H. R. H., the Infanta Eulalia

Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris

COURT LIFE
FROM WITHIN

BY
H. R. H.
THE INFANTA EULALIA
OF SPAIN

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things,
“Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
“Of cabbages and kings.”

ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1915
Copyright, 1913, 1914
By THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1914
By THE CENTURY CO.
Copyright, 1915
By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I have endeavoured in these pages to present a true picture of Court life. It is a life hedged about by many restrictions; to me a great deal of it all was empty and meaningless.

I say nothing of those who are actively engaged in the duties of rulership; but to the other members of Royal families, life is little more than a round of useless ceremonies, from which a mind with any pretence to independence flies in relief—does opportunity offer. I have left behind me the life of Courts and palaces. But for many years, in my own youth, and while my sons were growing up into manhood, I fulfilled my part as a Princess of Spain, after my marriage visiting practically all the Courts of Europe. I have written here of these visits and of my impressions of the rulers of Europe, and, while I hope there is much in this book of kindliness and sympathy, yet I have considered truth to be the first essential in these recollections.

I am democratic in my sympathies, and consider the day has gone by when Royalty should live behind closed blinds. The world, as I see it, is peopled by one big family. We are all brothers and sisters; let us know one another better.

Paris, 1915.

COURT LIFE FROM WITHIN

CHAPTER I
THE SEEDS OF REVOLT

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things,
“Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
“Of cabbages and kings.”
Alice in Wonderland.

Once, when I was making an official visit to the South of Spain with my brother (who was then King), we were told of a gentleman of the Province of Sevilla who had had a talking parrot sent to him from South America; and this parrot had been taught to say “Viva la Reina!”—that is, “Long live the Queen!” But soon after its arrival in Sevilla there was a revolution, and Spain became a republic; and it was not at all comfortable for the gentleman to have a parrot screaming “Long live the Queen!” So he shut it up in a room in his house and set himself to teach it to cry “Viva la Republica!”—“Long live the Republic!” It was a very intelligent parrot, and he easily taught it to say “Viva la Republica!”; but it had a tenacious memory, and it took him a long time before he could be sure that it would always say “Viva la Republica!” and never forget its change of politics and cry out, inopportunely, in a voice to be heard by the neighbours, “Viva la Reina!” Then there was another revolution, and Spain became a monarchy again, and every one shouted “Viva el Rey!”—“Long live the King!” And the gentleman carried his parrot back to the closed room, and after many days spent in trying to teach it to cry “Viva el Rey!” he wrung its neck.

It was a very valuable parrot, and most intelligent, but it was not sufficiently facile to take a speaking part in Spanish politics in those days.

I have remembered this sad story of the parrot because the events of its life were so important to my own. The Queen whom it first supported was my mother, Isabella II. The King on whose account it lost its life was my brother, Alfonso XII. And the Republic (which lasted from 1868 to 1874) was the one that made it possible for me to escape, at least mentally and spiritually, from the prison—very gilded, very luxurious, but more guarded than a Bastille—in which Royalty is compelled to live. Such an escape, I think, is more difficult than any of Baron Trenck’s. It is one that leaves, as you might say, the impediment of fetters on the mind, even when the body has gone free. And I have long been curious to consider what it was in me that made me struggle out of this splendid confinement, in which one is so envied and so many are so content.

When the revolution of ’68 first disturbed my life—and the parrot’s—I was too young to know it. The intelligence was still unformed, the body infantile. But both the body and the mind had been born of a race so old and in traditions so established that it would seem no revolution could affect them. For many hundreds of years a few families of human beings had been inheriting the thrones of Europe, generation after generation, as families inherit property, from parents to children, by the consent of society and under the protection of law. They were by birth “Royal,” as persons may be, in democracies, by birth wealthy. And they were born to rule as unquestionably as the children of the poor to-day are born to poverty. They were spoken of as “Blood Royal,” as if they were of special flesh, and they intermarried only with Blood Royal, because the people whom they governed demanded children of this special flesh to sit on the thrones of their countries. A king here or a queen there might lose a crown by bad management, or misfortune, or the ill-will of subjects, as a man might lose an inherited estate by similar causes; but he could not lose his place among the families of Royalty (with whom he and his children had intermarried) nor the honours of Courts and the respect of peoples who still obeyed members of the ruling families into which he had been born. So, since I had been born into one of these families—the Bourbon—the essentials of my life were as little changed by the revolution of ’68 as the parrot’s were. We both remained in our cages.

My mother, leaving Spain, came to Paris, to live in the Palais de Castile with her children, a Queen in exile, but still a Queen; Napoleon III. extended the hospitality of the nation to her; and she continued to move among ceremonies and Court functions after the manner royal.

Of all this I recall almost nothing. I have a vague memory of Napoleon III. making us a visit, and I remember that the young Prince Napoleon came to play with my brother and my sisters, who were older than I. I can recall our flight from Paris, when it was about to be besieged by the Prussians, for I was ill with measles and I was carried downstairs wrapped in a blanket, and I saw, somewhere on our journey to Normandy, German soldiers with helmets as our carriage passed them. But these are recollections of the eyes alone; they mean nothing.

My first clear consciousness of myself I cannot place. It pictures me in rebellion against wearing the earrings for which my ears had been pierced soon after my birth, so that I might be decorated with the jewels that were part of the regalia in which a Princess of Spain was expected to appear, even as an infant. I do not know why I rebelled—unless it was because the earrings interfered with the bodily activity that was irrepressible in me. I was very healthy, very strong. I wished to play outdoors, where I could run; I chafed at the restraint of our formal living; and I think it was this revolt of the body that became a revolt of the mind as soon as I developed a mind.

Conceive that we children had no playroom in the Palais. We had to amuse ourselves in a decorous sitting-room, quietly. And we were never allowed to be alone. We were always under the eyes of some Spanish lady-in-waiting who guarded and repressed us. When we were taken for a walk in the Bois, we were accompanied by ladies who prevented us from playing with the children we met. At home some one always sat and observed what we were doing. At night some one watched and slept in the bedroom with us. Whatever we did there were eyes on us. It is true that until after I was married I was scarcely left alone for a moment to sit by myself in a room. That seems to me very sad.

I am sad, too, when I remember this: there was a courtyard in the Palais that had in it a stone pool of water a little larger than a round tub; and it was an escapade for me to get down into the court and play in that pool. In summer I got fish and put them in it, and pretended that I was fishing. In winter I skated on it, although I could scarcely make two strokes without bumping into its sides. There was not a child in Paris so poor that he would not have laughed at such a playground; but to me it was liberty. One’s childhood, at least, might be more free than that.

Not that my childhood was pathetic. On the contrary, I was very robust, and instead of succumbing to repression I reacted against it. All my earliest recollections find me engaged in an incessant struggle for merely physical freedom and the enjoyment of sunlight and open air. I would not sit and play with dolls. I could not be entertained with the Spanish stories of witches that correspond to the fairy-tales of the North. I was not an imaginative child, and I did not care for pets. I had found a boy in the Palais—the son of one of the maids of a lady-in-waiting—and I ran away, whenever I could, to romp in the court with him. When my brother was home from school, he was my playmate, although he was seven years older than I. I liked him because I could fight with him—real fisticuffs—and be rough. We played a sort of football in the court together, and my mother used to say that she had two sons.

Once when we were at Houlgate, in Normandy—where we had a summer villa by the seashore—I decided to run away from home because I had been prevented from playing with children on the beach. After dark, when no one could see me, I set out, without knowing where I should go, all alone, determined never to come back. I had no plan. I did not even understand that food and lodgings had to be paid for and worked for in the world. I walked along the country road in the dark, quite happy because I was walking, but puzzled because when I began to tire I did not know where to stop. So when I came to the farm of an old woman from whom we had bought apples, I turned in, naturally, to get an apple, without telling her that I had run away.

I was overtaken there. The lady-in-waiting—who was very shrewd—as soon as she missed me, found out from my sister that I had threatened to run away, and she guessed that I would go to the apple-woman’s farm, since it was the only place near by where I had ever been. They brought me back home, but they had all been frightened, and I began to get my own way. For example, there was always a maid sleeping in our room at night, and I did not wish it—as much, perhaps, because she snored as because I wanted our bedroom for ourselves. When they insisted that the maid must be there, I dragged my bed into the corridor every night, until they gave me a room to myself in which I could at least sleep without being guarded. I would not wear tight clothes, and I put my hands down inside my waist-band when they were dressing me, so that they could not fasten tight things on me; and in this way I avoided many tiresome affairs of ceremony, which I disliked.

These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never have escaped.

When my sisters and I were sent as day-scholars to the convent of the Sacré Cœur, my real escape began. We wore the dark blue uniforms of the school, as all the girls did, and we were treated exactly as the others were. We studied in the common classrooms and played with our class-mates at the recreation hour in the convent grounds. How can I tell how eagerly I went to school in the mornings with the governess who took us through the streets? Or how happily tired I came home at night after all the study and play and little incidents of the class-room that had filled the day? I would be so tired that I would fall asleep at the formal dinner that was served for my mother and her guests of honour in the evening; and the servants would have to carry me to bed. But I would be awake next morning very early, before any one else in the Palais, in haste to be off again to school.

If we had remained in Spain I should never have been allowed such freedom. They would have brought tutors and governesses to teach us in the palace. I should never have been allowed school companions like those we had in Paris. It was for this that I have to thank the revolution.

I have one recollection of these days that is quaint. My sister had come to school wearing earrings; and a nun, telling her that earrings were forbidden in the convent, attempted to take them off. In freeing one she tore my sister’s ear accidentally, so that it bled, and I was very angry and I wanted to strike the nun. When we spoke of this at home to a lady-in-waiting, she reproved me, saying that it would be “a double sin” to strike a nun. I replied that I would not strike any one except to give back as good as I got. “Well,” she said, “you will never have to strike any one, for no one can strike you.” “Why not?” She answered, because I was “a royalty.” “Then,” I said to myself, “as long as I live I shall never have a good fight!” And this made me so sad that I remember it yet, with a sort of sinking, as one remembers something irreparable that made a great difference to one’s outlook on life.

My mind, by this time, had become as active as my body, and I was very curious and full of questions. The Spanish ladies-in-waiting who formed our household were quite ignorant. Many of them could not read or write, and they could teach us nothing but old wives’ tales and silly superstitions. I had learned to read very young but I could not get books of the sort I needed. Outside of our school-books we had little but “The Lives of the Saints,” which was read to us every day—the life of the saint on the day dedicated to that saint—as the Bible is read in pious families of Protestants. I remember that I had “Robinson Crusoe” in French, and some books of Jules Verne, that were welcome because they told of travels and adventures in the world of which I wished to know. Otherwise our books were all religious; and I had found that I could not ask questions about religion.

For instance, a nun at the convent, giving us religious instruction in the mysteries of the creation, had said that the world must have been created because nothing could exist without a creator; and when I interrupted her to ask, childishly, who, then, had created the Creator, she replied that it was a mystery beyond our human comprehension. I asked her who had told her about it, and she was very angry, and punished me by making me copy out pages of Racine’s poems during the recreation hour. This method of teaching religion was not successful with me, because—not being an imaginative child—I was sceptical of anything that could be explained to me. And, being contemptuous of the ladies-in-waiting, who were very religious in an ignorant way, I became contemptuous of the superstitions which their ignorance had added to their faith.

They carried about with them great numbers of metal images of saints, blessed medals, and relics in little lockets, which they kissed and believed in as potent against all sorts of diseases and misfortunes. They had large pockets for the purpose under their skirts; and my sisters and I had the same kind of pockets, filled with the same things. It was not long before I had emptied mine to make room for the cakes which I used to smuggle from the table to eat at school, where our food was rather scanty. For such irreverences as this, and for laughing at incidents in the lives of the saints which amused me when they were read to us, I became rather a scandal to our household, and they would say to me, “You are only fit for America! You ought to be sent to America!”—since America was regarded as a barbarous place where the manners were bad. And so I came to think that if I could only take a ship and go to America I should be really happy.

The nuns were very sweet and gentle with me, but I would have liked them better if they had been rough. There was something in me that distrusted suavity and desired brusqueness. I was not sensitive about harsh contacts, and I did not fear or resent punishment. Consequently, I not only imposed myself on my sisters, who were less robust than I, but upon my teachers, who could not control my spirit. Mirrors being forbidden in the convent, I put sheets of paper behind the panes of glass in the doors, and dragged the girls to them to look at themselves. And this seemed an ingenious perversity that staggered the nuns.

My two sisters having gone through their preparation for First Communion, my mother took them to Rome to receive the sacrament from the hands of the Pope. She took me, too; and, although I had not been prepared, the Pope gave me communion at the same time, saying that I was a “little angel,” because I had fair hair and blue eyes. When I returned to the convent and the nuns heard that I had received communion without the preparation, they were outraged. “Well, then,” I said, “isn’t your Pope infallible?” And this shocked and silenced them. Altogether, although I lost many recreation hours by having to do “impositions” as punishment for small rebellions, school failed to subdue me, and I kept a wilful freedom of mind.

I had heard from the gossip of the household that my mother—who had no knowledge of the value of money—was spending so extravagantly that we should soon have nothing to live on. And this delighted me. I used to picture myself working hard to earn—perhaps by teaching languages or painting, of which I was very fond—and the joy of the thought was intense. My eldest sister suffered from headaches in school; she used to be sent often to the infirmary; and I would ask permission to go up to her and sit by her bedside, and tell her wonderful stories of my dreams for our future when we should be fighting for life.

It seemed to me the happiest, the most exciting thing, to be in such a struggle, among people who had to work and make their way, always busy and interested in something, and never shut up in idleness to be bored. No Cinderella ever invented for herself stories of rescue by Prince Charming with more longing than I looked forward to my escape from the sort of life with which Cinderella was rewarded. And I still think that I was wiser than she.

My grandmother, Queen Maria Cristina—the widow of Ferdinand VII. of Spain—was living in retirement in Normandy; she had lost her throne by marrying a Spanish officer of her escort; and she would tell me that she had never been so happy in Courts—never as happy as since she had been exiled with the man she loved. We went to visit her very often during our summers—a very clever old lady with a mind of her own—and I liked her the best of all my relatives.

Her story of her marriage with the officer (which she told me herself) made a deep impression on me. She had been on a journey through the mountains near Madrid, and the altitude had given her a bleeding at the nose. The ladies-in-waiting had given her their handkerchiefs, and she had used all her own, but the bleeding still continued, and she turned to the officer of her escort riding beside her carriage and asked him for his handkerchief. She did not know him; she had never spoken to him before; but she was in such distress that when he gave her his handkerchief she passed all the others to him without knowing what she was doing. He kissed them and put them in his breast. Then the ladies said to themselves, “Ah, the poor officer! Now he will be sent away to Cuba or the Philippines!” And they were sorry for him, because he was a very handsome man and very well liked.

Next morning he was summoned to a private audience with the Queen, and the ladies said, “The poor man! Why did he do it? What a mistake!” But when he came away from the audience he was not depressed, and it was understood that the Queen had reprimanded and forgiven him. He continued in attendance on her as an officer of the household, and it was not suspected until long afterwards that they had been secretly married. It seems incredible, but the Queen had several children by this marriage without it being known even to Court circles. She once opened Parliament a few hours after the birth of a child, going to the ceremony in a carriage, very weak, but determined to show herself to the people because a rumour of the birth had been circulated by her enemies. She was a woman of unconquerable will. When the truth of the marriage could no longer be concealed, and the people revolted, she left Spain with her husband, and was very happy, living near Havre with him and their children. She was a real grandmother to me, and my visits to her were always a delight.

My father, who was the Infante Francisco, my mother’s first cousin, had been married to her for reasons of State; they had separated after the revolution; and he lived near us in Paris, or at Epinay, in an establishment of his own, where we children sometimes went to see him. He was a small, grey man, very silent, very formal, fond of books and solitude, and contented to be out of politics and affairs of Courts. There had been no sentiment in his marriage to my mother, and there was none in his relations with us children. My mother, too, was more a queen to us than a mother; and, as a girl, I knew nothing of the parental affections of a home. I think that may have been partly because my parents were quite old when I was born to them, so that the years separated us. But also it is one of the penalties of Royalty that their life cannot be intimate and fond.

My great devotion was for my brother, whom I was like. He was never religious in a superstitious way, and he was very lively and athletic and fond of sports, so that we played congenially. He was a clever student, and helped me with my school work. And he was talkative with me, and told me about his life at school, as I chattered to him about mine. But he went away to college in Vienna when I was very young, and then to a military college in England, and I saw him only in his holidays.

That, then, was the sort of childhood one had in the Palais de Castile. I saw the comings and goings of politicians and personages from Spain without paying any attention to them and without knowing what they were about; for I spoke French and but little Spanish. With my mother, who spoke almost no French, we talked with difficulty in a mixture of both languages. We scarcely saw her except at dinner in the evening among her foreign guests, or on Sunday when we went to chapel in the Palais; and we children made our own lives among ourselves, apart from the affairs of our elders. I had achieved a certain independence of mind, although no independence of action was possible to me. I had escaped the narrowing influences of our life, but no broadening influences reached me. I had to make my own mental growth without the aid of liberal books or the culture that one gets from informing conversation. I often wonder what would have become of me if another revolution had not returned us to Spain.

I was about eleven years of age when it happened. And it came like a bomb. I had not thought of it. I was expecting that, when I finished school, I should have a life like other girls; and I was bewildered when my mother summoned us to her room one morning and told us that my brother Alfonso had been proclaimed King of Spain. I could see from her manner that it was to her a happy event that would make a great difference to us, but I did not realise how it would be. It was as if some one should tell a little girl of a great inheritance that was to make her very wealthy, when she did not understand what money could buy.

The first signs of the change came immediately from the nuns at the convent, who treated us more formally than before. And we learned from the girls that they had been told to be different with us, but, of course, they did not succeed. They came to us much excited and curious to know how we felt; and I could see that they were disappointed because we did not feel as delighted as they supposed. Then a great many people began to come to the Palais—Spanish personages, Republicans who had never visited us before, and men who, I learned, had been concerned in my mother’s exile. And it puzzled me to see that she received them all as if they had always been as friendly as they now appeared.

Like most children, I was not forgiving; I had not learned to tolerate the disloyalties to which life accustoms one; and I was disgusted by the cheerful falseness of the self-interest that brought these people about us. I began to look cynically at the show of devoted deference that makes the peculiar atmosphere of a Court. And then I forgot everything in the announcement that we were to join my brother in Spain—my dear brother, whom I thought of as a playmate, not as a king. I had missed him so much. I believed that I should always be happy now, since we were to be together.

CHAPTER II
IRKSOME DUTIES OF A PRINCESS

It is in life as it is in travelling, that you go sometimes with such unreflecting interest in the mere passing-by of the incidents of Time that you arrive unaware of your destination, and look back with dismay on the change and the distance. It was so I went from the democracy of our French class-room to the estate of Royalty in Spain. The mere journey itself was an excitement; and it was at once, even in France, almost a Royal progress, because of the number of Spanish ladies who had come to Paris to conduct my mother to the Court, to say nothing of the other people who had attached themselves to our suite for various reasons of their own.

At the seaport of San Jean de Luz a Spanish warship awaited us, with the sailors on the yards, the colours flying, and the cannon firing a salute. This seemed to me very jolly, and I watched with curiosity; but I must have been a little withdrawn from it in my mind, for I remember noticing with amusement how much more excited for us my governess was by the crowds and the spectacle. It is usually the looker-on who most enjoys these pomps. The Royalty must preserve the dignity of effigies to endure the stares. And I was disappointed because I was not free to move about and be unconscious; because I could not be spoken to by those who were outside the circle of attendants; because the personages who were allowed to greet me all made the same congratulations with a formality that wearied.

Even on board the ship I could not go about and see the sailors. I had to remain in the Royal cabins, or move with the others among the standing salutes of officers who could not speak or be spoken to. We had lost the freedom of private persons; we had become like commanding officers in a world governed by the army regulations of Court etiquette; we could not go anywhere without sending word ahead so that life might be put on parade for us. Our meals were ceremonies. We attended a very long and formal Mass that was celebrated for us on board. And I remember, as my one real pleasure on the ship, that I had to sleep in a saloon on a billiard-table, where a mattress had been spread for me, because there were not enough Royal cabins to accommodate us all.

But as soon as we arrived at the Spanish port of Santander I forgot everything in the excitement of a reception that amounted to a carnival. With a staff of officers and dignitaries in uniform, and a troop of cavalry as escort, we were driven in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, through streets of which I could not see the fronts of the houses—they were so covered with the reds and yellows of flags and bunting that were dazzling in the vivid sunlight of Spain. There were crowds on the pavement, in the windows, on the balconies, and even on the house-tops; and they pelted us gaily with flowers tied in nosegays with weighted stems so that they might be accurately thrown. They threw at us doves with their feet tied to long strings, so that they could flutter but not escape. We warded off the flowers with our parasols, and standing up in the carriage I caught at the doves, while my mother, who feared nothing in the world, kept crying out, in a nervous terror, that she would faint if one of the birds touched her with its flutterings. She had the sort of horror of them flying that one has of bats. And this excited me. And the more excited I became, the more the crowd laughed and cheered and pelted us. If Spain were going to be all like that, I should be happy. It seemed impossible that these could be the same people who had driven my mother away with hisses. The realisation that they were truly the same made it seem, for the moment, that we were all playing a part in a spectacle without sincerity. The thought worried me as it passed.

We were being driven to the cathedral of Santander, where a Mass was to be celebrated and the Te Deum sung in thanksgiving for our return; and there, at the church door, the bishop in his robes waited for us under a canopy borne on poles by four young priests—the sort of canopy that he walks under in processions of the Corpus Christi, when he carries the Host through the streets. My mother, my two sisters, and I were taken under this canopy with him, as if we were something sacred; and we were solemnly escorted, by priests and acolytes, with music and singing and candles and incense, up the aisle to the sanctuary, where four throne-like chairs had been prepared for us before the altar. As I watched the priests and the people, I wondered whether they were sincere in this appearance of accepting us as sanctified by some sort of divine right.

From the cathedral we were taken to an official reception at the Mairie, and then to the Royal train that my brother had sent to bring us to Madrid; and we were started on our railroad journey with cheering and congratulations, in great state, among officers of the Court and personages of the Government. It was a journey that lasted all night, and the train was stopped at every station so that we might smile and bow to the crowd. At first I enjoyed it; it was exciting. But when it grew dark and I was tired and wanted to sleep, I found I had to wake up to be shown to the people, who came even in the middle of the night to see us pass. I rebelled. My mother insisted. “Very well,” I said, “I’ll make silly faces at them, and they’ll think you have an idiot for a daughter.” My mother was furious, but she knew that I would do it, so she left me alone, and I slept.

I had learned that we were not going direct to Madrid, but to the palace of the Escurial, in the mountains, a little distance from the capital. It was not considered wise that my mother should go to Madrid, because her presence there might encourage

The King’s Study in Escurial

the formation of a party in her favour as a rival to her son, and because it was necessary to avoid any appearance that the King was taking directions from her in affairs of State—in short, because the men who had recalled my brother were willing to have my mother and her children in Spain, but were not willing to have her rule there. This fact, for me, rather took away the sweet odour of sincerity from the incense that had been burned for us; but it did not seem to make any difference to my mother, who accepted such considerations as matters of course.

My brother met our train at a station some distance from Madrid, and we had a little family reunion that was very happy. He was so glad to have us and we to have him. My mother insisted that he must scold me for threatening to make faces at the people, but he laughed and would not. He joked and chatted gaily with me, as we used to in the old school days that seemed already so far away; and he promised that in a little time he would be able to have us with him in Madrid, where we should be very jolly together.

He accompanied us to the Escurial, which we approached from the mountains, so that we looked down on it. It was built in a square, with a wing coming out of one side like a handle. “What a funny palace!” I said. “It is the shape of a frying-pan.” My brother told me that this was intentionally so; that Philip II. had dedicated the palace to St. Lorenzo, who had been martyred on a gridiron; and the shape of the building was designed to remind the kings that if they were wicked they would be fried in hell. I enjoyed with him the charming naïveté of the symbolism. He was no more illiberal than I about his religion. Indeed, I think he was the only King of Spain who did not constantly go to confession.

Half of the Escurial was a monastery and a school, where the monks taught; for Philip II. had been fanatically religious, and he had lived there as “Brother Philip,” even while he conducted the war in the Netherlands and sent the famous Armada against England. The tombs of the Royal family were all here—to make it more cheerful—and new tombs were waiting for us, the daughters of Queen Isabella, so that I might regard my own sepulchre. I regarded it with amusement, because it seemed to me a childishness to make a daily bugaboo of death.

It appeared that we were not put in our tombs immediately after dying. We were placed first in the crypt, in a chamber called the pudridero, until decay had reduced our bodies to bones; and my brother whispered to me that in the pudridero reserved for Infantas so little care had been taken during the revolution that the bones had been mixed up together, and he had had to have them sorted for burial as best he could, rather haphazard. The thought of the poor Infantas in their fine tombs, with the bones of each in the tomb of another, set us laughing again. I thought that the Escurial was a very pretentiously funny place, and I enjoyed the tour of it with my brother as a great joke.

Next morning, before I was up, an important-looking officer in a gorgeous uniform of red and gold came bowing with dignity into my bedroom, and spoke something in Spanish. I could not understand what he wanted, and I tried to make him understand that I did not want him. He kept repeating himself deferentially, but with the air of a dignitary who knew his rights, until I ordered him out of the room with a gesture that he could not mistake. He went, much offended, and I hurried to my mother’s room to ask her who he was. She explained that he was an important Court official; that his sole duty in life was to carry slops from my wash-table—which was upholstered in red and gold to match his uniform; that this was a privilege which he valued highly, and that I had probably hurt him very much by denying him the right. I was indignant that any man of intelligence should be doing anything so absurd. My mother did not sympathise; it was an affair of Court etiquette. I refused to have a man coming to my room. She insisted that I must. “Very well,” I said, “if he ever comes in there again, I’ll beat him with something.” And although my mother was angry with me, he never did come in again.

This proved to be a sample of much of the formality that made life difficult at the Escurial. We had not only, now, the ladies-in-waiting to be with us always; as soon as we came out of our bedrooms in the morning we had ushers also to precede us everywhere; and if we crossed a hall a guard accompanied us and waited at the door. The Escurial is one of the most magnificent of palaces, with huge rooms of state as high as chapels, richly furnished and hung with tapestries and paintings. I found these rooms excellent to skip in, since all the furniture was arranged along the walls, as in ball-rooms; but I had to make friends first with the ushers, to persuade them to stand aside and let me play, otherwise, I suppose, I should have had to skip in a procession, with an usher marching in his uniform solemnly ahead of me and a lady-in-waiting behind!

I had no studies here and no playmates; my sisters were older than I, and they did not like my active games. I soon found the Escurial depressing. It was chilly in the mountains after sunset, and there was no way of heating the palace in those days except with fireplaces, that might as well have been burning out of doors. The view from the windows was desolate, for there were no trees, and the hills were bare. I saw no visitors but personages speaking Spanish, who came to see my mother formally; and to these we children were shown to satisfy curiosity. They all congratulated us on being back in the land where we had been born. I wondered why they expected that to make us so happy. After all, I did not remember being born there. As for the Escurial, it was picturesque, no doubt; it was magnificent; it was as historic as a public museum; and if I had been a tourist, sightseeing, I might have admired it as much as tourists do Versailles. But I do not think that even a tourist would be happy if he had to live permanently imprisoned in the magnificent discomforts of the palace of Versailles—especially if his only recreation was to skip in the Hall of Mirrors under the eyes of a uniformed museum guard.

Then there came to us a formidable relative, a princess to whom her royalty was a religion; and a new trouble began for me. I offended her unconsciously with every word—and, when I was not speaking, with every action. It appeared to her that I had not at all the manners of a princess, nor the mind. She set herself to instruct and counsel me, severely.

She tried to impress it on me that, with my brother on the Throne, every word I uttered had importance; that it would be weighed and studied and repeated. Therefore I must not express opinions of any sort about public affairs, or personages, for fear I should say something that might be used to make difficulties for my brother. It was a duty that we owed the Crown to have no opinions at all, except about matters that could have no public bearing or affect the popularity of the King.

Similarly, we could have no special friends, for fear of arousing jealousies that might embarrass the Throne; and in order to avoid even the appearance of having favourites, we must not show any special sympathy or antipathy for any person. We must be the same to all, and unvarying in our manner from day to day, so as to avoid comparisons. It was a duty that we owed the Crown. We must perform all our social and religious duties and observe all the etiquettes of Court life to the same end—that no act of ours, either of omission or commission, should make difficulty for the King. We must not only avoid the occasion of scandal, but we must efface ourselves so efficiently that even the most innocent gossip could not find its source in us. It was a duty that we owed the Crown. I must not say that I found the view from the Escurial desolate; it might be construed into an offensive criticism of the country. I must like everything and everybody, unless the King expressed a wish to the contrary in a particular instance. It was a duty that we owed the Crown.

At first she bewildered me with the sort of fright that comes on a child confronted by a dictatorial schoolmaster and a new lesson to learn. She talked and talked, and I did not understand her. Then I began to think her absurd, because her pomposity was stupid, and her self-importance made me smile. When she told me that every word I uttered would be weighed and repeated, I thought to myself, “No! People can’t be so silly as that! Or if there are such people, why worry about them? It isn’t worth the thought.” And the idea that I must not have opinions or friends was repulsive to me, because it was a restraint of spirit that would cramp me. After hearing it all from her, over and over, again and again, I decided that she was not a very clever person, and that she had exaggerated trifles. I knew that my brother would not expect such things of me, and I decided to pay no attention to her.

But the difficulty is that, no matter how liberal-minded a King may be, many of the people who devote themselves to the servilities of Court life are inevitably narrow; and though my brother had been recalled to the throne because he was a Liberal, his Court could not be so. My sisters and I, having been educated in France, were suspected of Republican tendencies of mind that would be as offensive as bad table manners in the Court. The clerical influence, though it was not strong with my brother, was very strong with my mother, and the ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, and the nobility in general; and I suppose it was evident that I was not a pattern of young devoutness. I spoke Spanish so clumsily that my brother had laughed at it and advised me that it would be unwise for me to attempt to speak it to visitors until I was more proficient. I did not know what was going on about me, but I imagine it was for such reasons as these that it was decided my mother should take us to the palace of the Alcazar in Sevilla, where we could learn Spanish and be purged of foreign habits of thought. And there, too, my mother would be still farther away from influencing the politics of the capital.

So, within a few months, we left the Escurial for the Alcazar, and I went from the chilly monotony of a Northern Court to the oppression and ennui of an Oriental harem. Even yet, if the sun shines too brightly and the summer day is hot, I am overcome with melancholy—as a Russian who has been in prison in Siberia might be when he sees the snow fall. Those endless, idle, unhappy days!

As we drove to the palace from the railway station I noticed that the street windows of the houses were all barred. Thieves, then, must be very bold in Sevilla? I was told: No; the bars were not in the windows to keep burglars out, but to keep the young girls in, and to allow them to speak safely with their future husbands, who came courting below in the streets. How picturesque! Since I had never been allowed to speak to a man alone, even through a grating—unless it was a priest in a confessional—I did not feel sorry for the young women of Sevilla. I did not understand that the bars were symbolical. I stared at the flat-roofed Southern houses and the barbaric colours of the costumes, and the crowds that did not cheer us as we drove by, but sang in chorus to the accompaniment of unseen guitars, and uttered sudden shrieks with sad, impassive faces, like Arabs, to express their joy. And the gates of the Alcazar closed on us without any ominous echo to my ears.

The Alcazar is a Moorish palace of great beauty, with walls and ceilings all covered with intricate patterns of carving and bright colours, so that it was like coming to live in a palace of the Arabian Nights. The inner courtyards are Oriental, cooled by fountains. The garden around the palace is Oriental, in tiny squares and flower-beds, with short paths, and no place for one to run. And around the garden the high wall is Oriental, a true harem wall, over which one could not see. In all the rooms of the palace there is not one door; and when we had hangings put up in the Moorish arches of our bedroom doorways the servants were surprised. They did not understand the desire for privacy. Sentinels and guards were on duty everywhere; a man even walked all night under my bedroom windows; and whenever we went into the gardens the trumpets were sounded—Heaven only knows why!

It was a life in which there was nothing to do, nothing to see—a life designed for Southern women who are content to loll about on cushions and grow fat. We were not expected to go out at all, except in carriages, with an escort, down staring streets, and, indeed, it would have been impossible to walk through the crowds that gathered. I could not ride horseback without a lady-in-waiting to go with me; and all the ladies were too fat to ride, even if they had known how. The best exercise I could get in the garden was to jump the flower-beds—to the amazement of everybody—or to skip up and down in one place mechanically. It was as much worse than the Escurial as the Escurial had been worse than the Palais de Castile; and when it came home to me that this, now, was to be my life for ever, I felt that I should go mad.

Every afternoon my mother gave audiences to the ladies of Sevilla; but what good was that? Even with us children they did nothing but curtsy, and kiss the hands, and look at us, awed, as if we were not human. They could not say anything to us, and we did not know what to say to them. Generals came to salute my mother, and remained for dinner; and every day one officer of the guard had luncheon with us; but we girls were not allowed to speak to men, except to exchange formal words of greeting under the eyes of the governess.

One day, the governess being absent, I got into conversation with an officer at the table, innocently, when he had been speaking about “the bath of Maria Padilla” in our garden. It was a large stone bath that had been built by Pedro the Cruel for this Maria

Gardens of the Alcazar, Seville

Padilla when she had lived at the Alcazar; and I had longed to have it filled with water so that I might use it. The officer told me that once, after Maria Padilla had bathed there, Pedro the Cruel, in a jest, had invited a courtier to drink some of the water to show his devotion, and the courtier replied, “I’m afraid if I tried the sauce, I might get a taste for the partridge.” I thought this very clever of the courtier, and I repeated the story to my governess, after dinner, and she was horrified. It was the last opportunity I got to speak with the officer.

And I did not get the bath. Indeed, at that time it was difficult to get a bath of any sort, except a sponge bath, piecemeal. The ladies-in-waiting declared that it was sinful to bathe; and when I laughed at that they argued that it was indelicate to take off all one’s clothing at once. (I imagine that their antipathy to bathing must have come from the feeling against the Moors, who had so long been the conquerors in Sevilla, since it was part of their religion to bathe.) I finally got my way by persuading a doctor to give orders that I must have cold baths for my health.

These, then, were some of the material restrictions of our life. The mental restrictions were even more hopeless. There were no books to be had. If I wrote a letter, it had to be read by the lady-in-waiting to whom I gave it to post. We had an old professor to give us lessons in Spanish, and we studied painting and music, and acquired the ornamental accomplishments and fundamental ignorances of young ladies who are not expected to have minds and not allowed to develop any. Religious instruction went on always. We heard Mass in the palace every day, and we should have had to go to confession and communion every day, too, if I had not insisted that I would not go oftener than once a month. My sisters were both most devout, and they did not sympathise with my rebelliousness. When I complained of the imprisonment of our lives, they counselled me, affectionately, to bow to the will of God and to accept with pious resignation the trials to which Providence had appointed us. I should have been happier, no doubt, if I could have done so; but Providence had also appointed for me a temperament that made resignation impossible, and I continued to obey the will of God by chafing and complaining and struggling to escape.

With the arrival of March came a new horror of heat; and as the summer progressed it seemed impossible to live through each new day. The sun was unendurable. The soldiers on guard had to be changed every quarter of an hour, and many of them were taken from their posts fainting. The birds fell dead from the trees in the garden. The air was full of an odour of melting asphalt, and even at night the pavements would be so hot that they would burn the soles of the shoes. Indoors the sealing-wax would melt on your writing-desk. And the mosquitoes! To study, or to write, we had to sit under mosquito bars, or we would be so pestered that we could not work. I was unable to eat. I lived on lemon and water, ill with the heat and with longing for the cool, green freedom of our country summers in Normandy—with the grey-blue skies and the grey-green fields, and the shade of the deep, hedge-hidden byways. How I yearned for them! As one yearns for the comfort of health in the semi-delirious miseries of fever! I would say to myself, “Oh, if Spain would only have another revolution!”

Then one of my sisters, who was less robust than I, became seriously prostrated. They were afraid that I, too, might collapse, because I would not let them give me food. My mother had quarrelled with my brother about some political differences, and she wished to take us to France; but since the King was unmarried, and one of us—or one of our children—might inherit the throne, it was not permitted to us to leave Spain, for fear of foreign influences. We were prisoners for life! It was decided that we should join our brother in Madrid, and our mother should go away to France without us. I was never to live with her again, but I parted from her without anxiety, since at last I had my wish—to be with my brother.

CHAPTER III
PULLING THE STRINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY

If our fortunes had carried us directly from Paris to stay with my brother in the palace of Madrid, perhaps I should have found myself still caged there. But freedom is only by comparison; and, after my unhappiness in the Alcazar, it seemed to me now as if my life had really been given wings. Our arrival was almost private; the people in the streets, accustomed to the sight of royalty, did not make a great to-do about us (for it is chiefly curiosity that draws crowds, I find, even to see kings!), and the one thing that looked like a public decoration in our honour was the washing, which it is the custom in Madrid to hang from the street windows to dry. It was an embarrassing decoration, because the articles were, as one might say, very intimate. They made a joke for us.

We arrived in high spirits at the royal palace, and I was glad to find it not only gorgeous, but most comfortable. It had been built by Charles III.—as everything in Madrid seems to have been built—but my brother had had it modernised with those conveniences of heating and plumbing which our antique splendour had hitherto done without in Spain. He had allotted a whole wing to us three Infantas (my sister Pilar, my sister Paz, and I), and we each had our own maids and servants from Sevilla, so that we made quite a household. He had installed in another wing my sister the Infanta Isabel, whom I hardly knew, because she had not been with us in France during the revolution. She was to take our mother’s place towards us. She had been married at sixteen to a prince of Naples; she had lived all her life among the forms and traditions of royalty, and she was genuinely devoted to their maintenance. I should have been afraid for my new liberty if I had not foreseen that her direction over us would be tempered by my brother’s indulgence. I knew that he had as much impatience as I for what we called, jocularly, between ourselves, the “singeries” (monkey tricks) of royalty. And so I began, with great expectations, what proved to be the happiest period of my life.

I was able to rise early, because my brother was always up at half-past seven, to ride in the Casa Campo for an hour, and I rode horseback with him—to my great joy. Then, at nine, we girls had our lessons while he met his Ministers. Early rising is not a Spanish habit. My mother, when she was Queen, had met her Ministers after the theatre, at midnight, and worked with them more in the nighttime than during the day. And my brother’s Ministers had protested against his nine o’clock Cabinet meetings; but he had won them to it with the smiling and tactful determination that always secured him his own way.

At midday we lunched with him, the whole household together, a score at table, with ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, officers, and aides-de-camp; but, on account of the presence of the latter, conversation was always formal. It was different on the afternoon drives. Then we were alone, for he drove himself, and I sat beside him; there were just the two servants on the rear seat, and no one to overhear us. Best of all were the visits I paid him in his apartments, where it was not considered necessary that I should be followed by a lady-in-waiting, since I was under the protection of the King. The guards only took me across the public gallery in the centre of the palace—a soldier on each side of me and an officer in front, because in this gallery some attempts had been made to kill my mother when she was Queen—and the ushers, who led me down the halls, left me when I entered my brother’s antechamber. He had collected a large library for his own use, and he made me free of it on condition that I should not tell any one. At last I had books! And more than I could read.

What adventures! I was most eager for history and philosophy, because my mind had been denied access to facts, and I read all that I could find, indiscriminately. It was probably my brother who directed me to Kant, his own education having been chiefly German, in Vienna. But my personal favourite among the philosophers was Emerson. I suppose it was his sturdy doctrine of self-reliance that appealed to me—his insisting that nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind—and, although I have not read him for years, I still remember him with the glow of my pleasure in his words. For poetry I had no appetite. French poetry seemed to me very light, without ideas. And fiction, English fiction particularly, to which my sisters were devoted, interested me but little. I wanted things to be true. I could not read Balzac; I do not know why.

With Shakespeare I had an odd experience. We studied him with our governess to perfect our English, and of course I realised that his verse was beautiful; but when his kings and queens spoke their lines they seemed to me to be playing parts that had been written to make fun of the claims of Royalty. My governess was indignant when I told her that. She said it was not true; that the speeches were meant to be taken seriously. “But no!” I would cry. “Don’t you see? Shakespeare is making fun of us. He knew we were not so, but he could not tell it in those days. He is laughing at us. He knew it was absurd.”

And when we read Hamlet I argued with her: “There! He has made a mad prince who talks foolishness. If he had respected Royalty as much as you say, he would not have written it. If you have an idiot in your family, you do not let people see him. No; he is laughing at his pompous kings.” And my governess scolded in vain. I still feel the same about Shakespeare’s Royalties.

Outside of my books I began to be most interested to understand the conditions in Spain itself. Why had there been a revolution? And why had my brother been called to the throne? I was told that my mother’s rule had been too “clerical”—that the priests had had too much power—and that when the Republicans had failed to provide a stable Government my brother had been welcomed as a liberal King. But the story of the way in which he came to be proclaimed seemed to contradict this reasonable explanation.

The ladies of the Court, it appeared, had merely given money to soldiers in the army to cry “Viva el Rey Alfonso!” when General Martinez Campos called out to them one morning, “Viva el Rey!” General Campos had then telegraphed to my brother that the army had proclaimed him King. My brother admitted to me that he had received the telegram as an invitation to an adventure, and, being fond of adventures, he had accepted it.

He rode into Madrid, a boy of seventeen, on a spirited horse, followed by the general and his officers. The horse, excited by the crowds, pranced and curveted; the crowd cheered his riding, and the more they cheered the more he made the animal caper. Every one admired him. He had—what is a valuable asset for a King—a very winning smile, and he smiled and rode his way into the hearts of the people. From the palace he announced to the Parliament that he had been proclaimed King, and the Parliament accepted him on behalf of the country. The only opposition came from the Carlist rebellion, led by Don Carlos, a rival claimant to the throne. My brother went at once to the war, and the rebellion was put down. General Campos and his family were rewarded with lands and titles, and my brother remained securely on the throne.

I thought it was a strange thing that a King could be made in Spain on the strength of a shout from a few soldiers; but it was the only explanation that any one could give me. When my mother had been dethroned, the Republicans had first chosen as King a Prince Amadeo of Savoy, son of Victor Emmanuel. But after a brief reign Amadeo resigned the crown and left the country. He told me himself that he had never found out why the throne had been offered to him, nor why his rule had been rejected. It was all a mystery to him.

Similarly, I found that the way in which my mother herself had come to the succession was as peculiar as all the rest. When her father, Ferdinand VII. was taken with his final illness, there was a Salic Law in Spain by which his brother Carlos would be his heir and successor. But an old enmity existed between Don Carlos and my mother’s aunt, the Infanta Luisa Carlota. She had said to him, “You’ll never reign.” And he had laughed at her. But when the King was plainly dying of paralysis, she put before him a paper that she had prepared, abolishing the Salic Law; and, placing a pen in his hand, she took hold of his fingers and began to sign his name to the decree. The Prime Minister, Calomarde, seeing what she was doing, put his hand over hers to stop her. She stopped long enough to strike him a blow on the head that dazed him. When he recovered himself the document had been signed and King Ferdinand was dead. Calomarde bowed gallantly and said to her, in the words of a Spanish proverb, “A fair hand can do no wrong.” She

Royal Palace, Madrid

replied, “No; but it can strike, eh?” And the law against the succession of a woman having been thus repealed, my mother came to the throne, an infant, under the regency of her mother, Queen Maria Cristina, and protected by her aunt. Don Carlos made war upon her, but he was unsuccessful.

This story my mother told me herself. I was puzzled to know why no one but Don Carlos had objected to such a manner of changing the succession. I got no explanation. Like the proclaiming of my brother and the summons to King Amadeo to rule, it was a mystery. Did it all mean, then, that no one but the Royal claimants cared who was King in Spain? Was it that the apparent Government in Spain, as in most countries, was not the real Government, and that the actual rulers of the country did not worry about who was in power in Madrid, since the power was impotent?

I found in talking with my brother that he was very interested in his work and the problems of government—but puzzled to know how to do anything to help the people—and saddened by conditions that he could not improve. He used to say, “I do not understand this country yet, but I shall find a way to do something with it after I have reigned over it a little longer.” He had no faith in the politicians, and when one party lost office and another came to authority, and I asked him if this would improve matters, he replied: “No. It makes no difference. They are the same dog with different collars.”

He was apparently very popular, and no one openly opposed him; but one could see that much of the common show of loyalty was a pleasant make-believe, designed to flatter. Once when we were visiting a town together, driving in a carriage with the mayor, the boys in the street kept screaming “Viva el Rey!” so shrilly that my brother, who was trying to talk with the mayor, could not make himself heard. “It is too bad,” he said to the mayor. “They scream so loudly that I cannot talk with you as I wish.” The mayor replied, with simplicity, “Ah, your Majesty, if I had known that you would wish to talk with me, I would not have paid them so much.” And thereafter, whenever I saw a people very enthusiastic in welcoming a king, I wondered how much they were being paid.

At another time my sisters and I were making an excursion in the mountains, and we were accompanied by a mayor who had provided us with the donkeys on which we rode. Whenever we came to a village, the children first, and then the older people would come out and cheer us. And they cheered us by name. “See!” the mayor would say. “See how popular you are! They know you all.” As there were four of us, and we had never been in the district before, we were astonished and very much flattered! And the mayor beamed. At every village it was the same. “Viva la Infanta Isabel! Viva la Infanta Pilar! Viva la Infanta Paz! Viva la Infanta Eulalia!”—each as we came. And the mayor, delighted and smiling and bowing, kept repeating: “But see! It is really wonderful! You are all known. You are so popular!”

After a time I wished to try my sister Pilar’s donkey, and I asked her to change with me. The mayor objected. No, no; I must not do it. It would not be right. “What?” I said. “Is it forbidden by Spanish etiquette that I ride my sister’s donkey?” And I insisted. Then the mayor, seeing that I was determined, explained, in angry confusion that we could not change donkeys because our names had been clipped on their tails, so that the people might know who we were! And at the next village I watched the boys come behind us and read our names on the donkeys’ tails before they set up their shouting!

I thought it very clever—though such a joke on us—and I soon found that it was typically Spanish. They were very ingenious at playing such little tricks of deception. One of the oddest happened when we were making an official visit to another town, and driving again with another mayor. As we proceeded slowly through a crowded street, suddenly a boy ran into the roadway and dived between the wheels of our carriage. We were afraid that he would be killed, and we shouted to the driver, who pulled up his horses. The boy crawled out between the opposite wheels and ran away, but before we could start on again another boy did the same thing. This alarmed me so—with the fear of running over some one—that I wanted to stop altogether. How could one drive through a town where the children did such mad things? I would not go. The mayor assured me that it would not occur again, but I refused to believe him. How did he know? If these two boys would do it, why not others? Finally, to calm me, he admitted that he had hired these two boys to throw themselves under our wheels. But why? Because we were in front of his house, and his wife and family had wished to have a good look at us, and he had devised this charming plan to stop the carriage under their windows.

With a people whose simpler citizens are capable of such subterfuges, you may believe it was not easy to discover the truth of what was going on in the intricacies of Government. The truth, as far as I was ever able to discover it, was this.

In Spain there was an elaborate system of what is called “bossism” in the United States of America. But in Spain it had been carried to its final perfection. In every small community there was some wealthy person who controlled the machinery of public administration. He chose the persons who were to fill the elective offices, and the election returns were changed or manufactured to certify the election of his creatures. In office, then, these men obeyed his orders. Taxes were levied, the laws were administered, and justice was dealt out, as he directed, for the benefit and protection of himself and his friends. All the officials, ostensibly appointed or elected to represent the people and carry out the popular will, represented only the “cacique” (as he is called) and obeyed only him.

Over the smaller caciques were bigger caciques, with more power and a larger following, just as, in the United States, over the boss of a city there is a state boss. But in Spain the people had become quite unable to free themselves, and there was an absolute administration of the functions of Government for the benefit of the office-holders and the wealthy men who put them into office.

A change of the party in power at Madrid made no difference. They were, as my brother said, “the same dog with different collars.” They all obeyed the caciques.

As in America, all indirect taxes fell most heavily on those least able to bear them. The rents, the cost of living, the necessities of life were high; wages were low. No poor person ever dared to go to law. There is a Spanish proverb that “Lent and prisons are made for the poor.” Money ruled, and ruled everything.

Along with this rule of money went a rule of the priests. Spain had been for centuries the outpost of Christianity in the war with Mohammedanism. In the age-long struggle against the Moors the Church became the symbol of national freedom to all Spaniards; their faith and their freedom were both threatened, and they fought for both together. The wars for the possession of America kept the same aspect of religious wars, because they were waged against a Protestant nation; and down almost to modern times the Government and the Church were such partners in being that it was impossible they should separate.

Now, with peace and commercial development, the problems of Government had become wholly political, and the priests were as busy in politics as were the caciques. The State not only maintained all the churches and buildings of the religious orders, but paid salaries to the priests and the monks and the nuns. They were all, in this respect, officials of the administration, drawing money from the public revenues, so that they conspicuously benefited by the plundering of the people. Therefore, whenever discontent with the Government gathered head in rebellion, it was inevitably an “anti-clerical” revolt, even though it had no concern whatever with religion. That was not only very unfortunate for the State, since it made reformation difficult by making it seem anti-religious; it was also very unfortunate for the Church, since it directed popular dissatisfaction against the priests instead of against the misgovernment.

So the people of Spain, although they were almost as free to vote at elections as the people of the United States, had really no voice at all in their own government. When they revolted they made a useless “anti-clerical” revolt that took them nowhere, because they got involved in a quarrel about religion and the burning of churches. When a Republic was declared, with the aid of the army—which was Republican because the aristocracy did not even serve as officers—the system of misgovernment continued under a new name.

It made no difference to the caciques whether there was a King or a Republic; they ruled. If the army proclaimed my brother King, the Parliament, for the caciques, accepted him in the name of the people. It did not matter; he was powerless, simply because he could only act through the officials of the State who were largely responsible for the conditions. I think the caciques would rather have a king than a Republic, because the throne could be made a scapegoat in case of revolt. And, though jealous of the influence of the priests with the people, they were always in partnership with that influence to protect themselves.

I write this explanation here as if it were something that I and my brother and everybody else understood. As a matter of fact, we none of us understood it. How should we? We were strangers to the country. There was a Chinese wall around us, to keep us from learning anything that the administration did not wish us to know. My brother was very young—at this time only nineteen. (It is significant how the Government of Spain prefers young sovereigns.) And the poor people of Spain, who might have told us if they had not been dumb, did not even know themselves what was wrong.

My brother worked very hard, trying to oversee those departments of the Government that were most easily watched, such as the army and the navy. He did not trust to official reports, but went himself to see if the reports were accurate. It was on such visits that we had our adventures with the mayors.

Once when we were out driving, he said: “Let us go to the French hospital. I must inspect it. We will go without warning, so that they will not be able to prepare appearances for me.” So we drove to the hospital, and when we entered and it was seen that the King had arrived a man who had been paralysed for years was so startled that he got to his feet and walked. A miracle! And I thought if it had happened a few centuries earlier it might have made my brother a saint. Who knows? I might have had a little shrine myself.

He gave audiences every afternoon to whatever persons wished to see him, whether to present petitions, or merely to pay their respects, or what not. And his patience with everybody amazed me. It was impossible, I found, to learn anything from those who came. They were usually too oppressed by the formalities to be natural. One day, when I was assisting an older sister at an audience to ladies of Madrid, one lady was so embarrassed that when my sister invited her to sit down—in the rather brusque voice that was her characteristic utterance—the lady sat down on a chair in which a kitten was lying. I supposed, at first, that the kitten had escaped, but I soon saw the lady growing red in the face and shifting in her chair, as if she were painfully uncomfortable. My sister tried to put her at her ease by asking her the conventional questions about herself, and I struggled to control my amusement, but without succeeding well enough to trust myself to interfere. At last my sister dismissed the lady, and turned on me to demand what was the matter with me that I should be grinning and choking instead of behaving myself with dignity. I cried: “But your kitten—your kitten!” And then I saw that my laughter had been very cruel, for the kitten was dead. The lady had accepted the invitation to sit down as a Royal order, and had not dared to get up off the cat till she was dismissed, although the poor thing was struggling and fighting under her for its life.

Naturally it was difficult to get any information from people under such conditions. Not that I wish to represent myself as going about with the air of a determined student eager to know. I had only a desultory curiosity that was continually stirred by finding some new puzzle of false appearance. My brother’s problems of government were usually laid aside with us. We shared his recreation rather than his work. And, being human, I was much more interested in myself, my own problems of life, and the outlook of my future than I was in anything else. Being a Royal person in Spain was, in some of its aspects, rather a lark, but in others it was serious. For however free I might be in my mind to be amused, to be curious, to be cynical, there was no disguising the fact that I was limited in my friends, controlled in my affections, and of liberty in love and marriage wholly deprived. My mind might be what I pleased—my body was Royal.

CHAPTER IV
LOVE AND ENNUI

In speaking of one’s past it is difficult not to take a present point of view; and when I say that being a Royal person in Spain had its serious aspects—because I could not love or marry as a private person—I mean that it had those aspects as I look back upon it. At the time I was not aware of them. They were accepted by me as constituting the natural order of life. Long before I could begin to think of such things as love and marriage I had been schooled to the idea that I could have such relations only with Royal persons. Humanity was divided in my mind into three sexes; there were women, men of Royal birth, and a third sex, who were to me, as you might say, priests. Any affair of love with the latter was unthinkable—not only to me but to them. It never entered my mind, any more than it would with a priest. If it ever entered their minds, I could not know it, because they could not speak to me, even if they wished.

In the palace of Madrid, when the usher would take me to the antechamber of my brother’s apartments, I would always have an interval of waiting while word of my visit was being carried to the King. And during that interval there would usually be some young officers or aides-de-camp standing in another part of the room. Since they were Spaniards, and I was not hideous, if I glanced at them I found them trying to look romantic. If one of them was alone, he would either sigh “like a furnace,” as Shakespeare says, or try to look unutterable silences across the room. At first this embarrassed me. But when I grew reassured by the fact that none of them dared approach me or speak to me, I found it comical; and I used to watch them slyly to see whether they were going to be melancholy and sigh, or make lambent calf’s eyes at me in the best Spanish manner. Afterwards I would tell my brother, and he would laugh, because he knew the officers and enjoyed teasing them. It became one of the little jokes between us, that all his young aides were languishing their lives away in hopeless devotion to me. Later, some of them—unwilling, perhaps, to be merely amusing—announced that they were going to blow out their brains. I never heard that any did it; and I did not see what satisfaction it would have been to them if they had. I supposed that they came to the same conclusion themselves. After a while I learned that one does not take such threats of self-destruction seriously in Spain. They are only a form of mild attention paid to ladies by the gallantry that wishes to be dashing.

At luncheons, when the officers ate with us, even sighs were impossible; and they behaved like very good boys before the school-teacher. My own behaviour must have betrayed amused interest, for I remember that our mistress of the robes—called the “aya”—who is a sort of Court duenna, read me long lectures on the government of my eyes. When a man conversed with me I must not look directly at him. That look, in Spain, meant courtship. I must always look down, and just glance at him sidelong, under the ends of my eyelashes, demurely. The Spanish girls do it very well, but my eyes were not Spanish. I had the habit of direct gaze; and after repeated lectures from the aya I pretended that I had acquired a squint from trying to look sideways; and this annoyed the aya and made fun for my brother.

The Spanish girls are taught to regard men as some sort of wild animal, whom it is dangerous to meet unless one is well protected by chaperons; and they become as timid as Oriental girls, and, of course, as curious.

Sometimes in the evenings, when my sisters and I were with my brother in his apartments, he would have with him young men of the Court, friends of his own age, grandees’ sons and members of the foreign legations, who went shooting and hunting with him. I enjoyed talking and listening to them, much more than conversing with the young ladies of noble families who were invited to Court as companions to us Infantas. The men had travelled, and read, and met interesting people. The girls had had no experiences and no thoughts. They could talk only of their religion or of their fiancés.

They went to church for both. When a young Spaniard wished to begin courting he told the priest about it. The priest consulted the girl’s parents, and if the match was thought suitable, arrangements were made for her to attend certain Masses on certain mornings with her chaperon. Her official cavalier then posted himself somewhere near, made eyes at her during the service, and stood at the holy-water font when Mass was over, to offer her holy water as she went out. It was possible, also, to leave a letter at the church door with some old beggar, who would deliver it to the proper person in return for alms; but this correspondence was not for young girls. Their courting was carried on by means of devout looks, which were not required, one hopes, to be too oblique. I thought it very silly, and I said so; but the girls argued, piously, that since love was “a sacrament” it was right it should begin with holy water and benefit of clergy. I do not remember that the same argument was made for the intriguing ladies who carried on their correspondence through the beggars. As a matter of fact, the relations between the sexes were all wrong, since there could be no secure happiness based on such ignorance and Orientalism in a Western community, where the women can not be denied after marriage the liberty for which they are not prepared before that event.

When I was about fifteen years old, a young Austrian archduke came to Madrid to visit my brother, and I was presented to him with my sisters, and saw him at a distance at the dinner-table, and bowed to him as I passed him in the hall. Next morning my brother summoned me to his apartments to tell me that the archduke wished to become engaged to me. “But,” I said, amazed, “I have scarcely spoken to him!” Never mind; he had said he was in love with me; he wanted to marry me. And as soon as I had recovered from my first astonishment, the idea delighted me. To be engaged! It made me feel quite grown-up. Quite important. Almost married. And I thought it would give me a standing at Court that would prevent the Mistress of the Robes from being so dictatorial.

It would be impossible for me to marry for some time. Our family fortunes had been so depleted during the revolution that I had no dot, and the young archduke had not yet come into his estate either. My brother, acting as a father to his sisters, was paying all our expenses out of his own pocket, and saving for us, as dots, the moneys that were allowed us by the Government. So it was agreed that my engagement with the archduke should not be made public and official until enough money had been saved to make a provision for me.

Meanwhile I was privately engaged—and very proud of it. It was not extraordinary, in the Spanish Royal Family, for a girl to be engaged in her teens. My sister Isabel had been married at sixteen; and my grand-aunt, the Infanta Luisa Carlota, had been married at thirteen and was a grandmother at twenty-seven. But neither of my other sisters was engaged yet, and I enjoyed the advantage over them.

Even so, the archduke was not allowed to see me alone, and his courtship had to be formal. We were allowed to walk together in the garden of the palace, but only under the chaperonage of a lady-in-waiting, who followed a few paces behind us. One day, turning a corner of the path, we were hidden for a moment from the eyes of our chaperon, and the archduke seized his opportunity to kiss me. There was an adventure for you! When we returned to the palace I hastened to tell my sister. She was horrified. She ran to tell the governess. The governess was even more shocked. She declared that I had committed a mortal sin. “Good!” I cried. “I’m glad of it! At last I have committed a mortal sin! I didn’t think it was possible—the way I am watched.” There was a great to-do. They declared that I must go to confession at once.

I went, next morning, defiantly, and in such excitement that I confessed in a voice that could be heard by every one near the confessional. I had committed a mortal sin! I had been kissed by the archduke! And the manner in which I blurted it out was so funny that the priest burst out laughing. I asked him how it could be a sin to be kissed by the man who was going to marry me. He replied, teasing me, “But if you don’t marry him, still the kiss will remain.” “I don’t care,” I said; “it won’t show.” He assured me, finally, that it was not a sin at all; and perhaps I should have been crestfallen if it were not that I had triumphed over the others. Then, as the story got about, it started a reputation for me as a flirt, which I enjoyed innocently. An Infanta of Spain kissed by a man at fifteen! It was almost a record.

When the archduke went away we were allowed to write to each other, though, of course, our letters had to be read by some one. I gave mine to my brother, but I do not suppose he ever glanced at them; the letters of a girl of fifteen, in such circumstances, would not be very interesting. I began to ask questions about the Austrian Court, where I should have to live after I married; and the reports I heard of it were not reassuring. The etiquette was most strict. I should be worse off there than in Madrid. And I should be separated from my brother. Very soon I did not like the thought of my engagement at all.

My brother had told us, at our first meeting on our return to Spain, that he was in love with a daughter of the Duc de Montpensier; that they had been corresponding unknown to her family—who were not so strict as ours—and that he intended to marry her. My mother was outraged at this announcement, for it was well known that the Duc de Montpensier had helped to bring about the revolution that had lost her the throne. When we went to Sevilla, to live in the Alcazar, she forgave the Duc, who had a place in Sevilla, but she continued to intrigue against my brother’s marriage; and it was because of this that he quarrelled with her, and let her go back to France when we Infantas came to live with him in Madrid.

The Duc de Montpensier was the youngest son of King Louis Philippe of France, and—like all that king’s sons—extremely clever. He had married my mother’s sister, another daughter of King Ferdinand VII., on the same day that my parents married; and he had lived in Spain ever since. In Sevilla my sisters and I became very friendly with our young cousins, the Duc’s children, and I became like another daughter to the Duc, whom I adored. He had all the charm of the esprit Français, animated and witty, accustomed to conversation with clever people, tolerant of opinions opposed to his own, and hating—more than anything else in the world—stupidity. He delighted me. He sympathised with me. I used to tell him all my little troubles.

I think that when the history of my mother’s reign and the republic is written, it will lay great stress on the Duc’s influence in Spain. At once, on his arrival, he had attracted to himself all the Liberal elements in the Spanish Court, unconsciously, as

Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris.

The Infanta Eulalia

mind attracts mind. He became the head of a Liberal party—subsequently called the “Orleans” party, because he was of the House of Orleans—although he always declared that he had neither desired nor tried to organise any following for himself. Men like the famous writer, José de Echegaray, gathered around him, and his palace became a centre for the dissemination of Liberal ideas. He was antagonistic to the Conservatives, who were chiefly Clerical; and he was much feared and opposed by the priests. He wished to improve the conditions in Spain. He wished, as he used to say, humorously, “to make it habitable.” But I do not think that he had any personal ambition to rule; for, although he had distinguished himself for bravery in the French army, and was a general in the Spanish army, he made no attempt to use his influence with the army or with the politicians, in order to obtain the throne for himself when it went begging after my mother lost it. He had not expected, he told me, that the reformers contemplated interfering with the ruling family. He supported the Liberals and gave them money, in the hope that they would correct the abuses and corruptions of misgovernment in Spain. And when no good came of it, he assisted the movement to call my brother to the throne.

My brother was as devoted to him as I was, and held to his intention of marrying the Duc’s daughter in spite of all the intriguing and the opposition of people who feared the Duc’s influence, and the warnings that this was a new attempt of the Duc to get back into political power by putting his daughter on the throne of Spain. It was a love match purely—the only one I ever knew in Royalty. For royal love matches are usually marriages between persons of royal birth who are enthusiastic because they find they have no positive aversion for each other.

The Duc, even in Sevilla, had planned to marry me to one of his sons, Antoine d’Orléans, whom I liked as a cousin, but had no other affection for. I said “No.” When I came to Madrid this was still talked of, as such things are discussed in families, but I paid no attention to it. My engagement to the archduke ended it for a time; but when I grew melancholy at the thought of going to Austria my brother would say, “Well, then, why not marry Antoine, and we shall never be separated.” And if you have to marry some one who will be more or less indifferent to you—and you foresee that in one choice your father-in-law, at least, will be charming—and that choice will keep you near a beloved brother whom you might otherwise lose—well, why not? Besides, I did not have to decide immediately. I could not marry any one yet. I let it drift—and drifted with it.

The Duc, to encourage me, perhaps, told me the story of his own marriage; and I think it is unique even in the annals of royal alliances. It was, of course, an affair of State, arranged for him. His bride, my aunt, was only fourteen years of age, and she could not speak a word of French. He spoke no Spanish. When they had been married—in great pomp at a double wedding with my mother and father—he was left alone for the first time with his wife, and the poor child was so frightened that she began to cry. He did not know what to say to reassure her, since he could not say anything that she could understand; and, looking around the room despairingly, his eye was caught by a movement of the curtains in the far corner of the bed-chamber. He looked more intently and made out the plume of a head-dress showing between the hangings. He rushed across the room and dragged out a lady-in-waiting! His exasperation at his bride’s sobs and his own inability to quieten her broke in fury on the head of the unfortunate woman. She explained as well as she could that they were afraid the bride would be too frightened if she were left alone with him, and they had agreed to conceal one of her ladies behind the curtains to give her secretly a sort of moral support. The Duc put her violently out of the room.

I suppose that the Duc had a strong influence on both my brother and me—on our opinions and our points of view—yet it must have been the influence of personality unconsciously exerted, for he always refrained from giving opinions about public affairs, even when he was asked for them. “No,” he would say, “I have learned not to express my opinions. They are always brought back to me—so transformed that I can not recognise them—and presented to me as my own. Look at the revolution.” He conformed in matters of religion to comfort his wife, who was very devout; but he never went to confession, and he required that when he attended Mass the priests should not take more than twenty minutes for it. He would keep an eye on the clock, and when the twenty minutes had elapsed he would say, “Watch him now,” and cough with peremptory impatience. The priest would immediately begin to race through to the conclusion of the service, and every one would be anxious for him to finish, as if the Due’s impatience were some terrible threat to be placated. Yet, for a man so feared, I never knew any one less fearsome.

He was very patriarchal-looking when I knew him—white-bearded, heavily-fleshed, and benign. To his receptions in the evening came all the clever people, of whatever opinion, and whenever bores arrived he pretended that they had come to see his wife, and had them ushered to her apartments, and said, contentedly, “There now. They will pray together and enjoy themselves.” It was the one thing that he asked of life—not to be bored. Imagine how that would appeal to one in the atmosphere of a Court. For the plague of Courts is ennui.

Princesses are peculiarly subject to it. A king or a prince has usually some work to do, some power to exercise. A princess is as much more idle than a young lady as a young lady is more idle than a working girl. In an attempt to keep up an exercise of my brain, I continued my studies during the whole ten years of my unmarried lite in Spain—studying languages, the piano, singing, the harp, painting—and keeping myself occupied with reading and writing as well as I could. People tell me that princesses are stupid. I wonder that we are not all idiots. During my life in Madrid, almost my only public duty was to help lay corner-stones. I helped lay enough to pave the city. Whenever nothing else could be found to justify our existence, the authorities would say, “Come, let them lay a corner-stone.” I can not believe that any other stones were put on top of them. It is not possible. There were too many. If the buildings had all been completed, there would not be room now, in the town, to walk. And the Te Deums that I listened to were numerous enough to exhaust the ears of Heaven.

I have already spoken of the audiences that we gave. They were stupid beyond words. One received strangers under conditions of formality that made them more strange, asked silly little questions of the women—“Are you married?” “How many children have you?”—smiled politely, and waited for the next one. It is the sort of thing that you might expect from the Chinese. And the purely Court receptions were even worse. There you had not even strangers, so you could not ask them whether they were married. You knew—or you were expected to know—all the dignitaries, statesmen, officials, aides, and diplomats who make up the Court circle; you met them again and again, for a perfunctory moment, said something innocuous, and passed on—until you met again.

The problem was to think of something to say each time. Once after a Royal chapel—when we always had to make a circle of a roomful of officials lined up around the walls—I noticed, as we approached one officer, that he wore black gloves with his uniform. It is a sign of deep mourning. The others of the Royal Family, preceding me, made the usual conventional attempts to say a little of nothing as if it were something worth saying; and so, when I came to him, although I had no idea who he was, I said, “I was deeply sorry to hear of your bereavement.” The others, overhearing me, were mortified that they had not offered him their condolences too; and when the reception was over they spoke to me about it. Whom had he lost? How had I remembered it? And when I explained what I had done, without knowing who the man was, even the King was envious. It was so difficult to have anything to say, and a Royal Family is always so haunted by the problem that my little ruse quite made a reputation for me. And, if you can believe it, the officer was deeply touched and gratified, poor soul, by my knowing of his grief. It is on such trifles that a king makes his personal popularity. But what a life!

When my brother married the Duc’s daughter, Mercedes, we had that beautiful and charming creature added to our circle; but they were such lovers and so happy together that we had our brother less, though we had Mercedes more. By this time I had quite lost interest in the daughters of the grandees whom my brother invited to Court to make companionship for us. They could play no game more active than croquet, which they played languidly. When I drove them behind my four ponies they wanted always to go to the parks, where they could look sidelong at the young men; and I preferred the country drives with more freedom. I soon wearied of a conversation that was all holy water and fiancés.

And before long the Spanish young men came to bore me as much as their sisters. They had only one conversation for a woman—the romantically sentimental, exaggerated to the point of foolishness. It was too silly. If they were not pretending that they were blighted with melancholy because of your unearthly charms, they were assuring you that they would shed their blood for you. I did not want to see their blood, but their brains; and they either had none or did not consider it necessary to use them in their conversation with a princess.

In the evenings I often went to the opera, but my brother had no ear at all for music; he could not tell the Royal March when it was played; and he complained that the singing depressed him like the howling of a dog. So I went with my sisters and some older chaperon. One night, on our way to the opera, we had an adventure that could happen only in Spain. There, whenever the priest is summoned to attend the dying, he takes the sacrament and sets out on foot, accompanied by an attendant with a little bell. The first carriage that he meets, even if it be a hired hack, is stopped at the sound of the bell and he is invited to ride. If the hack then meets a private carriage of more luxury, it is the privilege of the owner to take the priest into his vehicle. And if the Royal carriage is met, the Royalty not only take the priest with them, but they are expected to follow into the house of the dying, and kneel in the death-chamber while the last rites are being performed.

On this night I was in our carriage with a princess who was most gorgeously arrayed in a bright green evening gown ornamented with silver, with a great display of jewels on her corsage, and on her head a huge rayed ornament of diamonds in the shape of a diadem. Her hair was prematurely grey and rather wild. She had been riding in the sun, and her face was flushed. She was an enormous woman—so large that she had to give up horseback-riding because it became impossible to find a horse capable of carrying her.

We were scarcely well away from the palace when we heard approaching us the bell of the sacrament, and I said to her, hurriedly, “We can’t go to a death-bed in this finery. I’ll make the driver turn round.” But she was very religious. It was a sacrilege to her to turn our backs on the Host. In spite of my protests, we met the priest, took him into the carriage, and drove him to his destination. There the princess and I followed him into the death-chamber, devoutly, though with very doubtful feelings on my part.

We found a man dying of some sort of fever, lying on his back in bed, with a holy candle burning on his forehead—to improve his temperature, no doubt. He opened his eyes at our entrance; and when he saw the unearthly apparition of the princess in bright green, with the hair and face of a soul in purgatory and a blaze of glory about her head; he sat up in bed with a shriek, pointed his shaking hand at her, and cried “Booh!” That was all I saw. I got down on my knees, helpless with hysterical laughter, and covered my face with my hands. When the ceremony was over, I hurried out as best I could and went to pieces in the carriage. The man died that night.

One would think it was not very sanitary to be making such visits to fatal cases of disease. And it was not. We went once to the death-bed of a smallpox patient and knelt on pillows that had been under his head. But the Spanish people seem to have a vitality that is proof against infection; and in the South of Spain particularly they live to incredible old age.

CHAPTER V
MY MARRIAGE—IN MOURNING

I suppose that no one who has not lived at a Court will believe how narrow in its interests the royal life can be. It is the life of a little family isolated by an impervious etiquette from the immensities of life that are about it. One can read, and hear, and be aware of the life of the nation at second hand; one can not approach it intimately. And the little family revolves upon itself, with its own gossip, its own scandal, its own jealousies and ambitions, its own jokes, and its own quarrels, in a kind of royal cloister, surrounded by invisible walls. During those first years of my brother’s reign, laws were passed, debates were conducted, the Liberals and Conservatives struggled together for office, elections were held, revolts were put down. I heard nothing of it. Or if I did, it made so little impression on my interest that it made none on my memory. I remember that now the famous Premier Sagasta would be at the palace daily, and now his famous rival, Canovas; but that was politics merely; and politics were to us princesses what business would be to the daughters of an American millionaire.

The entourage that surrounded us in the palace of Madrid went with us to the mountains when the Court removed to the summer palace of La Granja, which is the Versailles of Spain, and modelled after Versailles. There we fished and hunted and rode and made excursions like a house-party at an English country seat. And when we went to Santander for the sea-bathing, it was the same. The same people accompanied us, the same routine of life engaged us, the same round of interests confined our minds.

Contrary to the popular tradition about Courts, there was very little of the scandal of which the “secret memoirs” of ladies-in-waiting have so much. Conditions in Spain did not encourage such stories, particularly among the aristocracy that came to Court. A Spanish lady would not even receive a call from a man if her husband were not at home; she could not walk alone in the streets; and, there being no divorce possible—and the jealousy of the Spanish husband so deadly—if she were foolish enough to engage in any love intrigues, the act would have to be too secret ever to become a matter of gossip.

And there was nothing but such aristocracy at Court. We did not see—as one would at a French Court, for example—judges, or lawyers, or academicians, or artists, or professors, or great engineers of public works, or even many military or naval officers, except the King’s aides. Such men might be presented at audiences, but did not enter into our social life. Nothing but aristocracy. These had few interests, and therefore few topics of conversation. They shot rabbits and partridges, but did not hunt. They did not talk of sports, since they played no games—except card games that went on interminably, afternoons and evenings. Sport, in those days in Spain, was an affair of the lower classes wholly. They were fond of music, so we had musicales—and, of course, dances. When we had clever foreign visitors who talked entertainingly, the aristocrat was bored; the expression of ideas wearied him. He had manners, presence, dignity, but no activity either of body or mind.

The diplomats we had always with us, and they make one of the traditionally brilliant circles of Court life; but I found, of all men in modern Courts, the diplomats the most absurd. If the kings have had their powers curtailed, the Court diplomats have lost theirs altogether. They are a useless survival of the days when the relations between nations depended on the feelings between Sovereigns, and the diplomats intrigued and flattered to some purpose, by smoothing over misunderstandings or exasperating offence. Nowadays, a Court diplomat has no power except to deliver the message of his home Government. He is not entrusted with secrets, any more than an errand-boy. And he is usually stupid. If a family of position has a son who is not quite bright, they say, “Put him in the diplomatic service.” He goes to a foreign Court and devotes himself to attending royal funerals and christenings and weddings and church services and Court functions, as the “representative” of his Government—and, if he is a Russian or a Southerner, he spends the rest of his time flattering the ladies whose husbands have Government authority, in an attempt to obtain information from them which their husbands have let fall.

Like the public warning, “Beware of Pickpockets,” in places of public resort, the drawing-rooms of Court society should put up the sign, “Beware of Diplomats.” The English representatives and the Scandinavians are not so fond of intrigue, but too many of the others are the official eavesdroppers and detectives of their Governments, and it is chiefly simple women who are their victims—women who can be blinded by pretended admiration and led into confidences that are indiscreet. It is not an occupation for a clever man, and few clever men remain in it long. The majority of those whom I have known were total idiots who would swallow absurdly wrong information without blinking and convey it eagerly to their home Governments without suspicion. I have tried it, to find out. And I found the typical conversation of diplomats all in one key of vanity: an assurance that when they were at one Court the king showed them “special favours,” and when they were at another Court, the same. It is a conversation that would weary a mistress of the Robes. It can not add much intellectual stimulus to the life of royalty. I could never see that it added any to mine.

Nevertheless, whether with diplomats or what not, these days moved along for us very brightly. We young and active. My brother and his wife were idyllically happy in their married life; and their happiness was reflected in all around them. He was working with the prospect of greater success to come with greater experience, living simply, taking healthful exercise, using tact and patience, and keeping a cheerful hope. Then, in the sixth month of his marriage, the heart was cut out of it all by the death of his young Queen after a miscarriage that resulted in blood-poisoning from some bungling of the doctors. They treated her for typhoid fever and blundered about for weeks, till a putrefaction had set in that no treatment could retard.

She was buried in the Escurial, and my brother would not leave the palace. Every day he would shut himself up, for hours, in the crypt where her tomb was; and when we tried to coax him away he would not speak to us. It was midsummer and the heat was extreme, but he would not leave her body to go to La Granja. He would not do anything but grieve, in a silence that worried us more than the wildest outburst, neglecting himself and his duties, taking no exercise, sunken in a mood of passionate despair that seemed to have put him beyond our reach. He did not sleep. We coaxed him to come out for a little fresh air in the early mornings about five o’clock, and again in the evenings after sunset, but it was months before I succeeded in getting him to ride on horseback. The Spaniards do not understand a grief that is silent. He did not care. He seemed to have lost interest in life entirely; and, as the months passed, we were afraid that his health would be destroyed.

We knew that he was tubercular. It was hereditary in our family, and my own lungs were affected; but royalty is not allowed to be ill, and we had to struggle with the situation privately, in a way to keep the knowledge of it from spreading beyond the inner circle of officialdom. My sister Pilar, who was always delicate, had developed symptoms of what was supposed to be some sort of skin disease, and the doctors ordered her to a resort in the mountains, to take the baths. Soon after our arrival there she became unconscious, and died, two days later, of meningitis. For all this I now blame the state of medical practice in Spain. In a country where education is wholly in the hands of the religious orders, and the hospitals in the hands of the nuns, there will be neither a good supply of medical students nor opportunities for them to perfect their studies under conditions that are good. We had to pay the penalty with the rest of Spain.

My brother never really recovered from this blighting of his life. He took up his work again, at first listlessly and then as an escape from himself; but the young and happy part of him was gone with his young wife, and he had nothing left but the care and activities of his position. He was only twenty years of age, though he seemed older. Since there was no heir to the throne, the Government began immediately to talk of arranging another marriage for him. He said he did not care, so long as he was not bothered about it, and negotiations were at once begun. It was a sad life for a charming man. He would have been much happier if he had never been a king.

Meanwhile, he returned to us for companionship, and I began to hear a great deal from him of his work and his plans. He had come to recognise that the day of the warrior king was over, and he was occupied with attempts to promote the industrial development of the country. He never wore a uniform except when he attended the army manœuvres or took part in some such military display, and he laughed at the kings who went about as soldiers, always on parade. He saw to the founding of arsenals for the manufacture of munitions of war, and he struggled to correct the dishonesty in the expenditure of appropriations for the army and the navy, but he was not in love with the show of military pomp.

He tried to persuade the grandees’ sons to enter the army as officers—on the theory, as he said, that “occupation is the salvation of a man”—but without success. The aristocracy of Spain is landed, but too indolent even to oversee the administration of their estates; and they called the Duc de Montpensier, contemptuously, “the orange-man,” because he directed the exporting of his orange crop to England, instead of letting it rot on the ground. Like so many aristocracies, they would do anything for money except work for it. They were content to take wealth and honour from the nation without making any return. In common with the Court diplomats, they had almost lost their reason for being.

All the mines and many of the large manufacturing industries of Spain are in the hands of foreigners, because the natives have no training for such occupations. They have a hatred of foreigners that prevents them from learning, and the King was always arguing against this hatred and trying to devise means of overcoming it. He set the example himself of going frequently abroad to study the improvements in foreign countries—getting the sanction of the Parliaments for his journeys by the simple expedient of letting them know, good-humoredly, that if they did not give it he would go without it—and he came back with ideas which he tried to apply. Spain was sadly lacking in railroads, and he had maps and plans drawn up for building them, and worked to finance them, but I do not recall with what success.

The great enemy of all such public works is the official dishonesty in Spain, and with this my brother was always at war. I am told that the corruption was not as bad during his reign as it was before. He fought it particularly among the Customs officials and tax-gatherers, and such collectors of the Government income, and he made himself much feared among them. He worried about the excessive criminality in Spain, interviewed judges, and tried to find out and ameliorate the conditions that produced the crime. His influence was potent, because Spain will accept a great deal from a Sovereign. I used to tell him that it was lucky he looked like a Spaniard, for he had not the brain of one; and if he had had my colouring, his ideas would have aroused antagonisms that would have defeated him at every turn. He was, as I have said, supremely tactful, and he had a patience that was incredible to me. He had not my habit of saying what is in one’s mind, inopportunely. He could wait, and speak in better time.

The arrangements for his second marriage he had left wholly in the hands of my sister Isabel and her advisers, who were, of course, Clerical. It was considered impossible for the King of Spain to marry a Protestant princess; and, of the Catholic Royal families, the Italian princesses were eliminated from the choice because of the quarrel between the Italian Court and the Vatican. Negotiations were opened, therefore, with the Court of Vienna, and a marriage was arranged between my brother and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Cristina. It was celebrated about a year after the death of his first wife. He had two daughters by this marriage—both of whom have since died in childbirth—and a posthumous son, the present King, born six months after my brother’s death.

He died in November, 1885, but it was not until the previous month, October, that we had any idea he was seriously ill. It seemed impossible that a man so active could be unwell. He had an energy both in work and recreation that wore out everybody else. He lived with the most healthful simplicity, from habit, eating in moderation, drinking no wine, enjoying exercise without weariness, and taking cold baths that one would not have thought a consumptive could endure. He showed no signs of fever that I knew of. The doctors, if they had noticed any alarming symptoms, did not speak of them to us; and we were only vaguely aware that he had to be careful of himself. But in October he complained of weakness, and the physicians suddenly told us that his lungs were very bad. Even so, the matter had to be kept secret—for fear of unnecessarily disturbing the business of the State. We went to the Pardo to give him rest and treatment. And before

Courtesy of Collier’s

Alfonso XIII of Spain

we had really accepted the thought that he was an invalid, he was taken with a hæmorrhage of the lungs, cried out that he was choking, and died almost with the words.

He was buried in the Escurial—where we had laughed together at the tombs of the Infantas—among all the kings, who had become now only the names of kings—no longer brothers, husbands, fathers—just dead kings—as he had become.

His death was, I think, a great loss to the country, for the King of Spain has much power under the Constitution, if he has the ability to handle the instruments of his authority in a way to have his orders carried out. And my brother had that suavity of will that wins its way almost affectionately and puts stubbornness firmly aside when it can not be won. Such a king, placed above the temptations of wealth, could protect the poor from an industrial oppression from which they are too often unable to protect themselves. And being of a liberal mind in his religion, he could prevent the religious orders in Spain from using their pulpit and sacred office for political ends.

His death seemed like the end of my own life to me. I had no longer any interest or happiness in Spain. I had no friends there, except the Duc de Montpensier and our little family. I found myself always a foreigner when I went outside the palace. I could not understand the popular religion, which is not Catholicism as it is known in other countries, but only the outward form and name of Catholicism filled with superstitions and fetishisms divorced from the moral purposes of religion.

They have, for example, in Madrid, a popular feast called “La Cara de Dios” (“The Face of God”), when there is exposed under glass, to be kissed by the people, the handkerchief with which Christ is supposed to have wiped the bloody sweat from His face on His way to Calvary, and thereby to have imprinted on the fabric a portrait of His features, which has been miraculously preserved. In front of the church where this relic is set out, booths are erected and an all-night debauch of drinking and dancing and brawling is begun. Between carouses the people go to kiss “the Face of God,” return to their excesses, and only interrupt them to make another pilgrimage to the relic. It seemed to me that the whole religion of the common people was a sort of feast of “La Cara de Dios,” that profited nobody but the keepers of the shrine. I could not turn to such a religion for consolation in my grief. I could not look forward to any happiness in a Court where only my love for my brother had made the stupidities of our days endurable. I wanted to get away.

But I could not get away unmarried. That was impossible. I was still engaged informally to the Duc de Montpensier’s son, Antoine d’Orléans; but now that my brother was gone I wished to break the engagement, because I had only entered into it with the idea that such a marriage would keep me near to him. My determination aroused an amazing alarm. Members of the Government came to plead with me to hold the Duc’s interest to the throne by marrying his son; if I refused, they were afraid that he would enter politics again, to the extent even of making another revolution. That was absurd. But it was not absurd that I was as fond of the Duc as if he had been my father, and he wanted me for a daughter-in-law. It was considered a necessity of State that I should marry at once in order to protect the succession. I felt as my brother had felt after the death of his first wife. I did not care.

In December, 1885, just a month after his death, the date of my wedding was fixed, by Royal decree, for the following February. I remember that soon afterwards I received a visit from a girl friend of my own age who had come to say good-bye to me because she was entering a convent; and I thought, as I spoke to her, how much happier she was than I. I felt very sad, very depressed. I declared that I would only be married in mourning. They cried out against it, that it would bring me bad luck. What worse luck was left for me, I asked, except to die?—and I should not mind that. They yielded to me; February 26th was set for my wedding-day; but in the middle of the month I was taken ill of a fever that proved to be diphtheria, and on the 26th I had been for several days at the point of death; so I had a reprieve. It was a brief one. On March 5th, I was well enough to be taken into the big sitting-room in the evening, to sign the marriage contract before the necessary witnesses; and on the following day, still very weak, I was married in the Royal Chapel, with all the company dressed in deep mourning, and the church draped in black as for a funeral. I went away on our honeymoon, miserable, to the palace of Aranjuez; and, for once, I welcomed the Court etiquette that required us to be accompanied by a lady and a gentleman-in-waiting, since their presence saved me from a tête-à-tête with my husband, for which neither of us had any inclination.

One reads a great deal, in histories, of the immoralities of kings. What is one to expect of a man married in aversion to some foreign princess whom he is forced to take into his life for reasons of State that do not make her either beautiful to look at, or intelligent to talk to, or congenial to live with? If people will not allow a king to enjoy even the ordinary temptations to be virtuous, why should they exclaim if he seeks, outside of marriage, the happinesses of personal intercourse that are denied him in a wife? The fault is not in the kings. It is in the conditions that have required kings to be more than human beings and content with less than human beings. With the unfortunate queens it is different; they are raised in a guarded confinement of etiquette from which they can not easily escape; and they usually turn to religion and the hope of a happier world to console them for the stupid cares and gilded miseries that afflict them in this.

I was not religious, but fortunately I was not a queen, and when we returned to Madrid I began to assert my freedom as a married woman by getting clear of the formalities of Royalty. We did not return to the palace, but took a small house, with a garden; and there I felt less depressed, being occupied with domestic arrangements that were as strange and exciting to me as Robinson Crusoe’s housekeeping—although much of it was in the hands of the grand maître, of course. I found that I had not the traditional Bourbon inaptitude for practical affairs, nor my mother’s inability to understand the value of money.

I was told a story of her that amused me very much. Once, to reward some service, she ordered one of her Ministers to pay a vast sum of money. “But, your Majesty,” he protested, “it is a great deal.” “Not at all,” she said. “See that it is paid.” So the Minister secretly sent out instructions that the sum should be brought to him in coin, and he stacked it on the Queen’s writing-table in piles. She asked, “What is all this money for?” “That,” he said, “is the money that your Majesty has ordered me to pay to So-and-so.” She cried, “Good heavens! Not all that. You are giving him a fortune. Here; this is enough.” And she took one of the piles and gave it to the Minister, and the rest was sent back.

As soon as we were settled I got rid of the constant company of the lady-in-waiting; I did not have her to live in the house; and this created a sensation. I was the first Princess of Spain who had ever demanded such liberty. I did not mind. I had the solitude of my little garden to myself, and I could walk and read there in a happiness that all the princesses would have envied if they could have known how pleasant it was. Some of my other attempts at informality were not so successful. One afternoon, while out walking with my husband without either carriage or escort, I felt so ill that I could not walk back. There was no vehicle to be had but a passing tramway-car, so we got into that. We were recognised. All the passengers rose and stared and became so excited that the driver—not knowing what accident had happened—stopped the car. It was some time before we could make our explanations, get the people seated, and get the car to go on; and the ride home was too uncomfortable to be even amusing. I was indignantly scolded for having been taken ill in such circumstances; and I never tried again to ride in a tramway-car in Madrid. Silly nonsense!

We were still attending Court functions and receptions, and going to dinners and luncheons at the palace; and on May 17th we were summoned there to hear the official announcement of the “Capitan-General” that “the King of Spain” had been born. It was at first intended to name him Ferdinand, to avoid the unlucky XIII., but for the sake of his father’s memory the name of Alfonso was demanded, and he was inscribed as “Alfonso XIII., Leon Fernando Mario Isidro Santiago Pascual y Anton.” (My mother complained that the names were too few. She had been accustomed to give us at least a dozen each!) A month later the Queen-Regent presented the King in the chapel, and then offered him to the Blessed Virgin, in an extraordinary ceremony at the church of Atoche, with Te Deums and Salves, and a Royal parade.

It was now almost midsummer, and I was resolved to get away. I had hoped to return to Paris, but the Duc de Montpensier brought us word that the Orleans family might be expelled from France, in which case we should go to Switzerland for our summer. I was sorry for more than selfish reasons, for I had had visits from my new relatives, and found them charming. Late in June the good news came that, though the Comte de Paris had been expelled and his property confiscated, the Government would go no farther; and early in July my husband and I started with the Duc and my mother-in-law to go through Paris on our way to join the Comte and Comtesse de Paris in Tunbridge Wells.

I was leaving behind me many happy days, but many also that were so unendurably sad that I was eager to be gone from the scenes that recalled them to me. I was no longer a prisoner of State. I was still, if you wish, “a ticket-of-leave man.” But no convict, released on good behaviour, ever went out with more relief, even though he was still to be subject to some State surveillance, and perhaps never to be wholly free of the instinctive timidities of the mind that has been guarded.

CHAPTER VI
ENGLAND AND THE ENGLISH

There now began for me an interesting experience. I had started out to travel and see the sights of Europe, a bride of twenty-two, with a mind in some ways older than my age, as inquisitive as youth, but, perhaps, not so subject to youth’s self-deception; as interested as youth in my own observations (rather than in any general view or philosophical explanation of society), but sceptical, and with no youthful tendency to illusions either romantic or royal. The European travels of such a young lady could not have much interest, ordinarily. But, for ten years and more, I went from Court to Court, rather than from country to country, in that huge family of Royalty whose members have been intermarrying for so many generations that all the occupants of the thrones of Europe have become cousins, and a princess can visit from palace to palace as if from house to house among relatives in a countryside. And it was an interesting experience, I say, because Royalty is not of semi-sacred caste that in one country will be accepted as quite holy and God-given, and in another will be merely allowed to live pensioned—like vergers in some fine old cathedral after its worship has been abolished and its altars removed—and in yet others will be existing in all the intermediate stages between these two extremes; honoured by this faction and attacked by that, reformed and reconstructed and embellished and defaced.

It was interesting, as it had been in Spain, to discover the anomalies and false appearances and thin lava-crusts on which we seemed to live so securely. Being well aware of how I saw myself in my own mind, it was interesting to study what was in the minds of other royal personages—to see how they regarded themselves and how they thought they were regarded—and to learn what real credit we had and what actual appearance we made in the minds of the people who saluted us with such varying degrees of curiosity and respect.

In Paris, where we went first, Royalty has no problems. Being for ever dispossessed of its claims in France, it is accepted there without awe and without enmity. It flees to Paris from the dulness of its official life in every monarchy of Europe; and at times it seems that more royalties are there than in all the other capitals of the Continent together. Paris has become a holiday rendezvous for them; and it needs them as little as it does its tourists. They can meet and dine and gossip, unobserved even by the Press. They can find circles of aristocracy in which they will be received as formally as they would be in their Courts. Or they may enjoy, if they can, on terms of some human naturalness, the life of salons and studios. And if they desire the crowded solitude of the streets, they will rarely find any one to stare. Paris is freedom, even for princesses. It was, for me, on that first return, an old home of childhood that I was revisiting; and I went to the convent to see the nuns who had taught me, and hunted up some of my playmates to recall myself to them after the nine years that seemed a lifetime that had passed. Then, in a week, we set out for England; and there we were Royalty again.

It was then I first saw Queen Victoria, and I shall not easily describe what a surprise it was. She had been for a long time the great Queen in my thoughts, on the throne of an empire beyond imagination in

Dowager Queen Alexandra of England, Queen Maud of Norway and Prince Olaf, Crown Prince of Norway

wealth and power, and ruling so many millions of the most civilised people devoted in their loyalty. I had formed a mental picture of I do not know what majesty and grandeur for her. We came to her from the City of London (so impressive after Paris) to have luncheon with her in Windsor Castle, that is so noble a seat of sovereignty; and when I entered the room in which she waited to receive us, I had a shock of pity and dismay. She was so small that I thought at first she must be sitting down. And she was not only feeble with age, but evidently ill, her eyes dulled, her hands swollen, her face as if feverish. Her merely human aspect of infirmity was increased by the black dress of mourning and widow’s cap that she wore; and standing with her two Indian servants behind her, leaning on her short cane, in that magnificent apartment that would have dwarfed a giant, holding out a tired hand to you vaguely as if she did not clearly see you—it brought a lump to the throat. Here was Royalty then! The greatest and most famous of us all! Queen Victoria!

My father-in-law and she had known each other many years, and at the luncheon table he sat beside her and kept up a conversation with her. She said very little, and with her eyes most often on her plate, like a person who is polite, but distracted by illness, and incapable of rousing the mind. The English Royal Family has the sensible habit of dining without the ladies-in-waiting, who take their meals in another room; so we were en famille; and the conversation was that of intimate domestic interests and the little social happenings of the day. One could hardly find a family more charming, more serene, more simply happy.

And the explanation of this air of the English Court is easily found. England is a country of accepted classes, of which each class makes no infringement on the rights of the class above it and fears none from the class below. There are even upper and lower servants in a household. And each class receives servility from the class below it to reimburse it for the servility that it pays to the class above. Royalty is just a final upper class, neither envied by an aristocracy which cannot aspire to it, nor feared by the lower classes over which it has no authority. It is a social ornament of government, a symbol of national majesty.

The aristocracy is almost equally ornamental, with certain appearances of power that are allowed it by the sufferance of the rest. The real government is the commerce and industry of the nation. It is a commercial empire, ruled by considerations of trade, but disguising itself, even to itself, by forms of administration that are aristocratic, with an established church in a nation largely nonconformist, a military power that in the main engages in wars for the extension or protection of commercial interests, and an ideal of empire for humanitarian ends—at the same time making it pay. You will always hear, for example, of the devoted self-sacrifice of the British rule in India, which carries the peaceful blessings of civilisation to natives incapable of self-government; but if India were being held at a continual loss to the British tax-payer—if he had to pay out of his own purse, without return, to protect the natives from their own incapacity—I wonder whether the British Empire in India would last a year. It is this faculty of almost honest self-deception which makes the Englishman so insoluble a puzzle to the foreigner.

It makes the English Royal Family the most popularly revered in Europe, even though it has, of all the royal families, the least governmental power to compel awe, and has no English blood in it to endear it to the nation, and is allowed not even a pretence of leadership in peace or war to make it picturesque. When I attended Queen Victoria’s jubilee, about a year after my first meeting with her, it seemed as if the whole nation had poured itself into the streets of London to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of her succession to the throne. And if one were sceptical, it might be said that they were only to come to enjoy the spectacle and to rejoice in the display of their own national magnificence. But the celebration had all the evidences of a personal tribute, and it was undoubtedly so accepted by the Queen and her family.

King Edward, who was a man of the world not easily deceived, always seemed to have this conviction of his importance in the eyes of his people. I do not know to what extent he interested himself privately in the problems of their government, from which the Royal Family is so jealously excluded; certainly, in years of familiar acquaintance with him, I never once heard him refer to them. Yet he was a man whose intellect would have been of value to his country, for he was one of the cleverest sovereigns of Europe, a striking personality, genial and shrewd. It seemed a pity that such a brain should be wasted in the idleness of royal life after it had succeeded in developing itself in spite of the restrictions that make most royal brains so dull.

Coming first to England from the animations of the South, I thought the people looked as stupefied as if they were all just recovering from a fit; and I felt the same general blank of reserved dulness among the aristocratic and official circles that surrounded the Court. It seemed a country that was not ruled by intelligence but by property. Property is a blind master, and great masses of the people were already rotted out by a poverty and industrial oppression from which any governing intelligence would have protected them. It took the fiasco of the Boer War, and the strikes and internal disorders of the last few years, to awaken the nation from its stupor of imperial complacency. Since that time there has been a great appearance of revolt and reform; and I have been interested to hear the foreign speculation on the probable fate of the throne in the final issue of the upheaval. I should like to know what power the British throne still has of which the country could deprive it, or what liberty the people could acquire by its abolition! They would gain as little as if, by a popular uprising, the citizens of London killed the lions in their Zoo. There may have been a time when lions were dangerous in England, but the sight of them in their cages now can only give a pleasurable holiday-shudder of awe—of which, I think, the nation will not willingly deprive itself.

There was then beginning the great industrial and commercial rivalry between England and Germany that before war came led to so much talk of it; and this rivalry was paralleled by an antipathy between the Kaiser and King Edward that was as frank as the enmity between the nations. Neither sovereign made any disguise of it even when they were together, and I always felt that it did them both good—for a strong hostility is often as potent as a strong affection to make character.

But let me leave the sovereigns for a moment and turn to the people. The English impressed and baffled me in many ways. To the foreigner of Latin blood and temperament, the English character indeed presents an almost insoluble enigma. Often just when we feel that we are really beginning to understand it, we are faced with some contradictory trait that completely baffles us. Certainly when we saw the country, apparently seething with internal dissensions, lay aside its family quarrels and present a united front to the enemy, we realised more than ever what a complex thing the English mentality is.

I must confess I thought that it would be hard for England to rise to any great national emergency, not so much because things seemed to have reached the breaking point in Ireland or because her colonies seemed bound to her more by self-interest than by real loyalty, but on account of the devastating habits of ease and luxury that had spread like a disease among her aristocracy. But now we know that these corrupting influences had not vitally affected the upper classes. Unlike the extravagances of ancient Rome that had eaten to the heart of the nation’s energies, England’s hurt was only skin-deep.

We can have no doubt of this when we see great ladies facing unfamiliar hardships and risks at the battle front, others dismantling their huge country houses and transforming them into hospitals and others freely giving their whole time and activities to the great relief organisations for the war’s sufferers. The English aristocracy’s ingrained sense of responsibility to the nation remains untouched by all its latterly acquired taste for luxury and over-indulgence in sports.

I say “latterly acquired,” because it is undoubtedly true that this love of extravagance has grown enormously during the last decade or so. From the pomp and lavishness displayed nowadays in certain smart establishments, I should never realise that I was in the same circle whose courtesy and simplicity used to delight me so in the England I learned to love years ago.

It was, as I have said, as a young married woman that I had my first experience of English life. The Comte and Comtesse de Paris, my husband’s relatives, had been exiled from France and had been living for some time in Tunbridge Wells. I spent many months with them there, and, through their large circle of friends, I became acquainted with all sorts and conditions of people, and soon found myself accepting the hospitality of these newly-made friends. When I made it clear to my host and hostess that I desired them to forget that I was an Infanta and to be treated as an ordinary individual, etiquette was banished, and I was able to do as I liked.

Life in the country houses always pleased me best. In those days it was the custom for the family and guests to breakfast together, and I loved the informality of it all undisturbed by the ministrations of liveried lackeys. Often, when there were children in the house, they were allowed to come to the table too, and we all had very jolly times over the porridge.

We often went bicycling for the whole day, carrying our lunches with us and eating them in some pleasant grove by the wayside. Sometimes we went on coaching expeditions and lunched in some old thatch-covered inn. When my children were little, I seldom missed passing some time in England each summer, so that they too could enjoy the freedom of the open-air life.

It did not take me long to appreciate the charm of the English home and country, which are vastly different from anything abroad. In Spain, people never live all the year round in the country if they can possibly avoid it, and they seldom visit their estates unless they wish practically to retire from the world. On the rare occasions when they do snatch themselves from the conventional round of gaieties in the cities or the big watering places, they shut themselves up in their big, bare castles, receiving no one and seldom venturing outside their own properties. It is almost a time of penance.

They are simply incapable of understanding the English love of life in the open air, with its many exhilarating and ingenious pastimes which appeal so strongly to me. More than that, they are inclined to look upon such taste as rather ill-bred. For instance, only the humblest Spaniard would dream of eating his cold lunch by the roadside, and I am sure that the true aristocrat would never appreciate the charm of seeking out some picturesque spot and having tea from a tea-basket. No Spanish lady of quality would even allow herself to walk hatless in her own garden, and reclining in a hammock or on the grass would be ruthlessly banned by her traditions and upbringing.

One summer day Queen Cristina came to me with a look of sheer consternation on her face.

“Eulalia,” she said, “I have just seen an appalling sight: an Englishwoman lying on the grass in the park.”

The culprit was a lady-in-waiting, who had been brought to Spain by an English princess visiting the Court. I had some difficulty in convincing the Queen that such an action would not be considered such a shocking breach of etiquette in England as she imagined.

In France, country life in the Smart Set is more animated than in Spain, but it still lacks the spontaneity and freedom of the English out-of-doors. The châteaux are occasionally thrown open to visitors, but the guests are content to undergo the same routine as in Paris—the only difference being that it is adapted to another setting. Of course, there are hunting meets, and, of late years, garden parties, but much of the entertaining takes place indoors—dinner-parties, theatrical performances, afternoon receptions, etc. The French have not yet learned how really to live in the country, to relax and to change their entire mode of thought and activities.

There is hardly a county in England that I am not familiar with. I have spent many weeks in Cornwall, Devon and Yorkshire, and have returned again and again to Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and Richmond. Curiously enough, during one visit to Richmond I received a message from the Duchess of Teck that her daughter, then Princess of Wales, had just given birth to her first boy. I went at once to White Lodge to offer my congratulations, and I fancy that I was the first, outside the immediate family, to hold the future Prince of Wales in my arms.

What to me is convincing proof of the change in latter years from simplicity to lavish display is the difference in the way of living I have remarked amongst many of my friends. Each time I have visited England recently I have been struck with this.

One thing that used to delight me so was the informality of the English tea. It was invariably served sans cérémonie in the drawing-room. After the servants had brought it in they retired and left us to our own devices. Neighbours frequently dropped in without warning, and often, as we gathered round a big blazing fire and ate those wonderful home-made delicacies unknown to Continentals, there was a charming feeling of expansiveness and intimacy that we never had at other times of the day.

Of late years I have noticed that the custom has

Courtesy of Collier’s

King George V, the Late King Edward VII and the Prince of Wales

changed. When you are invited to tea, you find your place set at a table loaded with expensive flowers and accessories from the chic caterer. Footmen are in constant attendance and the charm of informality has entirely gone.

Friends of mine who used to be content to dine in some simple tea-gown now wear the latest Paris creations and their jewels—and this every evening. Although the Frenchwoman may still think that the Englishwoman’s taste in dress is far beneath her own standard, she would have to admit, if she were invited to some fashionable house-party, that the Englishwoman of means has far eclipsed her in the matter of frequent change. She would see the hostess and guests appear in tweed suits and stout boots for their morning constitutional and breakfast, then reappear in white flannels for their afternoon game of tennis or boating. She would wonder how, in the thick of sports and entertainment, these energetic women found time to put on some clinging creation for tea which would later be laid aside for the décolleté dinner-gown.

Of course, these departures from the simple tastes of twenty years ago seem harmless enough in themselves, but they are surely indications of a constantly growing love of lavishness in the whole social routine. I am sorry to say that the fine old-time courtesies of the English gentry seem to have suffered by these more luxurious habits of living. In many smart circles, polished manners seem to have become as super-annuated as crinolines and stage coaches.

Whatever may be the faults of the English land-lord-system—faults inherited from the centuries—the system used to work excellently whenever the lord of the castle or manor-house lived up to his responsibilities. In spite of its touch of paternalism, there was something impressive about the white-haired earl inspecting his broad acres, bowing tenants standing aside to let his carriage pass, and something altogether touching about his lady visiting the cottagers, her footman—far haughtier in mien than she—bearing gifts of food and warm clothing. As long as the villagers were well cared for, I suppose they never questioned whether it was right for their master to have a mansion while they had to toil so hard to keep their humble thatched roof over their heads. But when the young lord took to dissipating the family fortunes on the turf, when he married some footlight favourite—in other words, when he began to neglect the responsibilities of his race—that, probably, was the beginning of their doubt in the justice of the English social order. Then they forgot to curtsy whenever the young lord and his bride motored through the village, and they began to listen to the itinerant labour agitator at the tavern.

Of course, the democratic spirit that is spreading all over the world has been at work in England for years, undermining rigid caste distinctions and differences, but I feel that it could not have grown so quickly nor expressed itself in just such forms as it has, if the extravagance and irresponsibility of many of the rich and powerful had not paved the way for it. Destroy respect and you destroy docility. There is no doubt that the English lower classes, in their first efforts toward democracy and equality, have made some pretty ludicrous mistakes. Instead of copying the fine qualities of the aristocracy, they have, more frequently than not, managed to imitate their shortcomings and limitations. I remember hearing that the valet of some prince insisted on having a valet for himself! I know that French maids, whom I have taken to England, have had their heads turned by the amazing etiquette of the servants’ hall—all unquestionably due to the servants’ desire to pattern their masters.

The maid of the Infanta is a great person, and she soon found that she could take precedence over all the others. She had to be elegantly dressed. Indeed, whenever I go to England, I always remark that my maid has double the luggage she requires when I take her to other countries. Once I discovered that the English servants’ attitude toward their work had so affected one maid that she was almost completely spoilt. For instance, after a visit to England on which she had accompanied me, this maid broke down and sobbed when I told her to light a fire.

“I can’t, I can’t,” she said, piteously, with tears streaming down her face.

“But for years you have been accustomed to light fires for me,” I said. “What has happened to make it such a terrible thing to light one now?”

She explained that she had learnt in England that it was beneath the dignity of a lady’s-maid to do menial work.

A Spanish maid from Seville had more sense, and amused me immensely by telling me that the English servants had told her that it was exceedingly smart to walk out on Sunday afternoons with a soldier, and they had added that if she desired to show herself with a Guardsman, he would expect to be paid.

“Fancy my paying a soldier to walk out with me!” she said, laughing.

However, it is not unreasonable to hope that the war, which has already done so much toward rousing the rich from their lethargy of extravagance and neglect of responsibilities to the most praiseworthy usefulness, will help correct the lower class conception of equality. As I have already said, no character is so full of surprises as the English—so capable of appearing to be one thing while underneath it is the exact opposite. Can this be what people of other nationalities mean when they speak of English hypocrisy? It is rather an innate reserve which the foreigner finds great difficulty in penetrating. It comes, no doubt, from the Englishman’s veneration for tradition, and for centuries he has been schooled to show no emotion. That is often why he is supposed to be either stupid or inattentive. As a matter of fact, this very exterior gives him the great advantage of being able to size up a situation without betraying either the process or his conclusions.

The proof of what I say is the Englishman’s unquestioned superiority in diplomacy. People who have no experience of cosmopolitan society seem to think that the successful diplomat must be a detective of the popular novel type: an astute if somewhat unscrupulous politician and a polished lady’s man all rolled into one. To be sure, the representatives of certain countries often do their best to realise just such an ideal, but, although this type may succeed in carrying some of their machinations to a conclusion satisfactory to themselves, they almost never accomplish anything really worth while for their governments. Most of the English diplomats I have known on the Continent give the impression of being serenely indifferent to any intrigues that may be going on around them. It has often amused me to watch them at dinner-parties. Unlike certain representatives of other powers, they never go out of their way to make themselves agreeable to ladies. I have never seen them pay special attention to the wives of powerful statesmen for the purposes of their profession—indeed, they seem to scorn these backdoor methods. Perhaps, it is because they know very well that real diplomacy is built on more solid foundations than on the gleanings of drawing-room conversations or the chance confidences of indiscreet women.

And they are right in this, for the whole tradition of diplomacy in England is different from that of any great power. She has not changed her tactics for centuries.

England has established such a prestige among nations that she is able to transact her international affairs in London, and has at her disposal the brains of her best statesmen. King Edward, in bringing about the entente cordiale, thus probably initiated the French Government into this way of conducting its international affairs, for of late years French diplomacy has steadily improved.

King Edward himself possessed in a high degree those national qualities that make the English such good diplomats. Not only in the conduct of nations, but in society, his self-possession and tact were unfailing. They certainly did not fail him on one occasion when I saw him placed in a very comical and embarrassing situation. We were both at a dinner-party in a great London house, and among the guests was a lady who bore an historic Italian title. She was English by birth, and before her marriage had been famous in London society for her great beauty and her charm of manner. A wealthy Jew, who shall be disguised under the name of Abraham, was madly in love with her, and her friends, including King Edward, saw his growing infatuation with concern.

“Don’t you marry that man,” was the advice given her, peremptorily but good-naturedly, by King Edward.

But marry him she did; not, however, before he had been to Italy and bought the palace and the pompous title of an impoverished Florentine noble. Of this fact the king was unaware, and when the lady was presented to him at the dinner-table as the Marchesa di X., he smiled and said: “I am delighted to meet you again as the Marchesa di X., and so thankful you didn’t marry that awful Abraham.”

A few moments later, the king observed that the “awful Abraham” was standing close by and had heard the unfortunate remark. Without turning a hair, he smiled at him and congratulated him heartily upon his marriage.

King Edward was the first member of the English Royal Family that I met. My acquaintance with him started in Madrid when, as Prince of Wales, he came with his brother, the Duke of Connaught, one of the most charming princes in Europe, to be present at the festivities given in honour of the marriage of my brother.

Later I stayed with him and Queen Alexandra at Sandringham. One of the first things to impress me there was the king’s extreme punctuality. Somebody used always to come and warn me ten minutes before meal-times that I must not keep him waiting. For some unknown reason, he had all the clocks in the house set half-an-hour in advance of the right time, and one of the first things that guests at Sandringham learnt was the existence of this curious practice. The king liked to be amused, and, as he had a taste for the Gallic turn of wit that makes Latin races such good raconteurs, there were always one or two foreigners about who, although they did not wear the cap and bells which would have defined their functions in an earlier age, played the part of Court jester admirably, and enlivened conversation at the dinner-table with praiseworthy persistence.

The Princess Louise, now Duchess of Argyle, possesses a share of the talent which distinguished her brother and their sister, the Empress Frederick. I spent a very agreeable time with her in the Isle of Wight, when I went to England for the first time. We had many cosy times together, leaving our husbands to amuse each other, and our mutual interest in art and literature naturally drew us together.

Undoubtedly, one of the cleverest and most charming figures in the royal circle is the Duchess of Connaught. Her husband would, I am certain, be the first to admit that his success in creating for himself the special place he holds in English life and in the life of the British Empire is largely due to the Duchess’s loyal help and wise advice. In spite of her German upbringing, she has given herself wholeheartedly to the country of her adoption, and her daughters, the Crown Princess of Sweden and Princess Patricia, are delightful and typically English girls.

The Russian princess, known best in England as the Duchess of Edinburgh and now Duchess of Coburg, was unable to adapt herself to life in a strange country. It is a canon of Court etiquette that imperial personages take precedence of royal personages, and consequently it was held in Russia that the Duchess of Edinburgh, being the daughter of the Emperor of Russia, should take precedence of the Princess of Wales, who was merely the daughter of a king. Queen Alexandra is so amiable that I believe that she would have contentedly allowed the duchess and anybody else who wanted to do so to pass before her; but obviously the wife of the heir to the throne could not be permitted to take any place but the first after the Sovereign. What was to be done? Queen Victoria solved the difficulty very cleverly. She caused herself to be proclaimed Empress of India, and the claim put forward by the duchess immediately fell to the ground. The assumption of imperial rank by the Queen was undoubtedly dictated by political considerations, but the solution of the difficulty, created by the conservatism of Court etiquette, was an argument which weighed with her when she took the decisive step.

In no country is the veneration of royalty carried to greater lengths than in England. That is doubtless why King Edward’s many American and Jewish friends were so readily received by the smart set, although these new-comers brought with them a love of lavishness and display that went counter to the taste and tradition of the English noblesse. When society opened its doors to these people of vast wealth and luxurious habits, and accepted their prodigal entertainments, it is hardly surprising that their example became infectious. Let us hope that England’s ingrained respect for royalty will induce the aristocracy to copy the simplicity and dignity of King George’s and Queen Mary’s life, and that this influence will aid in completely reviving the old-time ideals of courtesy and good-breeding.

As I have already said, this revival has already begun. The war, which has had the effect of rousing the rich from their over-indulgence in luxury and sports, will no doubt do much toward leavening the attitude of the classes toward each other. Surely, since they have been drawn together in a spontaneous movement of patriotism in the face of the enemy, they will lose much of their common mistrust and misunderstanding and the real democracy of the spirit—not the sham equality of externals—will have freer leeway. More than that, I dare hope that the war, which has not only forced different classes but different nations to stand side by side, will break down their insular habit of thought which sees no good in foreign life and customs.

CHAPTER VII
THE KAISER AND HIS COURT

After hearing King Edward’s opinion of his nephew, I was eager to meet the Kaiser. I was never more eager to meet any sovereign. And there was none who ever made such an impression on me. One felt at once the vibration of a strong personality, an incessantly active mind, a dynamic nervous energy, a Latin temperament intellectual and gay. He has the kind of hard grey-blue eye that is usually called piercing. And he uses it, I think, with some knowledge of its effect when he wishes to be disconcerting. But the wrinkles on his face come from smiling, not from scowls; and in his private life he is altogether charming and unaffected and delightful.

When I first visited at the Schloss, in Berlin, I was struck by the perfect household management. I was told that the Kaiser personally supervised all the details of the establishment. The next time I was there, I found on my arrival a little library of my favourite authors waiting in the apartment that had been prepared for me; and I discovered that the Kaiser had selected and provided the books. The charming thoughtfulness of the attention is as characteristic of him as the thoroughness of the superintendence. He seems to be as thorough in all he does. His activities are, of course, enormous. His mind appears untiring. He accomplishes an incredible amount of routine labour and comes to his recreation eager and not fagged.

The quality that makes him most misunderstood, both in Germany and abroad, is his religiosity. He has an intimate sense of the constant direction of a personal God—how intimate no one will believe who has not seen the expression of his face when he is silently praying. Since he believes that God directs every incident of the life of the world, he believes that he has been divinely appointed to rule over Germany, as every one else has been divinely appointed to the station he occupies and the work he has to do. He rules, therefore, under God, responsible only to God, and going chiefly to prayer for direction. This conviction is so profound and moving in him that I believe if he had not been born a king, he would have become a religious leader whose energy would have made him as compelling as one of the old prophets. And it is a conviction that governs him in the most unexpected ways. For example, he has often spoken publicly of the responsibility of the ruler who involves his people in a war in which so many men may be killed, when he cannot be sure that their consciences will be in a state to meet death.

Hitherto the intelligence of his rule in many directions has been beyond all question. The immense industrial expansion of the country has not been made at the expense of the lower classes. During the Boer War a shameful percentage of the recruits in England had to be rejected as physically unfit for service; the recruits for the German army have always been healthy. The foundations of the nation have not been rotted away by poverty and exploitation. It has not been wealth that has ruled here.

The German royal family is of the blood of the nation; it always had the picturesque qualities of military leadership; and it represented, even more than in England, the magnificence of national success and the new unity of German patriotism. Although the growth of the Socialist party has gone on surely, inside these very evident aspects of loyalty, it would seem that so long as Germany had to be organised on a war basis it would accept a dictatorship that is intelligent. Only when the Throne became stupid, the trouble would begin.

Meanwhile, the German Emperor was the boast and the model of certain sections of modern royalty. Many of the young kings who should be attending to the arts of peace were imagining themselves little “War Lords” and strutting about in uniforms that made them ridiculous. The lesser royalties saw themselves as divinely ordained to their conspicuous idleness as he to his work. Those qualities in the Kaiser which King Edward quarrelled with—because they appeared mediæval to a man of his type of mind—were parodied in imitation by princelings who had not the Kaiser’s brains and force of personality. I once had such a sovereign send an aide to order me to put down my parasol in a royal procession, for no reason except to exercise a petty authority; and I started a warm enmity by sending back word, through the aide, that the control of my parasol was not within the power of the Crown.

I think it was these imitations of the Kaiser that exasperated King Edward more than their original. The Kaiser’s antipathy to King Edward was another matter. As the father of his people, the German Emperor sets an example of personal virtue and austerity such as a parent might set his sons; and King Edward enjoyed his life to the full. The King practised all the diplomacies of silence; the Kaiser always had an impulsiveness in private and public utterance that was the despair of his ministers. The two men were personally antipathetical. They misunderstood each other and underrated each other. But, as I have said before, they did each other a lot of good.

When to-day I think of William II., I always recall a scene which seemed symbolical of the German Sovereign and his people.

A great crowd filled an immense hall of the grey castle which the past has left in the heart of modern Berlin. People of every rank stood shoulder to shoulder, for it was the one day of the year when the Imperial Court sets courage and faithful service before birth and noble ancestry, the day of the Ordensfest.

I was quite young and I felt joyous and happy as

Eulalia

I passed up the hall in the Imperial procession, with a page bearing my long manteau de cour. And each time that I turned from side to side to bow to the people, I caught a glimpse of the Kaiser at the head of the procession, a silver figure, like Lohengrin, on whose cuirass and helmet the light flashed. Before him walked four heralds in mediæval dress, sounding silver trumpets, and when he reached the dais and stood before the throne, looking down the castle hall, I saw in his steel-blue eyes that look of exaltation which his profound and unshakable belief in the divinity of kings gives him.

Was I a princess born in a democratic age? Or was I living in the age of chivalry, or at the vanished Court of Versailles? Before me, as I went to the dais, stood an Emperor as unshaken in the belief that he possessed godlike qualities as Charlemagne when a Pope set the unexpected crown upon his brow, or, as the Roi Soleil, unflattered by worship he believed to be his due. It seemed that I should have been one of those Infantas of Velasquez in a brocade dress and fluttering a little fan.

The impression the Kaiser made on me that morning of the Ordensfest was not new, though it came with fresh, almost startling, force. I had known him years before as Prince Wilhelm—a simple and unaffected youth. Then he became Crown Prince, and I noted a change. His manner became more imperious, less spontaneous. I felt that he was schooling himself, holding himself in check, conscious of the burden of coming responsibilities, fearing, yet longing for, the golden irksomeness of the Imperial crown. Since he has ascended the throne, I have never met him without realising that he is dominated by the belief that he is an instrument in the hands of the Almighty, divinely appointed to reign.

As he conferred orders and decorations on the stream of men who humbly approached his throne at the Ordensfest, I could see from their reverence and from the look of awe on their faces that his manner, his regal pose, his glance, had forced them to accept his own belief in the majesty and righteousness of kingship. But when we had passed to the great banqueting-hall he forgot for a moment to be godlike, and became the unpretentious Prince Wilhelm of the past.

We sat at a table on a dais, looking down on the great company invited to enjoy the Emperor’s hospitality, and we were served by young nobles. The page who had carried my train—a handsome boy who looked about twenty—stood behind my chair and handed dishes or filled my glass with the skill of a practised footman. It was the first time that a foreign princess had been present at the Ordensfest, and I had received a hint that it was customary to send the page who served one a present the following day, and I had learnt that there was an unwritten law that the present should be a watch. I was sitting next the Emperor and suddenly he turned to my page with an almost roguish smile.

“You are a happy boy,” he said, “to have the privilege to serve the beautiful Infanta.” Sovereigns always know how to flatter. “What present would you like her to give you?”

“Sire,” answered the page, “there is nothing I should like Her Royal Highness to give me so much as the flower that caresses her neck.”

It was a courtly and charming reply.

“You must give it him,” said the Emperor gaily, and of course I did.

And the page kept the flower.

“The deity has come down from its pedestal,” I said to the Emperor, when I had given the boy the flower, and we both laughed.

That was a little incident that relieved the tedium of a visit to the Schloss at Berlin; for, in spite of the courtesies of host and hostess, I felt then, as I do in all palaces, that I was in a prison. Indeed, to me the palace life is so irksome that when I hear the sentry pacing up and down outside my windows, I always feel that he is there to prevent me from going out more than to prevent other people from coming in. Whenever I have stayed with the Kaiser and Kaiserin I have been given a beautiful suite of rooms; but a prison is still a prison, however thick the gilding on the bars. Everything one does or says is noticed and talked about, and criticised and spread abroad. All day long my Spanish lady-in-waiting sat in an ante-chamber with the German lady-in-waiting and the German chamberlain appointed to attend me. It was intolerable to think that these three persons were sitting there with nothing whatever to do but to speculate on what I should take it into my head to do next and to exchange Court gossip. In an outer chamber was another group of idlers, servants whose chief duty was to conduct me processionally from one part of the castle to another.

Madame la Princesse appears in the antechamber, and the ladies make profound curtsies and the gentlemen profound bows. She smiles—princesses must always appear to be radiantly happy—and she tries to find something agreeable to say to each, and not to make bad blood by being more agreeable to one than to another. She announces her desire to go to the Kaiserin’s apartments. The chamberlain passes on that interesting information to the footman in the outer ante-chamber. A procession is formed, and Madame la Princesse is conducted, with the pomp of a bishop entering a cathedral to say Mass, to the other side of the castle. The procession passes through the Kaiserin’s ante-chamber, where another army of servants is idling, and the ladies-in-waiting who make profound curtsies and the gentlemen-in-waiting who make profound bows expect Madame la Princesse to smile and to repeat the gracious remarks about the state of the weather she has already made to the members of her own suite. The doors of the Kaiserin’s apartments are thrown open with becoming reverence, and Madame la Princesse disappears, leaving her suite to gossip with the Kaiserin’s, and probably to speculate on the nature of the royal conversation across the sacred threshold they may not pass unless bidden. A quarter of an hour elapses, and Madame la Princesse emerges, smiles at the bowing courtiers and curtsying ladies, and, feeling more like an idol than a human being, is solemnly conducted back and enshrined in her own apartments.