The church is dark and mysterious. Beside it rises a cloister, supported by grand pilasters, formed of delicate columns and surmounted by richly-carved capitals depicting scenes from Bible history. In the cloisters, in the church, in the square lying before it, in the narrow streets running on either side, there broods a spirit of contemplative peace which allures and at the same time saddens one like the gardens of a cemetery. A group of horrid bearded old women guard the door.
After one has visited the cathedral there are no other great monuments to be seen in the city. In the Square of the Constitution are two palaces, called the House of the Deputation and the Consistorial, the first built in the sixteenth, the other in the fourteenth, century. These buildings still retain some old, noteworthy features—the one a door, the other a court.
On one side of the House of the Deputation is the rich Gothic façade of the Chapel of Saint George. Here is a palace of the Inquisition, with a narrow court, windows with heavy iron bars, and secret passages, but it has been almost entirely remodelled on the old plans. There are some enormous Roman columns in the Street of Paradise, lost in the midst of modern buildings, surrounded by tortuous staircases and gloomy chambers.
There is nothing else worth the attention of an artist. However, in compensation there are fountains with rostral columns, pyramids, statues, avenues lined with villas and gardens, and cafés and inns; a circus for bull-fights that has a capacity of seating ten thousand spectators; a town which covers a strip of land enclosing the harbor, laid out with the symmetry of a chequer-board, and peopled by ten thousand seamen; a number of libraries, a very rich museum of natural history, and a repository of archives which contains a vast collection of historical documents dating from the ninth century to our times, which is to say from the first Courts of Catalonia to the War of Independence.
Of the objects outside of the city, the most remarkable is the cemetery, about a half-hour’s ride distant from the gates, in the midst of an extended plain. Seen from a point just outside of the entrance, it looks like a garden, and one quickens one’s pace with a feeling of pleased curiosity. But, once past the gate, one is confronted by a novel spectacle, indescribable, and wholly different from one’s expectation. One is in the midst of a silent city, traversed by long, deserted streets, bordered by straight walls of equal height, which are bounded in the distance by other walls. Advancing, one comes to an intersection, and from that point sees other streets with other walls at the end and other crossways. It is like being in Pompeii. The dead are placed in the walls lengthwise, disposed in various orders, like the books in a library. For every coffin there is a corresponding niche, in which is inscribed the name of the dead. Where no one has been interred there is the word propriedad, which indicates that the position has been engaged. Most of the niches are enclosed in glass, some with iron gratings, others, again, with very fine nettings of woven iron. They contain a great variety of offerings placed there by the families in memory of their dead; as, for instance, photographs, little altars, pictures, embroidery, artificial flowers, and the little nothings that were dear to them in life; ribbons, necklaces, toys of children, books, brooches, miniatures—a thousand things which recall the home and the family, and indicate the profession of those to whom they belonged; and it is impossible to look upon them without compassion. Here and there one sees a niche open and black within, a sign that a casket will be placed there during the day. The family of the dead are obliged to pay an annual sum for the space; when they fail to pay the casket is taken from the place where it lies and is borne to the common trench of the burialplace of the poor, which is reached by one of the streets. There was an interment while I was there. From a distance I saw them place the ladder and raise the casket, and I passed on. One night a madman hid himself in one of the empty holes: a watchman passed with a lantern; the madman gave a terrible cry, and the poor watchman fell to the ground as though he had been struck by lightning, and it is said he never recovered from the shock. In one niche I saw a beautiful tress of golden hair, the hair of a girl who had been drowned in her fifteenth year, and to it was fastened a card bearing the word Querida (Beloved). At every step one sees something which affects the mind and the heart. All those offerings have the effect of a confused murmur, a blending of the voices of mothers, husbands, children, and aged men, who whisper as one passes, “Look! I am here!” At every crossway rise statues, mausoleums, shafts bearing inscriptions in honor of the citizens of Barcelona who performed deeds of charity during the scourge of yellow fever in 1821 and 1870. This part of the cemetery, planned, as has been said, like a city, belongs to the middle class of the people, and is bounded by two vast enclosures—the one for the poor, bare and dotted with great black crosses; the other, of an equal size, for the rich, cultivated like a garden, surrounded by chapels various, rich, and magnificent.
In the midst of a forest of weeping willows and cypresses tower columns, obelisks, and grand tombs on every side; marble chapels richly adorned with sculpture, surmounted by bold statues of archangels raising their arms toward heaven; pyramids, groups of statues, monuments as large as houses, overtopping the highest trees; and between the monuments grass-plots, railings, and flower-beds.
At the entrance, between this and the other cemetery, stands a stupendous marble church, surrounded by pillars and partly hidden by trees—a sight which amply prepares the mind for the magnificent spectacle of the interior. On leaving this garden one again passes through the lonely streets of this city of the dead, which seems even more silent and sad than when one first entered it. On recrossing the threshold one turns with pleasure to the many-colored houses of the suburbs of Barcelona as they lie scattered over the plain, like the advance-guard sent to announce that a populous city is expanding and advancing.
From the cemetery to the café is a great leap, but in travelling one makes even greater ones. The cafés of Barcelona, like nearly all the cafés in Spain, consists of one vast saloon, adorned with large mirrors, and with as many tables as it is possible to crowd into the space. The tables seldom remain vacant, even for half an hour, throughout the entire day. In the evening they are all full to overflowing, so that one is many times obliged to wait a good while even to find a seat by the door. Around every table is a group of five or six caballeros wearing over their shoulders the capa, a mantle of dark cloth, provided with a generous palmer’s hood and worn instead of our capeless cloak. In every group they are playing dominoes. This is the most popular game among the Spaniards. In the cafés from twilight to midnight one hears a loud, continuous, discordant sound, like the rattling of hailstones, from the turning and returning of thousands of dominoes by hundreds of hands, so that one is obliged to raise one’s voice to be heard by one’s next neighbor. The commonest beverage is the exquisite chocolate of Spain, which is generally served in little cups, and is about as thick as preserved juniper-berries and hot enough to scald one’s throat. One of these cups, with a drop of milk and a peculiar cake of very delicate flavor which they call bollo, makes a luncheon fit for Lucullus. Between one bollo and the next I made my studies of the Catalan character, conversing with all the Don Fulanos (a name as common in Spain as Tizio is with us) who had the good grace not to suspect me of being a spy despatched from Madrid to sniff the air of Catalonia.
Their minds were greatly stirred by politics in those days, and it often happened that as I was very innocently speaking of a newspaper article, a prominent man, or of anything whatsoever, whether at the café or in a shop or at the theatre, it happened, I say, that I felt the touch of a toe and heard a whisper at my ear, “Take care! That gentleman on your right is a Carlist.”—“Hush! This man is a Republican.”—“That one over there, a Sagastino.”—“The man beside you is a Radical.”—“Yonder is a Cimbrian.”
Everybody was talking politics. I encountered a rabid Carlist in the person of a barber, who, learning by my pronunciation that I was a compatriot of the king, tried his best to drag me into a discussion. I did not say a word, for he was shaving me, and the resentment of my wounded patriotism might have led to the drawing of the first blood in the civil war. But the barber persisted, and, as he did not know how else to come to the point, he finally said in suave tones,