VI.
Ah, Madrid is an inn. On a night like this we come to know what Madrid is. Our capital is a floating population, heterogeneous, exotic, which can only be compared to the population of a free port, of a jail, of an insane asylum. Travellers journeying toward a future, to the fantastic kingdom of ambition, halt here as well as those who are journeying back from misery, from crime.
Beauty comes here to marry, or to sell herself, the landed proprietor to squander his wealth, the literati for glory, the deputy to become a minister, the worthless man for a government office. The savant, the inventor, the comedian, the giant, the dwarf, the man with an anomaly in his soul or in his body, the monster with seven arms and three noses as well as the philosopher with double sight, the charlatan, the reformer, the man who creates melodies, and the man who counterfeits bank-notes,—all spend some period of their life in the great inn. Those who attain notoriety, those who find a purchaser, those who have grown rich at the expense of themselves, become in time the innkeepers, the landlords, the masters of Madrid, and forget the land of their birth. But we, the wayfarers, the lodgers,—we realize to-night that Madrid means exile, that Madrid is a bivouac, a prison, a purgatory. For the first time in the year we feel that neither the café, the theatre, the casino, nor the hotel is our house. More than that, we realize that our house is not our home.
VII.
The home—that sacred abode of the patriarch, of the Roman citizen, of the feudal lord, of the very Arab; the holy arch of the Penates, temple of hospitality, and altar of the family—has completely disappeared in our great modern centres. The home survives in the provinces alone. There our house is our own. In Madrid it is generally the landlord's. In the provinces our house shelters us for twenty, thirty, forty years at least. In Madrid one moves every month, or at least every year. Our home has a physiognomy of its own, which never varies, ever kindly and sympathetic. It grows old with us; it bears the impress of our lives; it preserves our footprints. In Madrid the exterior changes every leap year; the apartments are arrayed in new garments; that furniture is sold which our contact had consecrated. At home the whole edifice is ours: the grassy court, the poultry-yard filled with chickens, the high, cheery terraces, the deep well,—the children's terror,—the monumental tower, the broad cool, vine-covered summer-house. Here we occupy a half-flat, paper-lined, and divided into mean apartments, with no view of the sky, no sun, no air. There we have that neighborly affection, something between friendship and relationship, which binds together all the families of one street. Here the man who moves about noisily above our heads is unknown to us, neither do we know the man who dies beyond the partition of our alcove, and whose death-rattle disturbs our sleep. Our provincial home is a cluster of memories, of local attachments: here the room in which we were born, there the room where our brother died; here the empty hall in which we played as children, there the study in which we wrote our first verses. On the chapter of a column, in the trough of an old ceiling, swallows have built their nests, and every year the faithful couple fly over from Africa to hatch a new brood. In Madrid all this is unknown. And the hearth, that consecrated stone, cold in summer, cold in our absence, but warm and friendly during the happy winter evenings when all the children are brought together and grouped about the old people,—for the colleges have their vacations, the married daughters bring their little ones home on a visit, and the absent ones, the prodigal sons, come back to the heart of the family,—where, tell me, where is this hearth in the houses of the capital? Can we call a French mantel-piece, made of marble, bronze, and iron, a hearth, that which one can buy at a store, at wholesale or retail, and can even hire, if need be? The French mantel-piece is the symbol of home in a great city. People of Madrid, that is your hearth,—a hearth subject to the changes of fashion, a hearth which is sold when it is old, which can be moved from room to room, from street to street, and which can even be pawned in an emergency.
VIII.
I wandered through a street. Far above my head, from a high story, my grandmother's prophetic couplet floated down to me amid the shock of glasses, the rattle of dishes, and the merry laughter of girls.
"Christmas comes,
Christmas goes;