architect, “how do you believe Spain can be saved?”
“There is but one way,” he answered solemnly; “there is but one way--a
federal republic; in this I am of the same mind as my friend, but with
Don Amadeus for president.” (The friend shrugged his shoulders.) “I
repeat it--with Don Amadeus as president! He is the only man who could
direct the republic. This is not my opinion alone; it is the opinion of
a great many. Let Don Amadeus make it plain to his father that a
monarchy will never please us here; let him call Castelar, Figueras, and
Pi y Margal to the government; let him proclaim a republic and have
himself elected president, and cry to Spain, ‘Sirs, I am now in command,
and if any one raises his horns, let him beware of the rod!’ And then we
shall have true liberty.”
The shopkeeper, who did not believe that true liberty consisted in being
beaten over the horns, protested, the other replied, and the discussion
lasted some time. Then they began to speak of the queen, and the
architect declared that, although he was a republican, he had profound
respect and warm admiration for Donna Victoria. “She has a great deal in
here,” said he, touching his forehead with his finger. “Is it true that
she knows Greek?”
“Oh yes,” I replied.
“Did you hear that, eh?” he asked the other.
“Yes,” replied the shopkeeper in a low voice, “but you don’t govern
Spain with Greek.” He admitted, however, that, since one must have a
queen, it was desirable to have one who was learned and intelligent, and
worthy of sitting on the throne of Isabella the Catholic--who, as every
one knows, knew as much Latin as a well-read professor--rather than to
have one of those hare-brained queens who have no head for anything but
festivities and favorites. In a word, he did not wish to see the house
of Savoy in Spain. But if anything could plead a little in its favor, it
would be the Greek of the queen.
What a gallant republican!
There is, however, in this race a generosity of heart and a vigor of
mind which justify their honorable fame. The Arragonese are respected in
Spain. The people of Madrid, who pick flaws in the Spaniards of all the
provinces--who call the Catalans rough, the Andalusians vain, the
Valencians fierce, the Galicians miserable, the Basques ignorant--even
they speak with a little more reserve of the haughty sons of Arragon,
who in the nineteenth century have written in their own blood the most
glorious page in the history of Spain. The name of Saragossa sounds to
the people like a cry of liberty, and to the army it is a battle-cry.
But, since there is no rose without a thorn, this noble province is also
a seed-bed of restless demagogues, of guerilla chieftains, of
magistrates, of a people with the hot head and steady hand, who give all
the government departments a great deal to do. The government is obliged
to caress Arragon like a morose, passionate son who lays his plans to
blow up the house if his will is crossed in the least thing.
The entrance of King Amadeus into Saragossa and the short stop he made
there in 1871 offered an occasion for some deeds which are worthy of
being retold, not only because they refer to the prince, but because
they are an eloquent expression of the character of the people; and
before everything else should come the speech of the mayor, which made
such a stir in and out of Spain, and will probably remain among the
traditions of Saragossa as a classic example of republican audacity.
Toward evening the king arrived at the railroad-station, where,
accompanied by an immense crowd, the delegates of the many
municipalities, the societies, and the civil and military corps of the
various cities of Arragon had gathered to meet him. After the customary
cheers and applause had subsided the alcayde of Saragossa presented
himself before the king, and read the following address in an emphatic
manner:
“Sir! It is not my own humble self, and it is not the man of deep
republican convictions, but in truth the alcayde of Saragossa, invested
with the sacred universal suffrage, who, through a sense of unavoidable
duty, presents himself here before you and submits himself to your
commands. You are about to enter the precincts of a city which, sated at
length with glory, bears the title of enduring heroism--a city which,
when danger threatened the integrity of the nation, became a new
Numantia--a city which humbled the armies of Napoleon in their very
triumphs. Saragossa was the advance-guard of liberty; to her no
government has ever seemed too liberal. Treason has never found shelter
in the breast of any of her sons. Enter, then, within the precincts of
Saragossa. If you lack courage, you have no need of it, for the sons of
their ever-heroic mother are brave in open field and are incapable of
treachery. There is at this moment no shield nor any army more ready to
defend your person than the loyalty of the descendants of Palafox, for
their very enemies find an inviolate asylum beneath their roofs. Think
and consider that if you walk steadfastly in the path of justice; if
you further the observance of the laws of the strictest morality; if you
protect the producer, who hitherto has given so much and received so
little; if you maintain the integrity of the ballot; if Saragossa and
Spain shall one day owe to you the achievement of the sacred aspiration
of the majority of this great people whom you have learned to
know,--then perhaps you may be honored by a more glorious title than
that of king. You may then be the first citizen of the nation, and the
most dearly loved in Saragossa, and the Spanish republic will owe to you
her complete felicity.”
To this address, which signified, after all, “We do not recognize you as
king, but, however, you may come in, and we will not murder you, because
heroes do not murder by treachery; and if you will be brave and will
treat us as you ought to do, we will possibly consent to support you as
president of the republic,”--to this the king replied with a
bitter-sweet smile which seemed to say, “Too great a condescension,” and
pressed the hand of the alcayde, to the great surprise of all present.
He then mounted his horse and entered Saragossa. The people, from all
accounts, received him with delight, and from the windows many ladies
threw poems, garlands, and doves down upon him. At some points General
Cordova and General Rosell, who accompanied him, were obliged to clear
the street with their horses. When he entered the Coso a woman of the
people rushed out to present him with some memorial. The king, who had
ridden past without noticing her, turned back and took it. Soon after a
charcoal-man presented himself and stretched out his sooty hand, which
the king grasped. In the square of Santa Engracia he was received by a
pompous masquerade of dwarfs and giants, who welcomed him with some
traditional dances, amid the discordant cheers of the multitude. So he
passed through the entire city. The next day he visited the church of
Our Lady of the Pillar, the hospitals, the prisons, and the circus of
the bull-fights, and everywhere his presence was hailed almost with the
enthusiasm due a monarch, not altogether without the secret chagrin of
the alcayde, who accompanied him, and who would have been better pleased
had the people of Saragossa contented themselves with the observance of
the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” without entering further
upon his modest promises.
However, the king had a joyous welcome on the way from Saragossa to
Logroño.
At Logroño, in the midst of an innumerable crowd of peasants, national
guardsmen, women, and boys, he saw for the first time the venerable
General Espartero. As soon as they saw each other they ran together; the
general sought the hand of the king, the king opened his arms, and the
crowd gave a shout of joy. “Your Majesty!” said the illustrious soldier
in a husky voice, “the people welcome you with patriotic enthusiasm,
because they see in their young monarch the firmest support of the
liberty and independence of their country, and are sure that if by any
misfortune our enemies were to cause trouble, Your Majesty, at the head
of the army and the citizen militia, would overwhelm and rout them. My
broken health did not suffer me to go to Madrid to felicitate Your
Majesty and your august consort upon your establishment on the throne of
Ferdinand. To-day I do so, and I repeat, once again, that I will serve
faithfully the person of Your Majesty as king of Spain, chosen by the
will of the nation. Your Majesty, I have in the city a modest home, and
I offer it to you, and ask of you to honor it with your presence.” In
these simple words the new king was greeted by the oldest, the
best-beloved, and the most renowned of his subjects. A happy augury,
though sadly at variance with the final outcome!
* * * * *
Toward midnight I went to a masquerade in a theatre of moderate size on
the Coso, a short distance from the Square of the Constitution. The
maskers were few and very shabby, but there was a compensation for this
in a dense crowd of people, fully a third of whom were dancing
furiously. Except for the language, I should not have known that I was
at a masked ball in a theatre in Spain rather than in Italy. I seemed to
see precisely the same faces. There was the same familiarity, the same
freedom of speech and movement, the usual degeneracy of the ball into
noisy and unbridled brawl.
Of the hundred couples of dancers who waltzed past me, only one pair
remains impressed upon my memory--a youth of twenty years, tall, lithe,
and fair, with great black eyes, and a girl of the same age, brown as an
Andalusian--both beautiful and noble in their bearing, dressed in the
ancient costumes of Arragon, clasped in each other’s arms, face to face,
as though the one wished to breathe the other’s breath, rosy as two
flowers, and radiant with joy. They paused in the middle of the crowd,
glancing about with an air of disdain, and a thousand eyes followed them
with a low murmur of admiration and envy.
On leaving the theatre I stood a moment at the door to see them pass
again, and then I turned toward the hotel melancholy and alone. The next
morning before dawn I was on my way to the Castiles.
BURGOS.
To go from Saragossa to Burgos, the capital city of Old Castile, one
travels the whole length of the great valley of the Ebro, crosses a part
of Arragon and a part of Navarre, as far as the city of Miranda,
situated on the branch road which passes through St. Sebastian and
Bayonne.
The country is full of historic memories, of ruins, monuments, and
famous names; every village recalls a battle, every province a war. At
Tudela, the French defeated General Castaños; at Calahorra, Sertorius
withstood Pompey; at Navarrete, Henry de Transtamare was conquered by
Peter the Cruel. One sees the remains of the city of Egon ad Agoncilla;
the ruins of the Roman aqueduct at Alcanadre; and the remains of the
Moorish bridge at Logroño. The mind grows tired of recalling the
memories of so many centuries and of so many peoples, and the eye grows
weary with the mind.
The appearance of the country changes every moment. Near Saragossa there
are green fields dotted with houses, while here and there one sees
groups of peasants wrapped in their many-colored shawls, and
occasionally donkeys and carts. Farther on there are only vast
undulating plains, bare and arid, without a tree, or a house, or a road,
where for miles and miles one sees only a herd of cattle, a cowherd, and
a hut, or some little village of mud-colored, thatched cottages, so low
that one can scarcely distinguish them from the ground--groups of huts
rather than villages, true pictures of poverty and squalor.
The Ebro winds beside the railroad in great curves, now so close that
the train seems on the point of plunging into it, now looking in the
distance like a silver line appearing and disappearing between the
hillocks and through the underbrush along its banks. In the distance one
sees a purple chain of mountains, and beyond them the snowy peaks of the
Pyrenees. Near Tudela one sees a canal, and after Custejon the country
becomes green again; as one advances the arid plains alternate with
olive-groves, and here and there lines of varied green break the yellow
expanse of the deserted land. On the distant hilltops one sees the ruins
of enormous castles, surmounted by towers broken, gaping, and fallen to
decay, like the great trunks of giants, prostrate, but threatening.
At every station I bought a paper; before I had travelled half the
distance I had a mountain, the journals of Madrid and Arragon, big and
little, black and red, but, unfortunately, not one friendly to
[Illustration: _Water Carrier_]
Amadeus. And I say “unfortunately,” because to read those papers was to
fall into the temptation to turn my back on Madrid and start for home.
From the first column to the last there was a passionate outburst of
insults, imprecations, and threats directed against Italy, scandals
about our king, burlesques of our ministers, the wrath of God implored
to descend upon our army,--the whole founded upon the report, then
current, of a coming war in which the allied powers of Italy and Germany
would suddenly attack France and Spain for the purpose of destroying
Catholicism, the eternal enemy of them both, of establishing the duke of
Genoa upon the throne of St. Louis, and of securing the throne of Philip
II. for the duke of Aosta. There were threats in the leading articles,
threats in the clippings, threats in the notices, threats in prose and
in verse, displayed with sketches, capital letters, and long rows of
exclamation points; dialogues between father and son, the one at Rome,
the other in Madrid, one of whom would ask, “What shall I do?” Whereupon
the other would reply, “Shoot!” or, again, “Let them come; we are ready:
we are ever the Spain of 1808. The conquerors of the armies of Napoleon
have no fear of the ugly mugs of King William’s Uhlans or of the yells
of Victor Emanuel’s sharpshooters.” And then King Amadeus would be
called “poor child;” the Italian army described as a crowd of
ballet-dancers and opera-singers; the Italians in Spain requested to
take their departure by the gentle hint, “Italians to the train.” In
short, ask what you would, and there was something to meet your wish. I
must confess that for a short time I was a little disturbed. I imagined
that, at Madrid, Italians could hardly fail to be hooted in the streets;
I remembered the letter which I had received at Genoa, repeated to
myself, “Italians to the train” as advice worthy of serious
consideration; I glanced with suspicion at the travellers who entered
the carriage, and at the railroad-employees, and expected that on first
spying me they would say, “Look at that Italian emissary! Let us send
him to keep company with General Prim.”
On nearing Miranda the railroad enters a mountainous region, varied and
picturesque, where on every side, wherever one looks, one sees only dark
gray rocks which suggest to the imagination a sea turned into stone at
the time of a storm, stretching away as far as the eye can reach. It is
a country full of savage beauty, lonely as a desert, silent as a
glacier, which represents to the fancy, as it were, a vision of an
uninhabited planet, and impresses one with a mingled feeling of sadness
and fear. The train passed between two walls of rock, sharp-pointed,
hollowed, and crested, serrated in every manner and form, so that it
seemed as though a crowd of stonecutters had spent their entire lives in
cutting furiously on every side, working blindly to see who could make
the most erratic marks. The railroad then comes out into a vast plain
thickly wooded with poplar, among which rises Miranda.
The station is a long way from the city, and I was obliged to wait in
the café until nightfall for the train to Madrid. For three hours I had
no other company than that of the two custom-officers, called in Spain
_carabineros_, dressed in a severe uniform, with a dagger and pistols
and a carbine slung across their shoulders.
There were two or three of them at every station. The first few times I
saw the barrels of their carbines opposite the window I thought they had
come there to arrest some one, and perhaps...; and without thinking I
put my hand on my passport.
They are handsome young fellows, brave and courteous, and the traveller
who is obliged to wait can be pleasantly entertained by talking with
them about Carlists and contrabands, as I did, with great advantage to
my Spanish vocabulary. Toward evening a Mirandese came in: he was a man
of about fifty, a politician, bright and talkative, and so I left the
_carabineros_ to join him. He was the first Spaniard who fully explained
the political situation to me. I asked him to unravel a little this
precious tangle of parties, of which I had not succeeded in finding the
thread, and he was well pleased to do so, and went into the subject very
thoroughly.
“It is described in two words,” he began. “See how matters stand! There
are five principal parties--the Absolutist, the Moderate, the
Conservative, the Radical, and the Republican. The Absolutist is divided
into two other parties, the out-and-out Carlists and the dissenting
Carlists. The Moderate party has separated into two, one of which favors
Isabella, the other Alphonso. The Conservative party is made up of
four--get them clearly fixed in your mind: the Canovists, led by Canovas
del Castillo; the ex-Montpensierists, led by Rios y Rosas; the
Fronterizos, led by General Serrano; and the Historical Progressionists,
led by Sagasta. The Radical party is divided into four--the Democratic
Progressionists, headed by Zorilla; the Cimbrios, headed by Martos; the
Democrats, by Ribero; and the Economists, headed by Rodriguez. The
Republican party is composed of three elements--the Unionists, led by
Garcia Ruiz; the Federalists, headed by Figueras; and the Socialists, by
Garrido. The Socialists are again divided into two parties--the
International Socialists, and the Socialists without international
sympathies. In all there are sixteen parties, and these sixteen are
still further subdivided. Martos is trying to constitute a party of his
own, Candan to form a second party, and Moret a third. Rios y Rosas, Pi
y Margal, and Castelar are each forming their own party. There are
accordingly twenty-two parties already formed or in process of
formation. Add to these the partisans of the republic, with Amadeus for
president; the partisans of the queen, who would gladly trip up the
heels of Amadeus; the partisans of the Montpensier monarchy; those who
are republicans on the condition that Cuba be retained; those who are
republicans on the condition that Cuba be given up; those who have not
yet renounced the prince of Hohenzollern; those who long for a union
with Portugal; and you will have thirty parties.
“If one wished to be still more accurate, one might subdivide still
further, but it is better to get a clear idea of matters as they stand.
Sagasta inclines toward the Unionists, Zorilla toward the Republicans;
Serrano is disposed to support the Moderates; the Moderates, if they had
an opportunity, would join hands with the Absolutists, who, in their
turn, would join with the Republicans, who would unite with a part of
the Radicals to blow the minister Sagasta skyhigh, as he is too
conservative for the Democratic Progressionists and too liberal for the
Unionists, who are afraid of the Federalists, while they, the
Federalists, on their part, do not place much confidence in the
Radicals, who are always vacillating between the Democrats and the
followers of Sagasta.
“Have I given you a clear idea of the situation?”
“As clear as amber,” I answered with a shudder.
* * * * *
I recall the journey from Miranda to Burgos as I would the page of a
book read in bed when the eyes begin to close and the flame of the
candle droops, for I was dead with sleep. From time to time one of my
fellow-travellers shook me to make me look out. The night was calm and
glorious, with clear moonlight. Whenever I looked out of the window I
saw on both sides of the track huge rocks of fantastic form, so close
that they seemed about to fall upon the train. They were white as
marble, and shone so brightly that one could have counted all the
points, the hollows and the boulders, as easily as in broad daylight.
“We are at Pancorbo,” said my neighbor. “Look at that height! Up there
stood a terrible castle which the French destroyed in 1813. This is
Briviesca. Look! here John I. of Castile summoned the States General,
who granted the title of prince of Asturia to the heir to the throne.
Look! there is the mountain of Brujola, which touches the stars.”
He was one of those indefatigable cicerones who would talk even to an
umbrella, and while he was eternally saying “Look!” he kept punching me
in the side near my pocket. At last we arrived at Burgos; my neighbor
disappeared, without saying good-bye. I took a cab to a hotel, and just
as I was about to pay the driver I discovered that the little purse in
which I carried change, and which I was in the habit of carrying in my
overcoat pocket, was missing. I thought of the States General of
Briviesca, and ended the matter with a philosophic “I deserved it,”
without making an outcry, as many do on similar occasions, “By the gods!
where can we be? what a terrible country!” as though there are not in
their own lands light-fingered people, who would carry off a purse
without even having the courtesy to tell one of the history or geography
of the country.
The hotel where I stopped was served by girls, as are all the hotels in
Castile. There were six or seven of them, like great overgrown children,
plump and muscular, who came and went with their arms full of mattresses
and linen, bending back in athletic attitudes, rosy, panting, and
laughing, so that it made one happy to see them. A hotel with
women-servants is an entirely different thing from an ordinary hotel.
The traveller seems to feel less strange and goes to rest with a quieter
heart. The women impart a certain home-like air to the house which
almost makes one forget one’s loneliness wheresoever one may be. They
are more attentive than men; knowing that the traveller is inclined to
be melancholy, they try to change his thoughts. They laugh and talk in a
familiar way in an effort to make one feel like a member of the family
and in safe hands. There is an air of housewifery about them, and they
serve one, not because it is their business, but because they like to
make themselves useful. They sew on buttons with an air of protection;
they take the clothes-brush out of one’s hand with a gesture of
impatience, as much as to say, “Let me have it, you good-for-nothing
thing!” They pick the hairs off of your clothes when you are going out,
and when you come back, all bespattered with mud, they say, “Oh! poor
fellow!” They advise you not to sleep with your head too low when they
bid you good-night; they bring your coffee to you in bed, telling you
benevolently to “Lie still; don’t get up!” One of them was named
Beatrice, another Carmelita, and a third Amparo (protection), and they
all three possessed that ponderous highland beauty which makes one
exclaim in a deep voice, “What splendid creatures!” When they ran along
the corridors they shook the whole house.
At sunrise next morning Amparo called in my ear, “_Caballero!_” A
quarter of an hour later I was in the street.