Court Life From Within

by Infanta of Spain Eulalia

My first clear consciousness of myself I cannot place. It pictures me in rebellion against wearing the earrings for which my ears had been pierced soon after my birth, so that I might be decorated with the jewels that were part of the regalia in which a Princess of Spain was expected to appear, even as an infant. I do not know why I rebelled—unless it was because the earrings interfered with the bodily activity that was irrepressible in me. I was very healthy, very strong. I wished to play outdoors, where I could run; I chafed at the restraint of our formal living; and I think it was this revolt of the body that became a revolt of the mind as soon as I developed a mind.

Conceive that we children had no playroom in the Palais. We had to amuse ourselves in a decorous sitting-room, quietly. And we were never allowed to be alone. We were always under the eyes of some Spanish lady-in-waiting who guarded and repressed us. When we were taken for a walk in the Bois, we were accompanied by ladies who prevented us from playing with the children we met. At home some one always sat and observed what we were doing. At night some one watched and slept in the bedroom with us. Whatever we did there were eyes on us. It is true that until after I was married I was scarcely left alone for a moment to sit by myself in a room. That seems to me very sad.

I am sad, too, when I remember this: there was a courtyard in the Palais that had in it a stone pool of water a little larger than a round tub; and it was an escapade for me to get down into the court and play in that pool. In summer I got fish and put them in it, and pretended that I was fishing. In winter I skated on it, although I could scarcely make two strokes without bumping into its sides. There was not a child in Paris so poor that he would not have laughed at such a playground; but to me it was liberty. One’s childhood, at least, might be more free than that.

Not that my childhood was pathetic. On the contrary, I was very robust, and instead of succumbing to repression I reacted against it. All my earliest recollections find me engaged in an incessant struggle for merely physical freedom and the enjoyment of sunlight and open air. I would not sit and play with dolls. I could not be entertained with the Spanish stories of witches that correspond to the fairy-tales of the North. I was not an imaginative child, and I did not care for pets. I had found a boy in the Palais—the son of one of the maids of a lady-in-waiting—and I ran away, whenever I could, to romp in the court with him. When my brother was home from school, he was my playmate, although he was seven years older than I. I liked him because I could fight with him—real fisticuffs—and be rough. We played a sort of football in the court together, and my mother used to say that she had two sons.

Once when we were at Houlgate, in Normandy—where we had a summer villa by the seashore—I decided to run away from home because I had been prevented from playing with children on the beach. After dark, when no one could see me, I set out, without knowing where I should go, all alone, determined never to come back. I had no plan. I did not even understand that food and lodgings had to be paid for and worked for in the world. I walked along the country road in the dark, quite happy because I was walking, but puzzled because when I began to tire I did not know where to stop. So when I came to the farm of an old woman from whom we had bought apples, I turned in, naturally, to get an apple, without telling her that I had run away.

I was overtaken there. The lady-in-waiting—who was very shrewd—as soon as she missed me, found out from my sister that I had threatened to run away, and she guessed that I would go to the apple-woman’s farm, since it was the only place near by where I had ever been. They brought me back home, but they had all been frightened, and I began to get my own way. For example, there was always a maid sleeping in our room at night, and I did not wish it—as much, perhaps, because she snored as because I wanted our bedroom for ourselves. When they insisted that the maid must be there, I dragged my bed into the corridor every night, until they gave me a room to myself in which I could at least sleep without being guarded. I would not wear tight clothes, and I put my hands down inside my waist-band when they were dressing me, so that they could not fasten tight things on me; and in this way I avoided many tiresome affairs of ceremony, which I disliked.

These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never have escaped.

When my sisters and I were sent as day-scholars to the convent of the Sacré Cœur, my real escape began. We wore the dark blue uniforms of the school, as all the girls did, and we were treated exactly as the others were. We studied in the common classrooms and played with our class-mates at the recreation hour in the convent grounds. How can I tell how eagerly I went to school in the mornings with the governess who took us through the streets? Or how happily tired I came home at night after all the study and play and little incidents of the class-room that had filled the day? I would be so tired that I would fall asleep at the formal dinner that was served for my mother and her guests of honour in the evening; and the servants would have to carry me to bed. But I would be awake next morning very early, before any one else in the Palais, in haste to be off again to school.

If we had remained in Spain I should never have been allowed such freedom. They would have brought tutors and governesses to teach us in the palace. I should never have been allowed school companions like those we had in Paris. It was for this that I have to thank the revolution.

I have one recollection of these days that is quaint. My sister had come to school wearing earrings; and a nun, telling her that earrings were forbidden in the convent, attempted to take them off. In freeing one she tore my sister’s ear accidentally, so that it bled, and I was very angry and I wanted to strike the nun. When we spoke of this at home to a lady-in-waiting, she reproved me, saying that it would be “a double sin” to strike a nun. I replied that I would not strike any one except to give back as good as I got. “Well,” she said, “you will never have to strike any one, for no one can strike you.” “Why not?” She answered, because I was “a royalty.” “Then,” I said to myself, “as long as I live I shall never have a good fight!” And this made me so sad that I remember it yet, with a sort of sinking, as one remembers something irreparable that made a great difference to one’s outlook on life.