Court Life From Within

by Infanta of Spain Eulalia

He was very patriarchal-looking when I knew him—white-bearded, heavily-fleshed, and benign. To his receptions in the evening came all the clever people, of whatever opinion, and whenever bores arrived he pretended that they had come to see his wife, and had them ushered to her apartments, and said, contentedly, “There now. They will pray together and enjoy themselves.” It was the one thing that he asked of life—not to be bored. Imagine how that would appeal to one in the atmosphere of a Court. For the plague of Courts is ennui.

Princesses are peculiarly subject to it. A king or a prince has usually some work to do, some power to exercise. A princess is as much more idle than a young lady as a young lady is more idle than a working girl. In an attempt to keep up an exercise of my brain, I continued my studies during the whole ten years of my unmarried lite in Spain—studying languages, the piano, singing, the harp, painting—and keeping myself occupied with reading and writing as well as I could. People tell me that princesses are stupid. I wonder that we are not all idiots. During my life in Madrid, almost my only public duty was to help lay corner-stones. I helped lay enough to pave the city. Whenever nothing else could be found to justify our existence, the authorities would say, “Come, let them lay a corner-stone.” I can not believe that any other stones were put on top of them. It is not possible. There were too many. If the buildings had all been completed, there would not be room now, in the town, to walk. And the Te Deums that I listened to were numerous enough to exhaust the ears of Heaven.

I have already spoken of the audiences that we gave. They were stupid beyond words. One received strangers under conditions of formality that made them more strange, asked silly little questions of the women—“Are you married?” “How many children have you?”—smiled politely, and waited for the next one. It is the sort of thing that you might expect from the Chinese. And the purely Court receptions were even worse. There you had not even strangers, so you could not ask them whether they were married. You knew—or you were expected to know—all the dignitaries, statesmen, officials, aides, and diplomats who make up the Court circle; you met them again and again, for a perfunctory moment, said something innocuous, and passed on—until you met again.

The problem was to think of something to say each time. Once after a Royal chapel—when we always had to make a circle of a roomful of officials lined up around the walls—I noticed, as we approached one officer, that he wore black gloves with his uniform. It is a sign of deep mourning. The others of the Royal Family, preceding me, made the usual conventional attempts to say a little of nothing as if it were something worth saying; and so, when I came to him, although I had no idea who he was, I said, “I was deeply sorry to hear of your bereavement.” The others, overhearing me, were mortified that they had not offered him their condolences too; and when the reception was over they spoke to me about it. Whom had he lost? How had I remembered it? And when I explained what I had done, without knowing who the man was, even the King was envious. It was so difficult to have anything to say, and a Royal Family is always so haunted by the problem that my little ruse quite made a reputation for me. And, if you can believe it, the officer was deeply touched and gratified, poor soul, by my knowing of his grief. It is on such trifles that a king makes his personal popularity. But what a life!

When my brother married the Duc’s daughter, Mercedes, we had that beautiful and charming creature added to our circle; but they were such lovers and so happy together that we had our brother less, though we had Mercedes more. By this time I had quite lost interest in the daughters of the grandees whom my brother invited to Court to make companionship for us. They could play no game more active than croquet, which they played languidly. When I drove them behind my four ponies they wanted always to go to the parks, where they could look sidelong at the young men; and I preferred the country drives with more freedom. I soon wearied of a conversation that was all holy water and fiancés.

And before long the Spanish young men came to bore me as much as their sisters. They had only one conversation for a woman—the romantically sentimental, exaggerated to the point of foolishness. It was too silly. If they were not pretending that they were blighted with melancholy because of your unearthly charms, they were assuring you that they would shed their blood for you. I did not want to see their blood, but their brains; and they either had none or did not consider it necessary to use them in their conversation with a princess.

In the evenings I often went to the opera, but my brother had no ear at all for music; he could not tell the Royal March when it was played; and he complained that the singing depressed him like the howling of a dog. So I went with my sisters and some older chaperon. One night, on our way to the opera, we had an adventure that could happen only in Spain. There, whenever the priest is summoned to attend the dying, he takes the sacrament and sets out on foot, accompanied by an attendant with a little bell. The first carriage that he meets, even if it be a hired hack, is stopped at the sound of the bell and he is invited to ride. If the hack then meets a private carriage of more luxury, it is the privilege of the owner to take the priest into his vehicle. And if the Royal carriage is met, the Royalty not only take the priest with them, but they are expected to follow into the house of the dying, and kneel in the death-chamber while the last rites are being performed.

On this night I was in our carriage with a princess who was most gorgeously arrayed in a bright green evening gown ornamented with silver, with a great display of jewels on her corsage, and on her head a huge rayed ornament of diamonds in the shape of a diadem. Her hair was prematurely grey and rather wild. She had been riding in the sun, and her face was flushed. She was an enormous woman—so large that she had to give up horseback-riding because it became impossible to find a horse capable of carrying her.

We were scarcely well away from the palace when we heard approaching us the bell of the sacrament, and I said to her, hurriedly, “We can’t go to a death-bed in this finery. I’ll make the driver turn round.” But she was very religious. It was a sacrilege to her to turn our backs on the Host. In spite of my protests, we met the priest, took him into the carriage, and drove him to his destination. There the princess and I followed him into the death-chamber, devoutly, though with very doubtful feelings on my part.

We found a man dying of some sort of fever, lying on his back in bed, with a holy candle burning on his forehead—to improve his temperature, no doubt. He opened his eyes at our entrance; and when he saw the unearthly apparition of the princess in bright green, with the hair and face of a soul in purgatory and a blaze of glory about her head; he sat up in bed with a shriek, pointed his shaking hand at her, and cried “Booh!” That was all I saw. I got down on my knees, helpless with hysterical laughter, and covered my face with my hands. When the ceremony was over, I hurried out as best I could and went to pieces in the carriage. The man died that night.