“Well; what is your king doing?” I asked of an official after I had spit out the first mouthful. The man to whom I spoke seemed embarrassed, looked first at me, then at the others, and finally made this very strange answer: “Esta reinando” (He is reigning). They all commenced to laugh, and while I was preparing a closer question, I became conscious of a whisper in my ear: “Es un republicano” (He is a republican). I turned and saw mine host looking into the air. “I understand,” said I, and changed the subject. When we had climbed again into the diligence my companion and I had a good laugh over the warning of the host, and we both expressed our surprise that a person of his class should have taken the political opinions of the officials so seriously; but at the inns where we afterward stopped we learned better. In every one of them we found the host or some adventurer reading the paper to a group of attentive peasants. Now and then the reading would be interrupted by a political discussion, which I could not understand, because they used the Catalan dialect, but I could get the drift of what they were saying by the aid of the paper which I had heard them reading. Well, I must say, among all of those groups there circulated a current of republican thought which would have made the stoutest royalist tremble. One of them, a man with a fierce scowl and a deep voice, after he had spoken a short time to a group of silent auditors, turned to me, whom by my impure Castilian accent he supposed to be a Frenchman, and said with great solemnity, “Let me tell you something, caballero!”—“What is it?”—“I tell you,” he replied, “that Spain is in a worse plight than France;” and after that remark he began walking up and down the room with bowed head and with his arms crossed upon his breast. Others spoke confusedly of the Cortes, of the ministry, of political ambitions, breaches of faith, and other dreadful things. One person only, a girl at a restaurant in Figueras, noticing that I was an Italian, said to me with a smile, “Now we have an Italian king.” And a little while later, as we were going out, she added with graceful simplicity, “I like him.”
When we arrived at Gerona it was still night. There King Amadeus, after a joyful welcome, placed a stone in the house where General Alvarez lodged during the famous siege of 1809.
We passed through the city, which seemed to us of great proportions, sleepy as we were and impatient to tumble into our corners of the railroad carriage. Finally we reached the station, and by dawn were on our way to Barcelona.
Sleep! It was the first time I had seen the sun rise in Spain. How could I have slept? I put my face close to the window, and did not turn my head until we came to Barcelona. Ah! there is no greater pleasure than that one feels upon entering an unfamiliar country, with one’s imagination prepared for the sight of new and wonderful objects, with a thousand memories of the fanciful descriptions of books in one’s head, free from anxiety and free from care.
To press forward into that land, to bend one’s glance eagerly in every direction in search of something which will convince one, if he is not already sure of the fact, that he is really there—to grow conscious of it little by little, now by the dress of a peasant, now by a tree, again by a house; to notice as one advances the growing frequency of those signs, those colors, those forms, and to compare all those things with the mental picture one had previously formed; to find a field for curiosity in everything upon which the eye rests or which strikes the ear,—the appearance of the people, their gestures, their accent, their conversation,—the exclamations of surprise at every step. To feel one’s mind expanding and growing clear; so long to arrive at once and yet never to arrive; to ask a thousand questions of one’s companions; to make a sketch of a village or of a group of peasants; to say ten times an hour, “I am here!” and to think of telling all about it some day,—this is truly the liveliest and most varied of human pleasures. The American was snoring.
The part of Catalonia through which one passes from Gerona to Barcelona is a varied, fertile, and highly-cultivated country. It is a succession of little valleys flanked by gently sloping hills, with tracts of heavy woodland, roaring streams, gorges, and ancient castles; clothed with a vegetation luxuriant and hardy and of a varied green, which reminds one of the severe aspect of the Alpine valleys. The landscape is enlivened by the picturesque dress of the peasants, which corresponds admirably to the fierceness of the Catalan character. The first peasants I saw were dressed from top to toe in black velvet, and wore about their necks a sort of shawl with red and white stripes, and on their heads little Zouave caps of bright red falling to the shoulder. Some wore a sort of buskin of skins laced to the knee, others a pair of canvas shoes shaped like slippers, with corded soles, open in front, and tied about the foot with interlacing black ribbons—a habit, in fine, easy and elegant, and at the same time severe. The weather was not very cold, but they were all bundled up in their shawls, so that only the tip of the nose or the end of the cigarette was to be seen. They had the air of gentlemen coming from the theatre. This effect is produced not merely by the shawls, but by the manner in which they are worn—falling at the side, so that the arrangement appears accidental, with those plaits and foldings which add the grace of a mantilla and dignity of a cloak. At every railway-station there was a group of men, each wearing a shawl of different color, and not a few dressed in fine new cloth: almost all were very clean, and all had a dignity of bearing which heightened the effect of their picturesque costume. There were a few dark faces, but most of them were fair, with lively black eyes, lacking, however, the fire and vivacity of the Andalusian glances.
Gradually as one advances the villages, houses, bridges, and aqueducts become most frequent, with all those things which announce the proximity of a rich and populous commercial city. Granallers, Sant’ Andrea de Palomar, and Clot are surrounded by factories, villas, parks, and gardens. All along the way one sees long rows of carts, troops of peasants, and herds of cattle; the stations are crowded with passengers. If one did not know where he was, he might think he was crossing a part of England rather than a province of Spain. Once past the station of Clot, the last stop before the arrival at Barcelona, one sees on every side huge brick buildings, long walls, heaps of building material, smoking chimneys, stacks of workshops, and many laboring-men, and hears, or imagines he hears, a muffled roar, growing in extent and volume, which seems like the labored breathing of a great city at its work. At last one can see all Barcelona—at a glance the harbor, the sea, a coronet of hills—and it all appears and disappears in a moment, and you are sitting in the station with tingling nerves and a confused brain.
A diligence as large as a railway-carriage took me to a neighboring hotel, when, as soon as I entered, I heard the Italian speech. I confess that this was as great a pleasure as if I had been an interminable distance from Italy and a year absent from home. But it was a pleasure of short duration. A porter, the same one whom I had heard speaking, showed me to my room, and, doubtless assured by my smile that I was a fellow-countryman, asked politely,
“Have you made an end of arriving?”
“Made an end of arriving?” I asked in my turn, elevating my eyebrows.