But the difficulty is that, no matter how liberal-minded a King may be, many of the people who devote themselves to the servilities of Court life are inevitably narrow; and though my brother had been recalled to the throne because he was a Liberal, his Court could not be so. My sisters and I, having been educated in France, were suspected of Republican tendencies of mind that would be as offensive as bad table manners in the Court. The clerical influence, though it was not strong with my brother, was very strong with my mother, and the ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, and the nobility in general; and I suppose it was evident that I was not a pattern of young devoutness. I spoke Spanish so clumsily that my brother had laughed at it and advised me that it would be unwise for me to attempt to speak it to visitors until I was more proficient. I did not know what was going on about me, but I imagine it was for such reasons as these that it was decided my mother should take us to the palace of the Alcazar in Sevilla, where we could learn Spanish and be purged of foreign habits of thought. And there, too, my mother would be still farther away from influencing the politics of the capital.
So, within a few months, we left the Escurial for the Alcazar, and I went from the chilly monotony of a Northern Court to the oppression and ennui of an Oriental harem. Even yet, if the sun shines too brightly and the summer day is hot, I am overcome with melancholy—as a Russian who has been in prison in Siberia might be when he sees the snow fall. Those endless, idle, unhappy days!
As we drove to the palace from the railway station I noticed that the street windows of the houses were all barred. Thieves, then, must be very bold in Sevilla? I was told: No; the bars were not in the windows to keep burglars out, but to keep the young girls in, and to allow them to speak safely with their future husbands, who came courting below in the streets. How picturesque! Since I had never been allowed to speak to a man alone, even through a grating—unless it was a priest in a confessional—I did not feel sorry for the young women of Sevilla. I did not understand that the bars were symbolical. I stared at the flat-roofed Southern houses and the barbaric colours of the costumes, and the crowds that did not cheer us as we drove by, but sang in chorus to the accompaniment of unseen guitars, and uttered sudden shrieks with sad, impassive faces, like Arabs, to express their joy. And the gates of the Alcazar closed on us without any ominous echo to my ears.
The Alcazar is a Moorish palace of great beauty, with walls and ceilings all covered with intricate patterns of carving and bright colours, so that it was like coming to live in a palace of the Arabian Nights. The inner courtyards are Oriental, cooled by fountains. The garden around the palace is Oriental, in tiny squares and flower-beds, with short paths, and no place for one to run. And around the garden the high wall is Oriental, a true harem wall, over which one could not see. In all the rooms of the palace there is not one door; and when we had hangings put up in the Moorish arches of our bedroom doorways the servants were surprised. They did not understand the desire for privacy. Sentinels and guards were on duty everywhere; a man even walked all night under my bedroom windows; and whenever we went into the gardens the trumpets were sounded—Heaven only knows why!
It was a life in which there was nothing to do, nothing to see—a life designed for Southern women who are content to loll about on cushions and grow fat. We were not expected to go out at all, except in carriages, with an escort, down staring streets, and, indeed, it would have been impossible to walk through the crowds that gathered. I could not ride horseback without a lady-in-waiting to go with me; and all the ladies were too fat to ride, even if they had known how. The best exercise I could get in the garden was to jump the flower-beds—to the amazement of everybody—or to skip up and down in one place mechanically. It was as much worse than the Escurial as the Escurial had been worse than the Palais de Castile; and when it came home to me that this, now, was to be my life for ever, I felt that I should go mad.
Every afternoon my mother gave audiences to the ladies of Sevilla; but what good was that? Even with us children they did nothing but curtsy, and kiss the hands, and look at us, awed, as if we were not human. They could not say anything to us, and we did not know what to say to them. Generals came to salute my mother, and remained for dinner; and every day one officer of the guard had luncheon with us; but we girls were not allowed to speak to men, except to exchange formal words of greeting under the eyes of the governess.
One day, the governess being absent, I got into conversation with an officer at the table, innocently, when he had been speaking about “the bath of Maria Padilla” in our garden. It was a large stone bath that had been built by Pedro the Cruel for this Maria
Gardens of the Alcazar, Seville