We had come to Madrid meaning to keep house for six months or more. We soon found that a furnished apartment at a moderate price in Madrid is as rare as a roc’s egg. We spent several days driving up and down the streets of the quarter where we wished to live, looking up at the houses. A large sheet of blank paper hung at the end of a window or balcony means unfurnished apartments to let, in the middle, furnished. We could find nothing available. It seemed as if we must give up our plan of passing the winter in Madrid. Then came the great invitation. Our old friends Don José and Doña Lucia Villegas asked us to share their large comfortable home. When we found they really wished us to accept this unparalleled hospitality, J. and I moved over to their delightful apartment, and Don Jaime found a modest hotel for Patsy.
The Villegas’ house is opposite the handsome new National Museum on the Paseo Recoletos, a wide avenue laid out in the grand style of the Champs Elysées.
Madrid is a modern capital; at first it seemed as if we had left picturesque Spain behind us and come to a modern European city, a little like Paris, a little like Brussels, and not at all like the Spain we knew. Then, as we began to learn our way about the city, we found that beside the new Madrid, with its splendid boulevards, its conventional new houses and cafés, its air of prosperous business, there was an old Madrid, full of quaint corners and picturesque buildings.
The palace of the King stands at the edge of this old Madrid, boldly planted on the high land above the river, where the old Moorish Alcazar once stood, a magnificent situation for a royal palace. The façade fronts and dominates the city; the rear looks out on vast stretches of royal demesne.
“This looks more as a palace should look than any I ever saw,” said Patsy. We had driven over one sharp clear morning to see Guard-mounting. “All grand and white and shining. The sort of a palace where lovely princesses with golden hair always live in poetry,—sometimes even in history.”
On the right of the palace is the noble Plaza de Armas, where, besides the guards pacing up and down their beat, there was a continual coming and going of all sorts and conditions of men. In a sheltered corner, under the very palace windows, two boys were playing at marbles. This was all in keeping with what we had seen and heard of the democratic character of the people. At one end of the Plaza, the long narrow arches of the peristyle frame a stupendous view. Behind the palace runs the river Manzanares; beyond lies the royal park of the Casa de Campo, with its masses of green trees, broken here and there by the glint of a lake, or the spire of one of poor Isabel Second’s expiatory chapels. Beyond the park, the bare plains of Castile sweep grandly to the north, rising to the stern snow-capped range of the Sierra Guaderrama.
It was all dearly familiar, because Velasquez has painted that blue-gray landscape, that silver light sometimes hardening to steel, those snow mountains, not once, but many, many times, as the background of his pictures.
“The Manzanares is not much of a stream compared to the Guadalquiver,” said Patsy. “That must be the bridge the Frenchman meant, when he advised the King of Spain either to sell his bridge, or to buy a river!” He pointed to a big handsome bridge, curiously out of proportion to the size of the meagre river.
Not far from the palace, along the river bank, was a gorgeous, tremulous, swaying mass of color,—scarlet, blue, orange, every tint of the rainbow.
“That,” said Patsy, “looks like the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Those might be the fluttering pennons of Leon and Castile, Navarre and Aragon.”