Inés de Castro.
In one of the chapels of Alcobaça’s church are the tombs of King Pedro and of Inés de Castro. Legend would have it that they were buried feet to feet, in order that when the trumpet of the Day of Judgment sounded their eyes might meet at once as they rose from the dead. In the striking lines of the modern Portuguese poet, Snr. Affonso Lopes Vieira—striking by reason of their fine sound and volume—
Hão de accordar sorrindo eternamente,
Os olhos um no outro emfim pousando.
(They will awake and smile henceforth for ever,
As their eyes meet at length in fond embrace.)
Such subtleties were scarcely of that age, but the tombs (and their recumbent figures) certainly face one another, minutely and delightfully carved in stone. The rivers Alcoa and Baça meet at Alcobaça, and a tributary of the Alcoa, a tiny stream, runs beneath the convent. Some of the tombs in this Capella dos Tumulos are green with damp and run a fair chance of permanent injury. King Diniz’ mother as well as the children of Pedro and Inés are buried in the same chapel. Round the cruel fate of lovely Inés a whole literature has grown up in prose and verse, from the fine verses of the courtier poet Garcia de Resende—far the best that he wrote—in the reign of King Manoel I to the poem Costança by Snr. Eugenio de Castro, and the sonnet which the two lines quoted above close. There is scarcely an educated Portuguese who does not try his hand at poetry, and scarcely a Portuguese poet who escapes the temptation to renew in verse the tragic tale of Inés de Castro. The temptation is the greater in that she lived and died a stone’s throw from the halls of Coimbra, in which most Portuguese receive their education, and represents in her romantic story and sorrowful ending all that is most meigo and saudoso in Portuguese saudade. From the fifteenth to the twentieth century the Inés legend runs like a connecting link through Portuguese literature, and if it has never yet been treated with more than a pretty lyric wistfulness in minor poems beautiful but subjective, perhaps these are the basis and preparation for the great poet who will record it in a spirit of true and high Tragedy worthy of the subject and of these Alcobaça sculptures. Pedro and Inés do not even meet in the celebrated drama, Inés de Castro, by Antonio Ferreira (1528-69). He discreetly left that for the Day of Judgment, rightly feeling, no doubt, that his own powers of description and psychology would be inadequate to the occasion. So they still lie waiting separated by these barriers of incomparable sculpture in the gloomy damp Chapel of the Tombs. With relief the visitor emerges to the sunny cloisters, a part of which really dates from the days of stout-hearted King Diniz and escaped the far-spread destruction of the Peninsular War.
TOMB OF D. INÉS DE CASTRO, ALCOBAÇA
Batalha.