Amongst the audience, none bore the severe infliction with a greater degree of evangelical resignation than the grand inquisitor and the archbishop of Toledo; both these prelates have not only the look, but the character of beneficence, which promises a truce to the faggot and pitch-barrel; the expression of the archbishop’s countenance in particular is most engagingly mild and pleasing. He came up to me without the least reserve or formality, and taking me by the hand, said with a cheerful smile, “I see you are equipped for a dance, and have adopted our fashion; we all long to judge whether an Englishman can enter (as I hear you can) into the extravagant spirit of our national dances. I will speak to Pacheco, and desire him to form a diversion in your favour, by calling off these doleful minstrels to the rinfresco prepared for them.” And so he did, and there was an end of the concert, to my infinite joy, and the no less delight of the villa mayors and sabbatinis, with whom, without a moment’s farther delay, I sprang forth in a bolero.
Down came all the Spanish musicians from their formal orchestra, too happy to escape its trammels; away went the foreign regulars, taking vehement pinches of snuff, with the most unequivocal expressions of anger and indignation. A circle was soon formed, a host of guitars put in immediate requisition, and never did I hear such wild, extravagant, passionate modulations.
Boccharini, who led and presided over the Duchess of Ossuna’s concerts, and who had been lent to Pacheco as a special favour, witnessed these most original deviations from all established musical rule with the utmost contempt and dismay. He said to me in a loud whisper, “If you dance and they play in this ridiculous manner, I shall never be able to introduce a decent style into our musical world here, which I flattered myself I was on the very point of doing. What possesses you? Is it the devil? Who could suppose that a reasonable being, an Englishman of all others, would have encouraged these inveterate barbarians in such absurdities. There’s a chromatic scream! there’s a passage! We have heard of robbing time; this is murdering it. What! again! Why, this is worse than a convulsive hiccup, or the last rattle in the throat of a dying malefactor. Give me the Turkish howlings in preference; they are not so obtrusive and impudent.”
So saying, he moved off with a semi-seria stride, and we danced on with redoubled delight and joy. The quicker we moved, the more intrepidly we stamped with our feet, the more sonorously we snapped our fingers, the better reconciled the sublime Effendi appeared to be with me. He forgot my critiques upon his vocal performers: he rose up from his snug cushion, and nodded his turbaned head, and expressed his delight, not only by word and gesture, but in a most comfortable orientalish sort of chuckling. As to the rest of the company, the Spanish part at least, they were so much animated, that not less than twenty voices accompanied the bolero with its appropriate words in full chorus, and with a glow of enthusiasm that inspired my lovely partners and myself with such energy, that we outdid all our former outdancings.
“Is it possible,” exclaimed an old fandango-fancier of great notoriety—“is it possible, that a son of the cold north can have learnt all our rapturous flings and stampings?”—“The French never could, or rather never would,” observed a Monsieur Gaudin, one of the Duke de la V——’s secretaries, who was standing by perfectly astounded.
Who persecute like renegades? who are so virulent against their former sect as fresh converts to another? This was partly my case; though my dancing and musical education had been strictly orthodox, according to the precepts of Mozart and Sacchini, of Vestris and Gardel, I declared loudly there was no music but Spanish, no dancing but Spanish, no salvation in either art out of the Spanish pale, and that, compared with such rapturous melodies, such inspired movements, the rest of Europe afforded only examples of dullness and insipidity. I would not allow my former instructors a spark of merit; and at the very moment I was committing solecisms in good dancing at every step, and stamping and piaffing like a courser but half-broken in at a manège, I felt and looked as firmly persuaded of the truth of my impudent assertions as the greatest bigot of his nonsense in some untried new-fangled superstition. Success, founded or unfounded, is everything in this world. We too well know the sad fate of merit. I am more than apt to conjecture we were but very slightly entitled to any applause; yet the transports we called forth were as fervid as those the famous Le Pique excited at Naples in the zenith of his popularity.
The British and American ministers, who were standing by the whole time, enjoyed this amusing proof of Spanish fanaticism, in its profane mood, with all the zest of intelligent and shrewd observers. Pisani, the Venetian ambassador, inclined decidedly to the southern side of the question. He was bound, heart and soul, by a variety of silken ties to the Spanish interest, and had almost forgotten the fascinations of Venice in those of Andalusia. Consequently I had his vote in my favour. Not so that of the Duchess of Ossuna, Boccharini’s patroness. She said to me in the plainest language, “You are making the greatest fool of yourself I ever beheld; and as to those riotous self-taught hoydens, your partners, I tell you what, they are scarcely worthy to figure in the third rank at a second-rate theatre. Come along with me, and I will present you to my mother, the Countess of Benevente, who gives a very different sort of education to the charming young women she admits to her court.”
I had heard of this court and its delectabilities, and at the same time been informed that its throne was a faro-table, to which the initiated were imperatively expected to become tributaries. The sovereign, old Benevente, is the most determined hag of her rout-giving, card-playing species in Europe, of the highest birth, the highest consequence, and the principal disposer, by long habit and old cortejo-ship, of Florida Blanca’s good graces.
Notwithstanding the severe regulations against gambling societies, most severely enforced at Madrid; notwithstanding the prime minister’s morality, and the still higher morality of his royal master, this great lady’s aberrations of every kind are most complaisantly winked at; she is allowed not only to set up under her own princely roof a refuge for the desolate, in the most delicate style of Spanish refinement, for the kind purpose of enchanting all persons sufficiently favoured by fortune to merit admission to her parties, by every blandishment and languishment the most seductive eyes of Seville and Cadiz she had collected together could throw around them; but so sure as the hour of midnight arrived, and Florida Blanca (who never fails paying his devoirs to the countess every evening) had made his retiring bow, so sure a confidential party of illuminati, of unsleeping partners in the gambling-line, made their appearance, heavily laden with well-stored caskets.
Now came the tug of play, and hope, and fear in all their thrilling and throbbing alternations; but, to say truth, I was so completely jaded and worn-out that I partook of neither, and was too happy, after losing almost unconsciously a few dobras, to be allowed to retire; old Benevente calling out to me, with the croak of a vulture scenting its prey from afar, Cavallero Inglez, a mañana a la misma hora.