MOORISH COLUMNS IN THE ALHAMBRA.
Here is a photograph I bought of Pradilla’s picture of Juana.”
The picture shows the sad procession on a windswept hillside outside Burgos just before dawn. The coffin stands on an iron bier, with two wax candles at the head and foot. A priest reads the service from his book. Juana’s ladies stand or sit exhausted on the ground. A group of pages and gentlemen in furred dresses stand near a fire kindled in the open. Juana, in a long black dress, stands beside the coffin looking down. “Dead? No, asleep!” she seems to say.
“For forty-seven years Juana watched beside the body of her husband. He died at twenty-eight; she lived to seventy-four. Their son, Charles V, gave Juana as fine a tomb as Isabel’s. I think she deserved it. A great lover is as rare as a great queen. Come with me and see the vault. That old battered coffin is Philippe’s, the very one Juana carried about with her. I touched it the other day. It made it all seem so real!”
We were standing by the royal vault, looking down through a grating at the coffins, when a fair young man with blue eyes strolled through the chapel and joined us.
“Haven’t you been here long enough, Joan?” he said. “Let’s get out of this stuffy old church.”
“All ready, Philip; I was only waiting for you.” She looked at him with adoring eyes, smiled kindly at me, and went off leaning on his arm. They were as pretty a young couple as you could see, and their names were Philip and Joan! It could hardly have been by chance that they were here. I fancied that the bride had contrived to include a pilgrimage to the tomb of the true lover, Joan the Mad, in their wedding journey.
| Amor es como el vino guárdate á tiempo y te sabrá más dulce cuanto mas viejo. | Love is like wine; Guarded with time It shall taste to thee sweetest When it is oldest. |