Well, Madame Hugo was so delighted with the form of the charming bourdaloue that she asked the master of the house in which she was staying if she might buy it of him. But, like a true Spaniard, the old Castillian was an implacable enemy to our nation, so he replied that Madame Hugo could have the coveted object if she wished, but that he never sold anything to the French. As, in this case, to take it was equivalent to stealing it, Madame Hugo refrained, supposing the bourdaloue to form part of a collection which it would be a pity to spoil. Now let us explain why those little elongated vessels are called bourdaloues. The famous preacher gave such interminably long sermons that ladies were compelled to take certain precautions against their length which we think we need not explain more fully. More happy than Christopher Columbus, who gave his name to a new continent, the pillar of Christian eloquence gave his name to a new article of furniture, made especially because of his doings—an article which from its long and narrow shape was easily carried about.
Now that we think we have cleared up this historical question to the satisfaction of our readers, we will rejoin the convoy on its journey to Madrid. It had reached within a league of Otero, where they were to pass the night and whose towers they could already discern, when, because one of the spokes of a back wheel of Madame Hugo's gigantic coach snapped in two, they had to make an enforced halt on the high-road, which was paved with enormous pieces of rock. Faithful to his courteous habits, the Duc de Cotadilla had ordered a general halt, causing an outburst of objections. A general halt at seven in the evening! a halt which might last a couple of hours and allow the convoy to be overtaken by nightfall! The duke could hardly have done more even if the accident had happened to one of the waggons containing the treasure, and he was exceeding his duties altogether when it was only for the wife of a French general, a lady who had been a member of the Spanish aristocracy for barely three years! So there was a great clamour throughout the convoy. There had been precedents in similar cases, and the unfortunate carriage had been left behind bag and baggage to the mercy of Providence! The Duc de Cotadilla wished to keep his word, but he had to give way before the chorus of complaints. The convoy meant to continue its way to Otero; but help on which she had not counted was to be given to Madame Hugo and her poor abandoned coach. The forty Dutch grenadiers asked to be allowed the favour of remaining by her coach as escort until the wheel could be mended and it was possible to continue the journey. This favour was granted them. The convoy moved off and gradually, like a receding tide, left the coach stranded on the highway. But never did shipwrecked people alone on a desert island set themselves to work with greater energy to construct a raft than did the forty Dutch grenadiers to the mending of the wheel. It was completed in an hour or so. When they set off again, the rear of the convoy had long been lost to sight and darkness had begun to fall. However, in spite of all these adverse circumstances, the coach, with Madame Hugo, her three children, the servant, the chambermaid, the forty Dutch grenadiers, entered Otero by ten that night, without having had to pay toll to the guerilleros—a most unusual stroke of good luck. During the night, owing to the efforts of a local wheelwright, whom they compelled by force to undertake the job, with two army blacksmiths superintending his labours, the coach was mended; and next day it was ready to take its place at the head of the file of carriages.
They reached the chain of the Guadarrama Mountains and began to climb them; ascending the highest summit, they made a halt at the foot of the gigantic lion which turns its back on Old Castile, and, with one paw on the scutcheon of the Spains, looks to New Castile; then they descended towards the campagna round Madrid. The campagna of Rome is bare and gloomy, but flecked with glorious sunshine, and looks alive, if one may so put it, in spite of its loneliness. The campagna of Madrid is bare, arid and grey, and like a cemetery. And the Escurial rises up at the end of the plain like a tomb. This, indeed, was the impression it left on me, and also the impression it left on Hugo, who visited it thirty-five years before I did.
"L'Espagne m'accueillit livrée à la conquête;
Je franchis le Burgare où mugit la tempête;
De loin y pour un tombeau, je pris l'Escurial,
Et le triple aqueduc vit s'incliner ma tête
Devant son front impérial.
Là, je voyais les feux des haltes militaires
Noircir les murs croulants des villes solitaires;
La tente de l'église envahissait le seuil;
Les rires des soldats, dans les saints monastères,
Par l'écho répétés, semblaient des cris de deuil!"
The convoy wound over the plain from the Escurial to Madrid like a long snake; they only slept once on the road, at Galapagar. Next day, by six in the evening, they had reached Madrid. They had scarcely entered its streets before everybody disbanded, overjoyed at being no longer under the restraint of military discipline. Madame Hugo bade farewell to the Duc de Cotadilla, of Colonel Montfort and her forty Dutchmen; then Colonel du Saillant took her to the palace of the princes of Masserano, which was prepared for her reception. The general was at his governorship in Guadalajara: we shall see later what he was doing there.
The palace of Masserano was in the Calle de la Reyna. It was a vast building of the seventeenth century, in all the splendour and severity of that period; it had no garden but a multitude of little square courtyards paved with marble, each with a fountain in the centre. These courtyards could only be entered through a kind of postern gateway; the sun never reached down into them, for the walls enclosing them were some forty to fifty feet high; and they were only just large enough for a wolf to walk round the fountain; in fact, they were simply store-places of shade and coolness. So far as Victor's memory carried him, the interior of the palace was of incredible magnificence; especially the dining-room, which had large glass windows on each of its four sides, the light through which showed up in all their glory splendid paintings by Fra Bartolommeo, Velasquez, Murillo, Sébastian del Piombo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michael Angelo. This dining-room led into a large salon, upholstered in red damask, which led into another salon upholstered in blue damask, which in its turn led to what was called the princess's room, an immense chamber, upholstered and furnished in blue figured silk and silver. On the other side of the dining-room, through an anteroom, ornamented solely with oak chests which were meant to serve as seats for attendants, you entered a large gallery which contained a collection of full-length portraits of the Counts of Masserano, in court dress, also of princes of the same name; the principality, by the way, only dated back as far as the middle of the seventeenth century. It was in these great galleries that the children played hide-and-seek with the sons of General Lucotte, in rooms a hundred and fifty feet long, and among Chinese vases and porcelain ornaments six feet in height! Their evenings were spent on a large balcony, from whence they could see the comet, in which they could distinguish the Virgin giving her hand to Ferdinand VII.,—so said the Spanish priests.
One morning an escort of Westphalian cavalry arrived, accompanying a messenger bearing a letter from General Hugo. The general was unable to come to Madrid, being busily engaged in warfare on the banks of the Tagus. The main purpose of the letter was to recommend the best college for the education of the three children. They were to be placed in the Séminaire des Nobles, where they would be prepared as pages of the king. It was not usual to take boys under thirteen, but, although Abel was only twelve, Eugène but ten and Victor only eight, an exception was made in their favour and a license from the king provided for their immediate admission. They had to leave the splendid Masserano palace, with its beautiful paintings by old masters, its splendid tapestries, its interminable galleries decorated with Chinese vases and the walls whereon three generations of counts and princes seemed to come to life again in their state costumes or in their trappings of war, for the gloomy seminary in the Calle San-Isidro. The Séminaire des Nobles was, indeed, a formidable and severe-looking edifice, with its great treeless courts, and one might almost go so far as to say its vast schoolrooms without scholars. There were twenty-five pupils, not including the three new-comers in this seminary, which had contained three hundred before the French invasion. This was, approximately, the proportion of the aristocracy of Spain that had rallied round Joseph Bonaparte. And besides the twenty-five scholars there was, as we have said, the three sons of General Hugo and a Spanish prisoner. The seminary looked indeed a gloomy place to the poor children when they entered it. Imagine those schoolrooms and dormitories and lavatories and refectories intended to meet the needs of three hundred pupils, now containing but twenty-five unhappy scholars, who looked lost therein. Virgil's phrase, rari nantes, seemed entirely to meet the case. The establishment was kept by two Jesuits who controlled the college with apparently equal strictness; these two Jesuits each represented opposite types of their order: one was named Don Manoël and the other Don Bazilio. Don Bazilio was tall and nearly fifty-five years of age; his forehead was bare and bald, and his nose was like a vulture's beak; his mouth was large and firm, and his chin protruded. He was hard and severe in character and never forgave. But, at the same time, he was just, and never punished unless punishment was deserved. The other, Don Manoël, was plump and very broad. His figure was thick-set; he had a smiling, almost a gay, face; and his manner towards new-comers was gentle and gracious and caressing; judging from his appearance, he was always ready to excuse, or at any rate to make allowance for faults; he was extremely false, very deceitful and utterly mischievous; he directed the college alone, in spite of the pretended collaboration of Don Bazilio, doubtless by order of his superiors. When the first edge of his appearance of sympathy had worn off, Don Manoël became unbearable. Lads began by detesting Don Bazilio; but, as he was just, in spite of his severity, this hatred gradually passed away; whilst, on the other hand, people began by liking Don Manoël, and ended by detesting him. But when the latter feeling was aroused it went on increasing crescendo.
The studies which these two Jesuits set their pupils were ridiculous. They were so feeble that, in a college composed of young people of eighteen to twenty years of age, a special class had to be started for the new arrivals of whom the oldest was but twelve. They actually judged of the children's capacities by their size when they began to examine them, and gave Abel a Quintus Curtius, and Eugène De Viris, and little Victor an Epitome. But at sight of this book, with which he had finished a long time before, the child rebelled and boldly asked for Tacitus. The fathers looked at one another in stupefaction and, refraining from punishing the audacious boy who had delivered himself of this ill-timed jest, they brought him the book. Victor opened it and immediately translated the paragraph about Cocceius Nerva on which he had alighted at haphazard. The two other brothers took up Tacitus in their turn, and gave an equal, if a not superior, proof of skill. They brought them Perseus and Juvenal; the children were familiar with both these satirists, and could not merely interpret them, but even offered to recite whole satires by heart. Thus the children fresh from France made light of these three authors, who were looked upon at the Séminaire des Nobles as beyond the reach of rhetoricians of twenty! The two Jesuits put their heads together, decided that they must make a special class for the three new-comers and settled that they would expound Plautus to them. Don Manoël it was, a true Jesuit, who chose an author full of ellipses, bristling with idioms, crammed with Roman patois, like that which Molière puts into the mouths of his peasant-folk, and for ever alluding to customs that had disappeared even in Cicero's time. But Don Manoël's end was accomplished: the children's brains grew dull over Plautus; and this was exactly what he wished, to break their pride. The twenty-two other pupils were Spaniards, sons of Spanish grandees who had thrown in their lot with Joseph. Among them were two sons of high birth to whom Victor dedicated different Souvenirs in his works: one, the Count of Belverana, whom he put in his Lucrèce Borgia, and Raymond de Benavente, to whom he addressed, in 1823, the Ode that begins with this stanza:—
"Hélas! j'ai compris ton sourire,
Semblable au ris du condamné
Quand le mot qui doit le proscrire
A son oreille a résonné!
En pressant ta main convulsive,
J'ai compris ta douleur pensive,
Et ton regard morne et profond,
Qui, pareil à l'éclair des nues,
Brille sur des mers inconnues,
Mais ne peut en montrer le fond."
The young poet noticed one custom peculiar to Spanish manners, namely, these children, whose ages varied from thirteen and every year up to twenty, all used the familiar form of address among themselves, as became sons of Spanish grandees, and never addressed one another by their baptismal or family names, but only by their titles of prince, duke, marquis, count or baron. They called Victor "Baron," which filled him with pride.