybody amazed me. It was impossible, I found, to learn anything from those who came. They were usually too oppressed by the formalities to be natural. One day, when I was assisting an older sister at an audience to ladies of Madrid, one lady was so embarrassed that when my sister invited her to sit down—in the rather brusque voice that was her characteristic utterance—the lady sat down on a chair in which a kitten was lying. I supposed, at first, that the kitten had escaped, but I soon saw the lady growing red in the face and shifting in her chair, as if she were painfully uncomfortable. My sister tried to put her at her ease by asking her the conventional questions about herself, and I struggled to control my amusement, but without succeeding well enough to trust myself to interfere. At last my sister dismissed the lady, and turned on me to demand what was the matter with me that I should be grinning and choking instead of behaving myself with dignity. I cried: “But your kitten—your kitten!” And then I saw that my laughter had been very cruel, for the kitten was dead. The lady had accepted the invitation to sit down as a Royal order, and had not dared to get up off the cat till she was dismissed, although the poor thing was struggling and fighting under her for its life.

Naturally it was difficult to get any information from people under such conditions. Not that I wish to represent myself as going about with the air of a determined student eager to know. I had only a desultory curiosity that was continually stirred by finding some new puzzle of false appearance. My brother’s problems of government were usually laid aside with us. We shared his recreation rather than his work. And, being human, I was much more interested in myself, my own problems of life, and the outlook of my future than I was in anything else. Being a Royal person in Spain was, in some of its aspects, rather a lark, but in others it was serious. For however free I might be in my mind to be amused, to be curious, to be cynical, there was no disguising the fact that I was limited in my friends, controlled in my affections, and of liberty in love and marriage wholly deprived. My mind might be what I pleased—my body was Royal.

CHAPTER IV

LOVE AND ENNUI

In the palace of Madrid, when the usher would take me to the antechamber of my brother’s apartments, I would always have an interval of waiting while word of my visit was being carried to the King. And during that interval there would usually be some young officers or aides-de-camp standing in another part of the room. Since they were Spaniards, and I was not hideous, if I glanced at them I found them trying to look romantic. If one of them was alone, he would either sigh “like a furnace,” as Shakespeare says, or try to look unutterable silences across the room. At first this embarrassed me. But when I grew reassured by the fact that none of them dared approach me or speak to me, I found it comical; and I used to watch them slyly to see whether they were going to be melancholy and sigh, or make lambent calf’s eyes at me in the best Spanish manner. Afterwards I would tell my brother, and he would laugh, because he knew the officers and enjoyed teasing them. It became one of the little jokes between us, that all his young aides were languishing their lives away in hopeless devotion to me. Later, some of them—unwilling, perhaps, to be merely amusing—announced that they were going to blow out their brains. I never heard that any did it; and I did not see what satisfaction it would have been to them if they had. I supposed that they came to the same conclusion themselves. After a while I learned that one does not take such threats of self-destruction seriously in Spain. They are only a form of mild attention paid to ladies by the gallantry that wishes to be dashing.

At luncheons, when the officers ate with us, even sighs were impossible; and they behaved like very good boys before the school-teacher. My own behaviour must have betrayed amused interest, for I remember that our mistress of the robes—called the “aya”—who is a sort of Court duenna, read me long lectures on the government of my eyes. When a man conversed with me I must not look directly at him. That look, in Spain, meant courtship. I must always look down, and just glance at him sidelong, under the ends of my eyelashes, demurely. The Spanish girls do it very well, but my eyes were not Spanish. I had the habit of direct gaze; and after repeated lectures from the aya I pretended that I had acquired a squint from trying to look sideways; and this annoyed the aya and made fun for my brother.

The Spanish girls are taught to regard men as some sort of wild animal, whom it is dangerous to meet unless one is well protected by chaperons; and they become as timid as Oriental girls, and, of course, as curious.

Sometimes in the evenings, when my sisters and I were with my brother in his apartments, he would have with him young men of the Court, friends of his own age, grandees’ sons and members of the foreign legations, who went shooting and hunting with him. I enjoyed talking and listening to them, much more than conversing with the young ladies of noble families who were invited to Court as companions to us Infantas. The men had travelled, and read, and met interesting people. The girls had had no experiences and no thoughts. They could talk only of their religion or of their fiancés.

They went to church for both. When a young Spaniard wished to begin courting he told the priest about it. The priest consulted the girl’s parents, and if the match was thought suitable, arrangements were made for her to attend certain Masses on certain mornings with her chaperon. Her official cavalier then posted himself somewhere near, made eyes at her during the service, and stood at the holy-water font when Mass was over, to offer her holy water as she went out. It was possible, also, to leave a letter at the church door with some old beggar, who would deliver it to the proper person in return for alms; but this correspondence was not for young girls. Their courting was carried on by means of devout looks, which were not required, one hopes, to be too oblique. I thought it very silly, and I said so; but the girls argued, piously, that since love was “a sacrament” it was right it should begin with holy water and benefit of clergy. I do not remember that the same argument was made for the intriguing ladies who carried on their correspondence through the beggars. As a matter of fact, the relations between the sexes were all wrong, since there could be no secure happiness based on such ignorance and Orientalism in a Western community, where the women can not be denied after marriage the liberty for which they are not prepared before that event.

When I was about fifteen years old, a young Austrian archduke came to Madrid to visit my brother, and I was presented to him with my sisters, and saw him at a distance at the dinner-table, and bowed to him as I passed him in the hall. Next morning my brother summoned me to his apartments to tell me that the archduke wished to become engaged to me. “But,” I said, amazed, “I have scarcely spoken to him!” Never mind; he had said he was in love with me; he wanted to marry me. And as soon as I had recovered from my first astonishment, the idea delighted me. To be engaged! It made me feel quite grown-up. Quite important. Almost married. And I thought it would give me a standing at Court that would prevent the Mistress of the Robes from being so dictatorial.

It would be impossible for me to marry for some time. Our family fortunes had been so depleted during the revolution that I had no dot, and the young archduke had not yet come into his estate either. My brother, acting as a father to his sisters, was paying all our expenses out of his own pocket, and saving for us, as dots, the moneys that were allowed us by the Government. So it was agreed that my engagement with the archduke should not be made public and official until enough money had been saved to make a provision for me.

Meanwhile I was privately engaged—and very proud of it. It was not extraordinary, in the Spanish Royal Family, for a girl to be engaged in her teens. My sister Isabel had been married at sixteen; and my grand-aunt, the Infanta Luisa Carlota, had been married at thirteen and was a grandmother at twenty-seven. But neither of my other sisters was engaged yet, and I enjoyed the advantage over them.

Even so, the archduke was not allowed to see me alone, and his courtship had to be formal. We were allowed to walk together in the garden of the palace, but only under the chaperonage of a lady-in-waiting, who followed a few paces behind us. One day, turning a corner of the path, we were hidden for a moment from the eyes of our chaperon, and the archduke seized his opportunity to kiss me. There was an adventure for you! When we returned to the palace I hastened to tell my sister. She was horrified. She ran to tell the governess. The governess was even more shocked. She declared that I had committed a mortal sin. “Good!” I cried. “I’m glad of it! At last I have committed a mortal sin! I didn’t think it was possible—the way I am watched.” There was a great to-do. They declared that I must go to confession at once.

I went, next morning, defiantly, and in such excitement that I confessed in a voice that could be heard by every one near the confessional. I had committed a mortal sin! I had been kissed by the archduke! And the manner in which I blurted it out was so funny that the priest burst out laughing. I asked him how it could be a sin to be kissed by the man who was going to marry me. He replied, teasing me, “But if you don’t marry him, still the kiss will remain.” “I don’t care,” I said; “it won’t show.” He assured me, finally, that it was not a sin at all; and perhaps I should have been crestfallen if it were not that I had triumphed over the others. Then, as the story got about, it started a reputation for me as a flirt, which I enjoyed innocently. An Infanta of Spain kissed by a man at fifteen! It was almost a record.

When the archduke went away we were allowed to write to each other, though, of course, our letters had to be read by some one. I gave mine to my brother, but I do not suppose he ever glanced at them; the letters of a girl of fifteen, in such circumstances, would not be very interesting. I began to ask questions about the Austrian Court, where I should have to live after I married; and the reports I heard of it were not reassuring. The etiquette was most strict. I should be worse off there than in Madrid. And I should be separated from my brother. Very soon I did not like the thought of my engagement at all.

My brother had told us, at our first meeting on our return to Spain, that he was in love with a daughter of the Duc de Montpensier; that they had been corresponding unknown to her family—who were not so strict as ours—and that he intended to marry her. My mother was outraged at this announcement, for it was well known that the Duc de Montpensier had helped to bring about the revolution that had lost her the throne. When we went to Sevilla, to live in the Alcazar, she forgave the Duc, who had a place in Sevilla, but she continued to intrigue against my brother’s marriage; and it was because of this that he quarrelled with her, and let her go back to France when we Infantas came to live with him in Madrid.

The Duc de Montpensier was the youngest son of King Louis Philippe of France, and—like all that king’s sons—extremely clever. He had married my mother’s sister, another daughter of King Ferdinand VII., on the same day that my parents married; and he had lived in Spain ever since. In Sevilla my sisters and I became very friendly with our young cousins, the Duc’s children, and I became like another daughter to the Duc, whom I adored. He had all the charm of the esprit Français, animated and witty, accustomed to conversation with clever people, tolerant of opinions opposed to his own, and hating—more than anything else in the world—stupidity. He delighted me. He sympathised with me. I used to tell him all my little troubles.

I think that when the history of my mother’s reign and the republic is written, it will lay great stress on the Duc’s influence in Spain. At once, on his arrival, he had attracted to himself all the Liberal elements in the Spanish Court, unconsciously, as