Wanderings in Spain

by Théophile Gautier

The first place you enter is a vast courtyard, at the extremity of which is the portal of a church, presenting no remarkable feature, except some colossal statues of prophets, with gilt ornaments, and figures painted rose-colour. This courtyard is flagged, damp, and cold; the angles are overgrown with grass; you no sooner place your foot in it than you are oppressed with ennui, just as if you had a weight of lead upon your shoulders; you feel your heart contract; you think that all is over—that every joy is henceforth dead for you. At a distance of twenty paces from the door you smell an indescribable icy and insipid odour of holy water and sepulchral caverns, which is borne to you by a current of air loaded with pleurisy and catarrh. Although, outside, there may be thirty degrees of heat, the marrow freezes in your bones; you imagine that the warmth of life will never again be able to cheer the blood in your veins, which has become colder than a viper's blood. The air of the living cannot force its way through the immense thickness of the walls, which are as impenetrable as the tomb, and yet, in spite of this claustral and Moscovitish cold, the first object I beheld, on entering the church, was a Spanish woman kneeling on the ground, beating her breast with one hand, and with the other fanning herself with equal fervour. I recollect that her face had a kind of sea-green tint, which makes me shiver even now, whenever I think of it.

The cicerone who conducted us over the interior of the edifice was blind, and it was really most marvellous to see with what precision he stopped before the pictures, naming the subject of each one, and the artist by whom it was painted, without the least hesitation or mistake. He took us up to the dome, and led us through an infinity of ascending and descending corridors, which rivalled in complication the "Confessional of the Black Penitents," or of the "Château of the Pyrenees," by Anne Radcliffe. The old fellow's name is Cornelio; he was the merriest creature in the world, and appeared quite to take a delight in his infirmity.

The interior of the church is mournful and naked. Immense mouse-grey pilasters formed of granite, with a large micaceous grain like coarse salt, ascend to the roof which is painted in fresco, the blue, vapoury tones of which are ill suited to the cold, poor colour of the architecture; the retablo, gilt and sculptured in the Spanish fashion, with some very fine paintings, somewhat corrects this aridity of decoration, which sacrifices everything to some stupid notion or other of symmetry. The style of the kneeling statues of gilt bronze on each side the retablo, representing, I believe, Don Carlos and some princesses of the royal family, is grand, and the effect is very fine. The chapter which is opposite the high altar is an immense church in itself; the stalls which surround it instead of being florid and decorated with fantastic arabesques, like those at Burgos, partake of the general rigidity, and have no other ornaments than simple mouldings. We were shown the place where for fourteen years the sombre Philip II., that king born to be a grand inquisitor, used to seat himself; it is the stall that forms the angle, and a doorway cut through the thickness of the panelling communicates with the interior of the palace. Without pretending to possess any very fervent amount of devotion, I can never enter a Gothic cathedral without experiencing a mysterious and profound feeling, an extraordinary sentiment of emotion; but in the church of the Escurial I felt so crushed, so depressed, so completely under the dominion of some inflexible and gloomy power, that I was for the moment convinced of the inutility of prayer. The God of such a temple will never allow himself to be moved by any entreaties.

After visiting the church we went down into the Pantheon. This is the name given to the vault where the bodies of the kings of Spain are preserved. It is octagonal in form, thirty-six feet in diameter and thirty-eight feet in height, directly under the high altar; so that when the priest is saying mass, his feet are on the stone which forms the keystone of the vault. The staircase leading into it is formed of granite and coloured marble, and closed by a handsome bronze gate. The pantheon is lined throughout with jasper, porphyry, and other stones no less precious. In the walls there are niches with antique-formed cippi, destined to contain the bodies of those kings and queens who have left issue. A penetrating and death-like coldness reigns throughout the vault, and the polished marble glitters and sparkles in the flickering torchlight; it seems as if the walls were dripping with water, and the visitor might almost imagine himself to be in some submarine grotto. The monstrous edifice weighs you down with all its weight; it surrounds, it embraces, it suffocates you; you feel as if you were clasped by the tentacles of an immense granite polypus. The dead bodies contained in the sepulchral urns seem more dead than any others, and it is with difficulty that you can induce yourself to believe that they can ever possibly be resuscitated. In the vault, as in the church, the impression is one of sinister despair; in all this dreary place there is not one hole through which you can see the sky.

A few good pictures still remain in the Sacristy (the best have been transferred to the Royal Museum at Madrid). Among them are three or four specimens on wood of the German school, possessing a very uncommon degree of merit. The ceiling of the grand staircase is painted in fresco by Luca Jordano, and represents, allegorically, Philip II.'s vow and the foundation of the convent. The acres of wall in Spain painted by this same Luca Jordano, are something truly prodigious, and we moderns who lose our breath at the slightest exertion, find it a difficult task to conceive the possibility of such labours. Pellegrini, Luca, Gangiaso, Carducho, Romulo, Cincinnato, and many others have painted in the Escurial cloisters, vaults, and ceilings. That of the library is the work of Carducho and Pellegrini, and is a good sample of light, clear fresco colouring; the composition is very rich and the twining arabesques in the best possible taste. The library of the Escurial is remarkable for one peculiarity, and that is, that the books are placed on the shelves with their backs to the wall and their edges to the spectator; I do not know the reason of this odd arrangement. The library is particularly rich in Arabic manuscripts, and must contain many inestimable and totally unknown treasures. At present that the conquest of Algiers has rendered Arabic quite a fashionable and ordinary language, it is to be hoped that this rich mine will be thoroughly worked by our young orientalists. The other books appeared to be mostly works of theology and scholastic philosophy. We were shown some manuscripts on vellum, with illuminated margins ornamented with miniatures; but, as it was Sunday, and the librarian was absent, we could not hope for anything else, and we were consequently obliged to depart without having seen a single incunable edition; which, by the way, was a much greater disappointment to my companion than to myself, who, unfortunately, am not an enthusiast in the matter of bibliography, or anything else.

In one of the corridors is placed a white marble Christ the size of life, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and some very singular fantastic paintings in the style of the Temptations of Callot and Teniers, only much older. In other respects it is impossible to conceive anything more monotonous than these narrow, low, and interminable corridors of grey granite, which circulate all through the edifice like the veins in the human body; you must really be blind to find your way about them; you go up stairs and down stairs, you make a thousand twistings and turnings, and if you only walked about three or four hours you would wear out the soles of your shoes, for the granite is as rough as a file, and as harsh as so much sand-paper. From the dome you perceive that the balls which, when viewed from below, did not appear larger than horses' bells, are of an enormous size, and might serve as monster globes. An immense panorama unfolds itself at your feet, and you perceive at one glance the hilly country which separates you from Madrid; on the other side you behold the mountains of Guadarrama. From this position, too, you see the whole plan of the building; your eye plunges into the courtyards and cloisters, with their rows of superposed arcades, and their fountain or central pavilion; the roofs appear like so many simple ridges, just as they would in an engraving that gave a bird's-eye view of the place.

When we ascended to the dome, a stork with three little ones was perched in a large straw nest, that resembled a turban turned upside down, placed on the top of one of the chimneys. This interesting family presented the strangest appearance in the world; the mother was standing on one leg in the middle of the nest, with her neck stuck between her shoulders, and her beak reposing majestically upon her breast, like a philosopher in meditation; the little birds were stretching out their long beaks and their long necks to ask for food. I hoped to witness one of those sentimental scenes of natural history, where we see the large white pelican wounding her own breast to nourish her offspring; but the stork appeared to be very little moved by these demonstrations of hunger, and did not move more than the stork engraved on wood which adorns the frontispiece of the books coloured by Cramoisi. This melancholy group increased still more the profound solitude of the place, and imparted a kind of Egyptian character to this Pharaoh-like assemblage of buildings. After descending from the dome, we visited the garden, where there is more architecture than vegetation. It consists of a succession of large terraces and parterres of clipped boxwood, representing a series of designs similar to the patterns of old damask silk, with a few fountains, and pieces of greenish water; it is a wearisome, solemn garden, as formal as a Golilla, and altogether worthy of the morose-looking edifice to which it is attached.

There are said to be one thousand one hundred and ten windows in the exterior of the Escurial alone, a fact which greatly astonishes the cockney visitor. I did not count them, as I preferred believing the report to entering upon an undertaking of such magnitude; but the fact is not improbable, for I never saw so many windows in one place; the number of the doors is equally fabulous.

I took leave of this desert of granite, this monastic necropolis, with an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction and delight; it seemed as if I were restored to life, and that I could once more feel young, and enjoy the wonderful creation of God, which I had lost all hope of doing, while under these funereal vaults. The warm bright air enveloped me as with some soft cloth of fine wool, and warmed my body, that was frozen by the cadaverous atmosphere; I was freed from the architectural nightmare, which I thought would never end. I would advise those people who are absurd enough to pretend that they are suffering from ennui to go and pass three or four days in the Escurial; they will there learn what ennui really means, and, for the rest of their lives, will always find a fund of amusement in the thought that they might be in the Escurial, and that they are not.

When we returned to Madrid, all our acquaintances were astonished and delighted at beholding us once more alive. Very few persons return from the Escurial; they either die of consumption in two or three days, or blow out their brains,—that is, if they are Englishmen. Luckily, we both enjoy a very good constitution; and as Napoleon said of the cannon-ball which was to carry him off, the building that is to kill us is not yet built. Another thing which did not cause less surprise was the fact of our bringing our watches back with us; for in Spain there are always, on the high-road, persons extremely desirous of knowing what o'clock it is; and as there are neither clocks nor even sundials at hand, they are under the painful necessity of consulting travellers' watches.