Padilla when she had lived at the Alcazar; and I had longed to have it filled with water so that I might use it. The officer told me that once, after Maria Padilla had bathed there, Pedro the Cruel, in a jest, had invited a courtier to drink some of the water to show his devotion, and the courtier replied, “I’m afraid if I tried the sauce, I might get a taste for the partridge.” I thought this very clever of the courtier, and I repeated the story to my governess, after dinner, and she was horrified. It was the last opportunity I got to speak with the officer.

And I did not get the bath. Indeed, at that time it was difficult to get a bath of any sort, except a sponge bath, piecemeal. The ladies-in-waiting declared that it was sinful to bathe; and when I laughed at that they argued that it was indelicate to take off all one’s clothing at once. (I imagine that their antipathy to bathing must have come from the feeling against the Moors, who had so long been the conquerors in Sevilla, since it was part of their religion to bathe.) I finally got my way by persuading a doctor to give orders that I must have cold baths for my health.

These, then, were some of the material restrictions of our life. The mental restrictions were even more hopeless. There were no books to be had. If I wrote a letter, it had to be read by the lady-in-waiting to whom I gave it to post. We had an old professor to give us lessons in Spanish, and we studied painting and music, and acquired the ornamental accomplishments and fundamental ignorances of young ladies who are not expected to have minds and not allowed to develop any. Religious instruction went on always. We heard Mass in the palace every day, and we should have had to go to confession and communion every day, too, if I had not insisted that I would not go oftener than once a month. My sisters were both most devout, and they did not sympathise with my rebelliousness. When I complained of the imprisonment of our lives, they counselled me, affectionately, to bow to the will of God and to accept with pious resignation the trials to which Providence had appointed us. I should have been happier, no doubt, if I could have done so; but Providence had also appointed for me a temperament that made resignation impossible, and I continued to obey the will of God by chafing and complaining and struggling to escape.

With the arrival of March came a new horror of heat; and as the summer progressed it seemed impossible to live through each new day. The sun was unendurable. The soldiers on guard had to be changed every quarter of an hour, and many of them were taken from their posts fainting. The birds fell dead from the trees in the garden. The air was full of an odour of melting asphalt, and even at night the pavements would be so hot that they would burn the soles of the shoes. Indoors the sealing-wax would melt on your writing-desk. And the mosquitoes! To study, or to write, we had to sit under mosquito bars, or we would be so pestered that we could not work. I was unable to eat. I lived on lemon and water, ill with the heat and with longing for the cool, green freedom of our country summers in Normandy—with the grey-blue skies and the grey-green fields, and the shade of the deep, hedge-hidden byways. How I yearned for them! As one yearns for the comfort of health in the semi-delirious miseries of fever! I would say to myself, “Oh, if Spain would only have another revolution!”

Then one of my sisters, who was less robust than I, became seriously prostrated. They were afraid that I, too, might collapse, because I would not let them give me food. My mother had quarrelled with my brother about some political differences, and she wished to take us to France; but since the King was unmarried, and one of us—or one of our children—might inherit the throne, it was not permitted to us to leave Spain, for fear of foreign influences. We were prisoners for life! It was decided that we should join our brother in Madrid, and our mother should go away to France without us. I was never to live with her again, but I parted from her without anxiety, since at last I had my wish—to be with my brother.

CHAPTER III
PULLING THE STRINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY

If our fortunes had carried us directly from Paris to stay with my brother in the palace of Madrid, perhaps I should have found myself still caged there. But freedom is only by comparison; and, after my unhappiness in the Alcazar, it seemed to me now as if my life had really been given wings. Our arrival was almost private; the people in the streets, accustomed to the sight of royalty, did not make a great to-do about us (for it is chiefly curiosity that draws crowds, I find, even to see kings!), and the one thing that looked like a public decoration in our honour was the washing, which it is the custom in Madrid to hang from the street windows to dry. It was an embarrassing decoration, because the articles were, as one might say, very intimate. They made a joke for us.

We arrived in high spirits at the royal palace, and I was glad to find it not only gorgeous, but most comfortable. It had been built by Charles III.—as everything in Madrid seems to have been built—but my brother had had it modernised with those conveniences of heating and plumbing which our antique splendour had hitherto done without in Spain. He had allotted a whole wing to us three Infantas (my sister Pilar, my sister Paz, and I), and we each had our own maids and servants from Sevilla, so that we made quite a household. He had installed in another wing my sister the Infanta Isabel, whom I hardly knew, because she had not been with us in France during the revolution. She was to take our mother’s place towards us. She had been married at sixteen to a prince of Naples; she had lived all her life among the forms and traditions of royalty, and she was genuinely devoted to their maintenance. I should have been afraid for my new liberty if I had not foreseen that her direction over us would be tempered by my brother’s indulgence. I knew that he had as much impatience as I for what we called, jocularly, between ourselves, the “singeries” (monkey tricks) of royalty. And so I began, with great expectations, what proved to be the happiest period of my life.

I was able to rise early, because my brother was always up at half-past seven, to ride in the Casa Campo for an hour, and I rode horseback with him—to my great joy. Then, at nine, we girls had our lessons while he met his Ministers. Early rising is not a Spanish habit. My mother, when she was Queen, had met her Ministers after the theatre, at midnight, and worked with them more in the nighttime than during the day. And my brother’s Ministers had protested against his nine o’clock Cabinet meetings; but he had won them to it with the smiling and tactful determination that always secured him his own way.