Spanish writers have a justified bitterness for this period of the national history. While the Imperial power was sinking slowly away, no return of prosperity, of New World conquest, or Old World grandeur appeared in the distance. None ever came. Stretching back into the past, the widening road of disaster ran straight to the foot of the throne of Philip II. On every side the downfall had begun. Spanish troops once invincible retreated and again retreated. Bit by bit the schemes of other countries began to be realized in the dismemberment of the Empire. Literature grown decadent, history perverted, Mannerism and Gongorism were the new gods and Churriguera the builder of their temples.
The arts decayed and died. Merchants, anticipating the destruction of trade, refused to venture their money. They rather hoarded it in secret places, discarding hope of interest. Commerce knew no security. Wealth brought but extortion. Power lay in the hands of court favorites.
“Les provinces étoient si épuisées,” writes Villars, “qu’en quelques endroits de la Castille on étoit obligé pour vivre, de trocquer les marchandises, parcequ’il n’y avoit plus d’argent pour acheter. Dans Madrid même il ne se’en trouvoit presque plus, et l’on y ressentoit à loisir les suites du changement de la monnoye que l’on avoit fait, avec tant de précipitation. Les personnes de qualité dont la dépense avoit doublé par ce changement ne pouvoient payer leurs marchands, et les banquiers n’avoient plus de fonds et ne trouvoient point à emprunter; on ne payoit rien dans la maison du Roy et les choses en vinrent à une telle extrémité, que la plus part des petits domestiques ayant rendu leurs livrées pour quitter le service, on eut beaucoup de peine à trouver les moyens de les y faire demeurer.”
Even religion was to become the vehicle of a host of strange mysteries; professional saints flourished; miracles were of daily report, the stigmata had repeatedly appeared. Superstition fed upon tales of witches and hobgoblins, and the minds of high and low were filled with a strange, incongruous mass of belief and doubt. A whole supernatural world both local and national crowded the places of Christian tradition. Every fragment of Roman, Arabic, or Gothic belief came to be fused upon the general credulity.
While the form that faith had assumed no longer surprises the reader as he turns the pages of contemporary writers, yet the auto de fé had not gasped its last. Outside the gate of Fuencarral the fires still burned. In 1680, the very year in which our author is writing her later letters from Madrid, it had produced an exhibition in the Plaza Mayor which had the utmost detail of dramatic staging given it to lend impressiveness. The bull-fight, too, was beginning to grow into that popularity which was later to make it the national sport.
The condition of the people was lamentable. Little by little the lower orders, driven from trades and manufacturing, were forced to face conditions of pauperism. Theft came to be too common to be noted. Every mountain pass was infested by robbers. People travelled well armed or stayed at home.
Into such a country, under such conditions as these, came, in February, 1679, this French woman of position, cultivation, and wit, and from San Sebastian she wrote the first of the series of letters which one by one found their way northward as she journeyed toward Madrid.
“Le premier trait du caractère Espagnol, c’est le manque de sense pratique,” says Taine. Something, however, must be added to every epigram on Spain, for she will not permit of hasty summing. Something must be said of language, dignity, and, last but not least, of the instinctive ceremonial. All of this our author has perceived.
This ceremonial of Spain, what and whence is it and how is it that it is first discerned by the traveller? Its history, could it be written, would be indeed a history of shadows, a ghostly palimpsest of needs made forms. Time was when a stern and God-favored war, fought day by day, year to year, and century to century behind the Pyrenean wall, nursed and fostered strange forms and moulded fantastic mental attitude. Europe busied herself but little with it all. It was enough for her that the Spaniard did well his office of guard and watcher at the outer gate. There, she came to believe, was his place, and there he wore his livery. And a strange livery it was—made up of rags and tatters of Iberian pride, Roman servitude, and Christian independence, and as it was fought day after day at the cheerless outer gate, from time to time the foe who bore upon him with the banners of Islam fell back before him, leaving upon the field some word to be gathered up as booty, some spoil of solemn gesture or grave reply or strangely formed garment brought across all Africa from Hejaz or the land of the Anazeh. And in this strange attire he stood and fought and bled until with sweat and blood of a thousand years the garment was a single hue and had become a solemn cloak.
Then the word came for the sheathing of the sword to the south, and with this cloak wrapped about him the erstwhile guardian of the outer gate of a sudden stalked out upon Europe, jangling the gold purse of the Indies at his belt, to the terror and the unfeigned astonishment of the world.