the first sight of the Albaicin, Generalife, and Alhambra, with the cold, snowy, sparkling Sierra glistening in the blue cloudless sky. Then such an airecillo: not the one in the calle Alcalá that goes through your Capa and upper Benjamin in the twinkling of a bedpost, but a mild, gentle, refreshing, reinvigorating breeze. Then such a profusion of tree and water. General O’Lawlor, very civil, has procured me the Governor’s suite of apartments in the Alhambra, one staircase of which leads into the Sala de los Embajadores (as aforesaid), where I hope and trust to have the honour of receiving the present one of his B.M. The other leads to the Patio de los Leones, which beat Pidcock’s lions, and are lions worth seeing.
All very quiet. They were prepared to rise had the thing succeeded at Cadiz, but as that did not, they think little about it, but eat their ices as usual.
There has been a horrid execution here, which was calculated to excite a revolution anywhere. A beautiful widow, connected with high families, was garrotted, solely for a Constitutional flag, with a half-embroidered motto, having been found in her possession. She refused to give any account of it herself, or any accomplices. The matter was sent to Madrid, and down came, to the equal horror and surprise of every one, an order for her execution! a woman executed for such an offence anno 1831! They certainly manage these things differently in Spain.
If you come, you must do so per diligence to Andujar, and thence ride in two days across the country with three or four of these stout Miquelites. You will find every comfort in the inn, and I am now constructing a sort of a grate, the sweet vision of Your Excellency’s excellent, super-excellent, rost-bif ever floating before my eyes as the hour of 6 approaches. I cannot promise such fare as it was my lot to consume at Madrid, and which sent me back to the conjugal embrace Epicuri de grege porcum. But you shall dine in the fabled palace of the Moorish kings: the fountains shall play, and a band of Gitanas shall dance their half-voluptuous dance around you; you shall drink the purest, coldest water from the Moorish cistern, which is opposite my window, and which I am supplied with gratis: (it costing to the public an ocharo per cantaro);[16] you shall eat the delicious ice, the Queso de albaricoqui; and, last of all, a most hearty welcome from
S. S. S. y amigo,
R. F.
P. S.—Mr. Sᵗᵉ Barbe, el ingles afrancesado, and Mr. de Custine, el Frances inglesado, being duly dressed as majos by Pindar of Seville, departed for Tariffa, where the Marquis tells me he is going to write “some poem about the good Guzman.” They are then coming here. I shall entertain them in the Alhambra, and be immortalised in a note by this poetical Marquis.
My wife thinks she can manage a room and a sort of a bed for you and your man. It appears inhospitable in me to talk of the inn, but the Alhambra is but a ruin; however, you shall choose yourself. Utrum horum mavis accipe.
Alhambra, June 15 [1831].
I am very sorry that, at this distance from my worthy friend the Assistente, there is no chance of extracting from him the information you want, which I think I could have managed at Seville in a careless way. If I were to write to him, he would instantly be alarmed, and attach great importance to it. I enclose a letter to Lord Dudley for Mr. de Gersdorf (?) instead of one to Lord Essex; a letter to Lord Essex would be of no use, for he has now totally abandoned and shut up Cassiobury, which was very well worth seeing when he lived there; secondly, he lives entirely in a set of his own, and I know from long experience hates nothing like the sight of a foreigner;—as he expresses himself, “damn all foreigners; none shall put their foot in my house.”