I must here note that in Spanish the word acabor (to make an end of doing a thing) corresponds to the French expression venir de la faire. Consequently I did not at once understand what he said.
“Yes,” the porter replied, “I ask the cavaliere if he has alighted the selfsame hour from the way of iron?”
“Selfsame hour? Way of iron? What sort of Italian is this, my friend?”
He was a little disconcerted.
However, I afterward discovered that there is in Barcelona a large number of hotel-porters, of waiters in the restaurants, cooks, and servants of all kinds—Piedmontese for the most part from the province of Navarre—who have lived in Spain from boyhood and speak this dreadful jargon composed of French, Italian, Castilian, Catalan, and Piedmontese. However, they do not use this dialect in addressing the Spanish people, for they all know Spanish, but only to Italian travellers in a playful spirit, to let them see that they have not forgotten the speech of their fatherland.
This explains the fact that I have heard many Catalonians say, “Oh! there is very little difference between your language and ours.” I should think so! I ought also to repeat the words which a Castilian singer addressed to me in a tone of lofty benevolence as we were conversing on the boat which bore me to Marseilles five weeks later: “The Italian language is the most beautiful of the dialects formed from ours.”
As soon as I removed the traces which the horrible night of the crossing of the Pyrenees had left upon me I sallied forth from the hotel and began to wander about the streets.
Barcelona is, in appearance, the least Spanish of the cities of Spain. Great buildings—very few of which are old—long streets, regular squares, shops, theatres, large and splendid restaurants, a continuous moving throng of people, carriages, and carts from the water front to the centre of the city, and thence to the outskirts, just as at Genoa, Naples, and Marseilles. A very wide, straight street called the Rambla, shaded by two rows of trees, divides the city from the harbor to the hills. A fine promenade, flanked by new houses, stretches along the sea-shore above a high dyke of masonry built like a terrace, against which the waves beat. A suburb of vast proportions, almost another city, extends toward the north, and on every side new houses break the old enclosure, spread over the fields, even to the foot of the hills, range themselves in endless rows until they reach the neighboring villages, and on all the circling hills rise villas and palaces and factories, which dispute the land and crowd each other as they rise even higher and higher, forming a noble coronet about the brow of the city. Everywhere they are creating, transforming, renewing; the people work and prosper, and Barcelona flourishes.
I saw the last days of the Carnival. Through the streets passed long processions of giants, devils, princes, clowns, warriors, and crowds of certain figures whom I always have the misfortune to encounter the world over. They were dressed in yellow and carried long staves, at the ends of which purses were bound: these they stick under every one’s nose, into the shops and windows, even to the second stories of the houses, begging alms—in whose name I know not, but which were most likely spent in some classic orgy at the close of the Carnival.