Infanta Eulalia at Window of Her Apartments
the House of Bourbon and sister of the Duc d’Orleans. She is a somewhat masculine type of woman, and spends a great deal of her time in Abyssinia. She leaves her husband and two boys and, with no companion except an elderly Englishwoman, sets out on a hunting expedition. She is lost in the heart of Africa for months, and then suddenly reappears and settles down to the humdrum life of her palace. But soon she hears again the call of the wild, and is away once more. What she does in Abyssinia nobody knows, if one excepts the elderly Englishwoman. The country seems to have cast a spell on her, and she cannot resist its fascinations. The Duke of Genoa, Queen Margherita’s brother, and his wife, who is a Bavarian Princess, live in the same palace as the Dowager Duchess of Aosta, but their households are independent and, in point of fact, the two duchesses rarely see each other. The duke is almost a recluse; he spends several hours in his private chapel every day, lost in prayer and meditation.
I was a little surprised the first time I went to Turin to find that the Piedmontese dialect of Italian was spoken in Royal circles. To understand what was said sometimes required close attention, even when one knew Italian well, and I have found a similar difficulty in other Italian cities. In Bologna, for instance, where I have lived so much, the cultured classes, as well as the peasants, talked dialect, and travelling about Italy one seemed constantly under the necessity of learning new words and phrases.
There are so many beautiful Italian cities in which agreeable society may be enjoyed that had one to choose one in which to live permanently it would be difficult to come to a decision. Venice is one of the most adorable, and the time I spent with the Duke and Duchess of Genoa at the King’s palace there was a dream of delight. But there is one objection, and that a serious one to a prolonged stay in Venice, and that is the difficulty of getting proper exercise. As everybody seemed prepared to spoil me when I was there, I made it clear that it was essential for me to do something more vigorous than gliding down silent canals in a gondola or strolling in the Piazza. It was therefore arranged that I should play tennis at the Arsenal, and that indulgence gave me the one thing that seemed lacking in the charming life of the city. Italians can play tennis very well when they choose, and Monsignor Montagnini, the Papal Legate who was turned out of France when diplomatic relations between the Republic and the Vatican were ruptured, was a case in point. He played an excellent game, and we often had a set together in Paris. Little did I guess what his means were, and never will I forget his false behaviour when his papers were captured. In Venice too, I found some good players, and so managed to get the vigorous exercise I needed. Apart from this, I lived the life of the Venetians—walked in the Piazza from half-past eleven to half-past twelve, took the air in a gondola about half-past five, went occasionally to the opera at the Fenice, that most exquisite of theatres, and ended the day by dancing in the enchanted palaces that rise from the sea. It was often sunrise when I stepped into a Royal barge with gondoliers in scarlet and, to the rhythmic music of oars that cut the water and the splash of the spray that fell from their blades, floated through the rosy dawn to the Royal palace.
CHAPTER XII
ADVENTURES IN AMERICA
It was during these years of travel in Europe that I was offered the opportunity of going to America to represent the Throne of Spain at the World’s Fair that was to be held in Chicago to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery. I accepted the invitation with joy. I had no longer my childish idea that if I could only take a boat and sail to America I should be really “free”; but I had still in my mind the household saying that I was “only fit for America,” and I felt sure that I should like the great democracy, and I was eager to see it. It was planned, also, that I should visit Cuba—in the usual administrative hope that a Royal visitor might revive the loyalty of a rebellious colony exasperated by misgovernment. The misgovernment was a thing for which the Royal Family was as little to blame as the Cubans themselves; but I was willing to be made use of, in one of the few ways that royalty can be of use in a constitutional monarchy, and I prepared to see—and be seen by—Cuba, too.
There were such stories in Spain of the dangers from yellow fever in the colony that ladies-in-waiting were as reluctant to make the trip as the sailors of Columbus; and though my husband took a large suite of gentlemen, I found only one lady-in-waiting to go with me, and one maid, a faithful old servant who had been in the family for thirty years. We set out, in April, 1893, on board the Reina Maria Cristina from Santander, after the inevitable Te Deum in the cathedral of Santander, a State dinner and reception, an illumination of the harbour, and a choir in a tender to sing us off. There were more Te Deums and receptions and illuminations at the Spanish ports and islands where we called; and at one port we were met by the authorities with a black-bordered protest against the suppression of the local capitan general. The paper was signed by a “defence assembly.” The officials warned us that it would be unwise for us to land. I insisted on it. They went away, and as soon as I understood that they had gone for a police order I went ashore without any escort except our suite, and walked through the crowded streets to the cathedral. This proceeding aroused such a furore of popular enthusiasm that I might have been another Jeanne d’Arc entering a beleaguered town that she had relieved; and for the rest of my trip I had no hesitation about putting aside the officials and trusting myself to the people. At Las Palmas I got on so well that in the cathedral, when the bishop was singing the Te Deum, the crowd forgot they were in church and interrupted him with shouts of “Vive la Infanta!” As a matter of fact, I have found that the danger to royalty comes not from informalities of this sort so much as from the parade of bodyguards and escorts that exasperate the unhappy people by personifying the power of the social conditions that oppress them. It is usually on the most impressive occasions that bombs are thrown.
We arrived outside the wonderful harbour of Havana early in May, and I watched for the first sight of Morro Castle with curiosity. I had heard from my mother that it had cost her grandfather, King Charles IV., such an incredible sum to build that he had longed to see it, as he said, “if only through a keyhole.” I understood that I was the first of the Royal Family to look at it. Certainly, I was the last. And the fact that I should probably be the last was the strongest impression that I got from Cuba.
My first impression, of course, was of the heat. Immediately on my arrival I was visited by a physician, who came to warn me of all the diseases I might catch, and to tell me of all the things that I must do and must not do to avoid them. It was terrifying to listen to him. I had insisted on having cold drinks, and he was sure that cold drinks would be fatal. I had been installed in the palace of the capitan general, and I was going about on the marble floors in my stockinged feet to be cooler. This also I was told was dangerous. “Well,” I said at last, “if I don’t cool myself down, I shall surely die of the heat, anyway, so what matter?” And I decided to do what I wanted and let my natural vitality take care of the consequences. Because of this policy I made what appears to have been a startling impression of energy on the Cubans. There is nothing more popular than energy in a royal person—perhaps because it is so unexpected. I had, for once, the good luck to please by doing what I pleased.