“What! friend Roch, up as early as ever,” cried the eldest who was also the least good-looking.
“Leon, my good fellow, choicest of souls—won’t you walk with us this morning?” said the tallest, a consequential personage, who was walking, as usual, between the other two, so that they looked as if they occupied their place on each side of him for purely ornamental purposes, and to throw his personal and social dignity into the strongest relief. The young man in mourning excused himself as best he might.
“I will return within an hour,” he said walking briskly away. “Au revoir.”
The other three went on along the promenade, and it will be proper here to give some account of this illustrious trio which formed, as the reader must understand, a constellation such as may be seen in Spain at any hour, in spite of the frequent cloudiness of our climate. The reader, like the writer, will of course say at once: We know them—let them pass and disappear. But then, they never disappear. This constellation never sets, is never dimmed by the radiance of the sun, never hidden behind a cloud, never in eclipse. It is always in the ascendant. Alas! yes, it never fails to shine with terrible splendour, and at the zenith of social life in Spain.
Who does not know the Marquis de Fúcar? Flattery speaks of him as an Oasis of Wealth in the midst of the desert of universal poverty; he holds the first place among the stars of the Spanish capital, and is the very Alpha of the society he moves in.
Who, again, does not know Don Joaquín Onésimo, that beacon light of Spanish bureaucracy, which burns so brightly wherever it shows itself, the central glory of the myriad Onésimos who, under different pretexts, fill various offices of the State? “Not a family, but an epidemic,” was said of the Onésimos. But there is no doubt whatever—Heaven knows—that if this luminary were to be extinguished, all the precincts of the administration would remain in darkness, and all social order, social institutions—nay, society itself, would revert to primæval chaos. The third side of this triangle was formed by a polished and well-dressed man, in whose pallid and languid features all the freshness and energy of his two and thirty years seemed prematurely quenched. His manners were insolent, and his whole aspect gave that impression of exhaustion and fatigue which is common enough in those who have wasted their moral strength in politics, their intellect in party journalism, and their physical vigour in vice. The type is peculiar to Spain, and to Madrid—nocturnal in its habits, perfervid, lean; the very incarnation of that national fever which betrays its burning and devouring heat in night work over newspapers, in gambling-houses where the lamps are put out only when the sun rises, in twilight rendezvous, and in mysterious meetings in the corridors of theatres, in the corners of cafés and in Minister’s offices. Such a specimen looks strangely out of place in this pure clear atmosphere, under these gigantic trees. It might almost be supposed that he would feel uncomfortable at such a distance from the dens of corruption and wickedness, that there could be no corner in his heart for the glories and graces of Nature, nor a perception of its beauties in his dulled eyes, with their red and swollen lids, heavy and bleared with late hours.
Federico Cimarra—the young man in question—Don Joaquín Onésimo, who expected ere long to rejoice in the title of Marqués de Onésimo, and Don Pedro Fúcar, Marqués de Casa-Fúcar, after having paced the avenue two or three times, sat down.
CHAPTER III.
IN WHICH THE READER WILL ENJOY HEARING THE PRAISES LAVISHED BY SPANIARDS ON THEIR COUNTRY AND COUNTRY-MEN.