H. R. H., the Infanta Eulalia

Photograph by Henrie Manuel, Paris

COURT LIFE
FROM WITHIN

BY

H. R. H.
THE INFANTA EULALIA
OF SPAIN

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.

{1}

COURT LIFE FROM WITHIN

CHAPTER I

THE SEEDS OF REVOLT

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 tena{2}cious 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.{3} 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{4} 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{5} 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{6} 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{7} 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{8} 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{9} 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 recrea{10}tion 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.{11} 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 re{12}member 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{13} 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 im{14}posed 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{15} 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{16} 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.{17}

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{18} 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{19} 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.{20} 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{21} 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.{22}

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 amuse{23}ment 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{24} 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.{25} 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{26} 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

{27}

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{28} 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.{29}

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{30} 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{31} 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{32} 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 mat{33}ters 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.{34}

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{35} 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{36} 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{37} 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{38} 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

{39}

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{40} 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.{41}

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{42} 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.{43}

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{44} 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{45} 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{46} 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{47} 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{48} 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{49} 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 him{50}self 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

{51}

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{52} 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 accom{53}panied 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{54} 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{55} 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{56} 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{57} 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{58} 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 con{59}ditions. 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{60} 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{61}—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{62} 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.{63}

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{64} 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—an{65}nounced 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{66} 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, arrange{67}ments 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.{68}

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{69} 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 de{70}clared 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{71} 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{72} 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

{73}

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 cor{74}rect 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{75} 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{76} 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{77} 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{78} 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{79} 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;{80} 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{81} 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{82} 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.{83}” 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 small{84}pox 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.{85}

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;{86} 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{87} 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{88} 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{89} 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{90} 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{91} 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{92} 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 uni{93}form 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 manufactur{94}ing 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 exces{95}sive 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{96} 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

{97}

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{98} 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{99} 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,{100} 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{101} 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{102} 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{103} 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{104} 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{105} 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.{106}

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{107} 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{108} 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

{109}

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{110} 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{111} 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{112} 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.{113} 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{114} 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{115} 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.{116} 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,{117} 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{118} 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.{119}”

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{120} 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

{121}

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 them{122}selves, 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 foot{123}light 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{124} 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{125} 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 ad{126}vantage 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 back{127}door 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-{128}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{129} 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 func{130}tions 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{131} 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{132} 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{133} 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.{134}

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{135} 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{136} 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{137} 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{138} 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

{139}

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{140} 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{141} 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.{142}

“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{143} 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{144} 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.

The etiquette of Versailles in the time of Louis XVI. could hardly be more exasperating to a modern woman than that of Berlin in the twentieth century. Before luncheon and dinner processions converge from all parts of the castle, conducting members of the Imperial family and royal guests to the drawing-room.

“The Kaiser will be in the drawing-room in ten minutes,” was the regular warning I used to receive from a lady-in-waiting, fearful that I should be late, and knowing the value the Kaiser sets on punctuality. In point of fact, I never was late, and, indeed, punctuality almost ceases to be a virtue at the Schloss, where one lives under a hard-and-fast code of rules.{145}

On the way from the drawing-room to the dining-room the Kaiser and Kaiserin and their guests pass through the apartment in which the ladies and gentlemen in attendance have been discarded. They stand in a great circle, and it is the invariable custom to make the tour of the circle with the usual smile and the usual banal remarks. That duty performed, the royal personages go into the dining-room, and the suites retire to eat in another room. In Madrid the persons in attendance on the royal family dine with them. When I first went to Berlin the Kaiser’s children were young, and, although they lunched with us, they were not permitted to speak unless first spoken to. After the meal the royal party returns to the drawing-room, but it must not be thought that when alone royal persons unbend and behave naturally. The daily discipline of relentless etiquette has its effect on them; they cannot forget that they are royal, and therefore obliged to mask their feelings more rigorously than is necessary for ordinary people; indeed, most princesses I know are reduced by this inexorable discipline to nonentities whose mouths are twisted in an eternal smile. At Berlin we conversed politely for the regulation time, and, after{146} making the circle of the suites again, were conducted back to our apartments in half a dozen processions.

Back in one’s rooms, it is impossible to emerge without a repetition of wearisome ceremonies. To go out for half an hour’s walk by oneself is a relaxation the poorest can enjoy; it is forbidden to a palace prisoner. The etiquette of Berlin requires a princess to be accompanied by a lady-in-waiting. And usually the lady-in-waiting cannot walk fast, so that the enjoyment of a little vigorous exercise in the open air is impossible. Moreover, people about courts are usually uninteresting companions. Obviously, intelligent persons would not consent to lead such aimless lives and to conform to such an inexorable code. How inexorable is that code may be judged from the fact that one of the Court ladies in Berlin was confined to her room for three days as a punishment for walking across the courtyard in an indecorous manner, that is to say with one hand ungloved.

The Emperor William’s insistence on law and order even extends to details of house-keeping. For instance, he knows that I like to begin the day with{147} something more substantial than the coffee and rolls most Continentals take in the morning. Accordingly, whenever I have stayed at the Schloss he has himself given orders that an English breakfast should be served in my apartments, and I have always been indulged with the eggs and bacon and marmalade I am accustomed to. At first sight it may seem a little odd that an Emperor should be at the pains to arrange the menu of a guest’s breakfast. The Kaiser evidently knows as well as I do that a princess in a palace is less happily situated than a visitor in an English country-house, who gives his orders and gets what he likes served in his room. It would never occur to me to ask for a boiled egg at breakfast in a palace where people are not accustomed to have boiled eggs for breakfast, because the order would pass through so many persons before it reached the kitchen that my egg would probably be an omelette au surprise or a terrine of foie-gras before it arrived in my dining-room.

Above and beyond the Kaiser’s love of seeing that things work smoothly in his home is his love of his capital. To him Berlin is a daughter, whom he likes to see beautiful and well turned-out, just as he likes{148} to see the Kaiserin and the Duchess of Brunswick charmingly dressed.

“It has been raining hard,” he said, coming into my room one morning, “and it has just stopped. I want you to come out with me, because I have something interesting to show you.”

I put on my hat at once and we went down to a carriage which was waiting and drove away. I was wondering what interesting sight I was going to see and what surprise the Kaiser had in store for me.

“Look!” he cried suddenly, “look at the streets! There have been torrents of rain and the weather only cleared up a few minutes ago, but do you see that there is not a speck of mud on the road?”

It was true. The streets were surprisingly and absolutely clean.

“You appear to dry as well as to sweep them,” I said.

“I have an army of road-sweepers,” he said. “Here they are,” and he pointed to a group of men energetically plying their brooms. “I wanted you to see how clean I keep Berlin.”

“And is that all you have brought me out to see?” I said teasingly.

Courtesy of Collier’s

German Emperor in Austrian Uniform

{149}

“Yes, all,” he said, and we both laughed.

The Kaiser knows that I am passionately fond of dancing, and he used to make a point of arranging small dances when I was at the castle, so that I could enjoy myself without the restraint imposed on Royal personages at the formal Court balls. They used to call these small dances: Les Bals de l’Infanta. At Court balls we walked round the circle of guests—at all Courts people seem eternally standing in smiling circles—and the foreign ladies, penned behind their ambassadors, used to afford me considerable amusement, especially the Americans, who used to appear in larger numbers than they have done recently. There they stood in the glory of expensive court trains, which could be no possible use to them afterwards, and curtsied to the ground when the ambassadors had recited their names to each of us. I often wondered why they came and what pleasure they could possibly derive from seeing us smile and from curtsying to us. Obviously sensible and representative women would not be among them, unless, indeed, their husbands held official positions which necessitated their presence.

After circling the circle, we went to the dais and{150} sat for a few moments in gilt armchairs, facing the general company, before descending to dance the quadrille d’honneur. When that ceremony was ended, one’s partner, a prince or an ambassador, handed one back to the dais, made a low bow and retired. At Courts etiquette does not allow a princess to choose a partner because he happens to waltz well or to be amusing. At Berlin chamberlains had lists of partners for princesses, and one of them would bring me the card on which their names were inscribed, just as a waiter brings one a bill-of-fare in a restaurant, and I gave my orders. Each partner came to the dais, made a very low bow, and, when the dance was over, consigned me to my golden arm-chair with another low bow. The Kaiser has caused the minuet to be revived at his Court, and, when I watched that stately dance from the dais, I used to feel certain that I was at the Court of the Roi Soleil. But the Bals de l’Infanta were far more charming, for then I could dance with whom I liked and waltz to my heart’s content.

These informal dances are just an instance of the personal consideration which the Kaiser has always shown me. “Madame, vos desirs sont les ordres pour{151} Guillaume,” he telegraphed to me once, and that was in answer to a letter I had sent, begging him to ask the Sultan Abdul Hamid not to chop off the head of Izzet Pasha, who was lying in prison under sentence of death. A Turkish lady, whom I knew in Paris, had been to see me and had begged me to ask the Kaiser, who was about to visit Constantinople, to intercede with the Sultan for the unfortunate man. I knew nothing about Izzet Pasha, but my friend was so distressed and so confident that I would help her, that I was very much touched, and immediately wrote to the Kaiser. The lady was overjoyed when I showed her the courtly reply I had received, and the Sultan, of course, granted the Kaiser’s request.

The matter did not end there. Two years later, when I had entirely forgotten it, I arrived one day in Madrid, and the instant I had got out of the train, the Queen Mother and my sister, the Infanta Isabella, who were waiting on the platform to receive me, began to question me about some mysterious Turk in whom they evidently supposed I was deeply interested.

“Who is this Turk you have sent us, Eulalia?” asked the Queen.{152}

“But I do not know a single Turk,” I said.

“But this Turk who has arrived in Madrid, because you want to have him near you,” said my sister.

“What crazy nonsense!” I cried. “Are you both out of your minds?”

“Certainly not,” said the Queen, “seeing that I have a letter from the Sultan, saying that he has sent the man here as Turkish Minister entirely to please you.”

Then the truth dawned on me. Abdul Hamid must have asked the German Emperor why he desired the prisoner he had pleaded for to be pardoned, and the Kaiser must have told him that it was the wish of the Infanta Eulalia. Mohammedan ideas of feminine psychology made the Sultan see a tale of the Arabian Nights, and, determining to humour me to the top of my bent, he sent the hero of the imaginary romance to Madrid where, as he expressly stated in the letter the Queen Mother showed me at the palace, he hoped he would remain as permanent Minister, to be for long years an ornament of the Court of the Infanta Eulalia.

French people, who think of the Kaiser as a Teuton to the backbone caring only for German ideals{153} and achievements, would be surprised at the genuine taste he has for French literature, which he has cultivated by an exhaustive reading of French classics. Realising that I am au fond of French in spite of my Spanish name and title, the Emperor often showed me that side of his character which makes him an admirer of French literature, French art and French drama. One day he took me to the old palace of Sans-Souci at Potsdam to show me the apartments of Frederick the Great and the relics of the King’s friend, Voltaire, which are preserved there. We went into Frederick’s library, and when the door was closed, I found myself in a circle of book-shelves from which there seemed no exit. All the books were French.

The Kaiser smiled.

“Here you are again in your dear France,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered; “I am very proud of my French ancestry, and you yourself are very proud to let me see that Frederick lived in a French atmosphere, and to show me all these French books with which he surrounded himself.”

Of course, as may be imagined, the Kaiser’s interest in French culture is more in the way of relaxa{154}tion than anything else. As I have intimated, his dominant characteristic is his deep-rooted belief in the divinity of his office. Why the ruler of a modern state, which has been so progressive in its scientific and commercial achievements, should be so imbued with mediæval ideas of kingship is a problem to puzzle psychologists; but it is a factor that cannot be neglected, if one is to form any proper appreciation of governmental conditions in Germany.

The origin of the Kaiser’s belief in the divinity of kings is one thing; but the acceptance of this belief by the whole nation is quite another. Probably the only explanation lies in the docility of the Teutonic temperament. An average citizen who does not revolt at a system of police control so irksome as to be unbearable to the Anglo-Saxon, who does not balk at addressing even minor officials with high-sounding titles, is certainly more ready to believe that absolute power is vested in his Emperor than a man of more independent habits of thought and action.

No matter how distasteful such a form of government may be to citizens of a freer state, or how unsound in theory, it has had its good points. Because the Emperor William has believed in law and order,{155} and has had power to enforce his conceptions on his people, German cities are clean, well cared for, and are freer from the curse of corruption in local governments than in some more democratic countries.

But because the Kaiser’s ideas of proper government included mighty armaments, the military party, always the dominant class, was encouraged to grow stronger and more powerful each year. His very enthusiasm over his efficient army and navy no doubt had a very great influence on the nation at large. Trained to venerate their ruler, naturally they were willing to uphold what he upheld. He had always fostered the growth of trade, and his people had seen how this policy had benefited them. The Kaiser believed in increasing his army and navy, and the people, never questioning his judgment, did not rebel when the tax-collector took a little more of their earnings each year.

Whether the Kaiser ever realised that his encouragement of the military caste had loosed a force that might sweep everything before it is hard to say. If it ever occurred to him that the party was growing too strong, surely his mystic belief in his own divinely derived power reassured him with the argu{156}ment that his personal authority could always hold these turbulent elements in check. Accustomed to rule as absolutely as any mediæval potentate, the Kaiser had unconsciously called into being vast forces which in turn were to dominate him, to engulf him, and to make him the foremost figure in the most gigantic cataclysm of human history.{157}

CHAPTER VIII

THE TSAR AND HIS PEOPLE

Looking back over my travels, few visits stand out with more pleasant recollections than those I have paid to Petrograd.

In the present Tsar, Nicholas II., one finds a type of sovereign not only different from either King Edward or the Kaiser, but, in my experience, unique. Sovereigns may have moments of an affectionate emotion; they rarely have consistent tenderness. In their most intimate relations of family life they are apt to resume suddenly the frigid tones of royalty; and I have seen a king, talking even with his mother, get himself unexpectedly into his royal manner and speak as stiffly as if he were giving his mind to some lower breed of human being. Many a person, chatting tête-à-tête with a sovereign alone, has been charmed by the simple naturalness of his manner, and meeting him an hour later, before others, has wondered if it could be the same man. Not so the Tsar. He has more human tenderness than I ever{158} saw in any other man. He enters a crowded audience-room with the same charming kindliness and unconsciousness of self that he has in the privacy of family life. His eyes have always the one clear gaze of a clean soul.

He is not at first impressive, simply because he is incapable of playing a part, even a royal one. But the more you see of him the more he grows on you. He has no love of display, of uniforms, of the parade of royal power. He is wise with the wisdom of sympathy, and eager to help his people, and benevolent in his thought of them to a degree for which I know no parallel. I think it must be due to the unmistakable irradiations of this kindliness of heart that no attempts have been made upon his life, even during the bitterest frenzies of revolutionary hate.

In the menace with which the existence of royalty is surrounded, one would expect to find the Imperial family living amid all the oppressions of constant fear. On the contrary, I thought them the happiest royal family I have seen. They were so naturally affectionate and happy that it was even possible to forget that they were royal. They had apparently accepted the dangers of their life as soldiers do{159}—as we all accept the lesser dangers of our ordinary day—and were unaffected by them.

What they thought of the problems of their rule I do not know; and I do not know enough of their people to understand what those problems really are. But surely no power could be more beneficently exercised than this man’s must be; and if his spirit could only animate the instruments of his authority and the innumerable officials who are necessary to administer it, the mad asperities of recrimination in Russia would be as impossible to the administration and its opponents as they are to the Tsar himself.

He is a Dane, through his mother, and his qualities are those that make the Royal Families of Denmark and Sweden so charming. But these are the constitutional monarchies of a kindly and contented people, who have no cause to rebel against a government that is their own creation, and who show no awe of a ruling family as unassuming as themselves. I think, if one must be born Royal, it would be wise to be born to a Scandinavian Crown.

I have rarely felt happier than I did when I heard that Nicholas II. had called on his subjects to take a share in the government of the vast Russian Em{160}pire. The publication of the Imperial Manifesto of October, 1905, in which the Emperor announced the creation of the Imperial Duma, was an event of first-class importance, and I admired the spirit of the nation which had shown its determination to limit the power of the Crown and the wisdom of the Emperor in yielding to the desires of his subjects.

“This is the first step,” I said, “on the path which must ultimately lead to the substitution of democratic for autocratic government in Russia.”

My affection for the Emperor and Empress, my enthusiasm for the advancement of democratic ideas, my recollections of a long visit to Russia, all combined to intensify my interest in the dawn of freedom in a land which I felt, when I visited it, was part of Asia included in Europe by some strange mistake of the geographers.

It was mid-winter when I arrived for the first time in Petersburg, magical beneath its snow mantle, and I came as a simple tourist to see the country and to study the conditions of Russian life. I established myself in a hotel as a Spanish countess, feeling delighted that nobody knew who I actually was, and revelling in the freedom of strict incognito.{161} But I had not been in the hotel five hours before a Grand Master of Ceremonies arrived and betrayed my secret. From that minute everybody knew that the countess was an Infanta of Spain, and my liberty was gone. It is my usual experience. I arrive somewhere, believing that not a soul knows where I am, and, almost before I have taken possession of my rooms, there is a whirr of the telephone bell and somebody at the other end saying: “Eulalia, how did you get here? You must come and see us at once.”

The Grand Master of Ceremonies brought me a message from the Emperor and Empress, telling me how delighted they were to know that they were going to see me soon, and suggesting that I should come to the Winter Palace the next morning for the Twelfth Day ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters.

“But I have nothing to wear!” I cried.

It was absolutely true. I had never expected to figure at a Court ceremony, and it had not occurred to me to bring a manteau de cour. Etiquette, however, is less severe in Russia than in Spain or in Prussia, as I soon discovered, and the next morning I{162} put on my smartest frock and drove to the Winter Palace, a gigantic building, painted dull red, with rows of gods and goddesses standing on the cornice of its stupendous façade, looking cold and unhappy in the nipping air.

I had not seen the Empress since we were girls, staying with Queen Victoria at Windsor or in the beautiful Isle of Wight. And what a charming girl she was! A simple English girl in appearance, in a skirt and blouse, utterly unaffected, warm-hearted, and fresh as a rosebud touched with dew. I was thinking of the happy, careless days when we were in England together, as I drove to the palace, forgetting the change that the passage of the years makes in the friends of one’s youth, and when I went into the room where the Empress was waiting to watch the Blessing of the Waters from the window, I felt startled to find, instead of the girl I used to know, a surpassingly beautiful and stately woman. The petals of the rosebud had unfolded. She was the centre of a brilliant group of Grand Duchesses and ladies, all wearing the strange but beautiful dress of the Russian Court, with long hanging sleeves. On her head was a kokoshnik, a crescent-shaped diadem,{163} flaming with diamonds, from which fell a long white veil, and her stateliness and beauty distinguished her from all the other sumptuous figures surrounding her. A stranger who had never seen her before would have been certain that it was she, and not one of the others, who was Empress.

“How good to see you again, Eulalia, after all these years,” she said, coming towards me; and she put her arms round me and kissed me.

And in that greeting I realised that the Tsaritsa had not changed. She was still the affectionate and unaffected friend I had known years before. We had a hundred questions to ask each other, but almost before we had had time to begin, we had to stop talking to attend to the imposing ceremony which was beginning on the frozen Neva.

From the window I saw that a pavilion, like an exceedingly decorative bandstand, had been erected on the ice, just in front of the palace, and I watched a procession of ecclesiastics in stiff Byzantine robes and glittering mitres move slowly across the road separating it from the palace, followed by the Grand Dukes and the Emperor. The singing of the choir floated to us through the frosty air and the{164} Empress crossed herself devoutly. She is a sincerely religious woman.

I watched the Emperor standing motionless beneath the fretted and gilded canopy of the pavilion, and the thought suddenly flashed into my mind that the Russian Emperors alone claim the right to govern the souls as well as the bodies of their subjects. The Autocrat is a great ecclesiastical personage as well as a secular ruler, and the Russian Church depends upon him and can do nothing without his consent. I remembered that banishment to Siberia was the punishment for those who deserted the Orthodox Church and refused to believe as the Tsar believes and to pray as the Tsar prays. The Kings of Spain and the Emperors of Austria are sons, not rulers, of the Church, and I had been taught that the Pope was king of kings. It seemed to me that no worse form of despotism could be conceived than the concentration in the hands of an autocratic ruler of the spiritual and temporal power and, as these thoughts crowded into my mind, there seemed to me something sinister and terrible in the ceremony I was watching, and I realised, as I had never done before, the immensity and the awfulness of the power

Courtesy of Collier’s

Nicholas II and the Heir of Russia

{165}

wielded by the motionless figure beneath the gay pavilion. Nobody rejoiced more than I did when the Emperor published the Manifesto of April, 1905, granting his subjects religious liberty, and I realised that the stupendous claim which had made me shudder when I thought of it, as I watched the sumptuous Twelfth Day ceremony from the windows of the Winter Palace, had been renounced for ever. In point of fact, Nicholas II. had no desire to maintain it, and he renounced it as soon as an appropriate occasion arose.

After the picturesque ceremony which had stirred these thoughts had ended and the Archbishop had dipped a golden cross in the water running below the ice of the river, the holy water was brought into the palace to the Empress, and the Emperor joined us. He gave me a characteristically Russian welcome. His manner was engagingly simple and unaffected. The contrast between him and the German Emperor was extraordinary. The Kaiser, a constitutional monarch, whose power is strictly limited, shows by his bearing and his manner, as I have indicated in another chapter, that he holds the divine right of kings to be a cardinal article of faith.{166} When one is with the Tsar it requires a certain effort of the imagination to remember that he possesses autocratic power over the lives of 160,000,000 human beings. The Russians are the most hospitable people in the world, and the Emperor and Empress are not excelled by any of their subjects in kindness and generosity to guests. They both insisted that, so long as I remained in Petersburg, I must be with them as much as possible, and, in point of fact, although I slept at the hotel, I was constantly at the Winter Palace, and had my part in the intimate family life of the Imperial family.

When a man likes nothing better than to remain at home with his wife, it is a sure sign that he is very much in love with her. Judged by that test, there is no happier couple in Europe than the Emperor and Empress of Russia. They are never more contented than when together, and it was obvious to me that the Tsar simply adores his wife. It would be strange if he did not, for there is not a gentler or sweeter woman in the world than the beautiful Tsaritsa. And both of them are devoted to their children. They used to make me come with them sometimes to the nursery, where the little{167} Grand Duchesses used to welcome us with shrieks of delight. What games there were! People who think of the Tsar as a frowning despot would have been astonished to see a vigorous pillow-fight going on between him and his children. And away from the formalities of the Court, closeted with her children, the Tsaritsa was always radiant and happy. Under the spell of their prattle and of their caresses she was transformed. The smiling mother seemed a different woman to the beautiful but grave lady seen by the public in the ceremonies of the Court.

“Do try and get the Empress to smile, Eulalia,” said one of the Grand Duchesses to me at some Court function.

But that was sooner said than done. There is not a trace of artificiality in the Empress’s character. She seemed unable to pretend she was enjoying herself, when, in point of fact, she was fatigued and bored. Moving as the central figure of a splendid pageant, I think she was always wishing the ceremony to be at an end and to find herself free to be with her children again.

The tastes of the Emperor are as simple as those of the Empress and in curious contrast to those of{168} most of the Imperial family. Neither of them likes the late supper-parties in which the majority of their relations indulge. Early to bed and early to rise is my motto, and supper-parties, hardly finished at two o’clock in the morning, bored me unutterably. When I went to the opera with the Emperor and Empress, we used to take time by the forelock and sup in the second entr’acte, in order to be able to go straight to bed when we got home. The ballets given at the Marinsky Theatre were exceedingly beautiful, and the Empress followed the movements of the dancers with evident enjoyment from the stage-box. Behind the box is a charming room, and there it was that supper used to be served.

“Here is your high tea, Eulalia,” the Empress would say merrily, and then we sat down to a square meal of cold meat and countless cups of tea, to which I used to do ample justice, as I did not dine before going to the theatre.

His love of simplicity does not, however, prevent the Emperor from enjoying Society. Like most Russians, he is fond of it, and his animation and vivacity at Court balls were delightful and, moreover, genuine. I liked to watch him dance the ma{169}zurka, that rushing, almost violent, dance that they say only a Slav can dance to perfection. It was so obvious that he enjoyed it. When supper was served we went to a long table on a dais, set at one end of a great hall, and I discovered that the Russian Court has a very charming custom which does not obtain elsewhere. The Emperor and Empress took their places, facing the general company, with their Royal guests and other members of the Imperial family to right and to left of them; but we had hardly been a minute at table before the Emperor rose and went to one of the tables below the dais, where he sat down and chatted with the people supping at it. After talking for five minutes, he went to another table to greet other guests, and then passed from group to group, sitting down at each table for a few minutes. And, with the Russian instinct of hospitality, the Emperor played the part of host so well that the conversation became more animated at each table he visited. The presence of some sovereigns, too careful of preserving the distance between themselves and persons who are not of the blood royal, sometimes casts a gloom on their guests.{170}

Perhaps the Emperor’s obvious enjoyment of a ball was due to the fact that it is but seldom he can allow himself relaxation. There is not a busier man in the world. I once remarked to him that I find it impossible to get through the work of the day unless I follow a definite rule, and I asked him how he divided up his time.

“I get up early,” he answered, “and after a light breakfast I work until eleven. Then I take a walk and come back for luncheon at half-past twelve. After that comes the task of giving audiences to ministers and others, and, when work allows it, I take a drive before tea in order to get some fresh air. Immediately after tea I am busy again with my secretaries, and work with them lasts until dinner-time.”

“A strenuous day,” I said.

“But that is not the end of it,” he answered, smiling. “I am very often obliged to go back to work straight from the dinner-table, and sometimes it is not finished until far on into the night.”

The Emperor’s devotion to duty is in striking contrast to the almost traditional love of pleasure displayed by the Grand Dukes. A foreigner might{171} easily be led to suppose that the House of Romanoff is at heart in sympathy with democratic ideas. The lack of formality at Court, the marriages between Grand Dukes and commoners, the presence of unlettered peasants at certain of the ceremonies of the Winter Palace, the share taken by some of the members of the Imperial family in amusements accessible to anybody who has money in his pocket, their supper parties in restaurants and their enjoyment of the café concerts of the capital—all these things might deceive the stranger. To know the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses is to realise that they neither understand the aspirations of the democracy nor sympathise with them, for, reflecting the glory of Autocracy they are more firmly convinced than any other Royal persons in Europe that a gulf divides them from the rest of mankind. And this conviction is so deep that they appear to believe that the most ordinary actions are ennobled by the mere fact that they are performed by persons in whose veins flows the Imperial blood.

The life led by most of them would be unbearable to me. A perpetual round of amusements becomes in the end as wearisome as the treadmill.{172} How people who are not in the first flush of youth can day after day sit up until two o’clock in the morning, as too many of them do, eating unnecessary suppers and drinking champagne, I can not understand. High tea with the Emperor and Empress pleased me better than late suppers with the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses. Indeed, when I yielded to persuasion and went out with them for an evening’s amusement my sleepiness used to divert them immensely.

“Eulalia, you’re yawning,” they would say.

“It is two hours past my bedtime,” I would answer.

And then we laughed, and it was probably the Grand Duke Alexis who would suggest that we should all drive out to the Islands and have another supper at a café concert. Then I would strike and go home, scolding myself for sitting up so late and marvelling at the extraordinary vitality of the rest of the company, starting merrily on the long sledge drive to the Islands, where they would sit by the hour in a private room overlooking the little stage on which the unsuccessful artists of Paris danced and sang.{173}

Perhaps it is because I am Spanish and not Russian that I failed to see the pleasure to be derived from spending the night in frivolity; for, in point of fact, there is nothing characteristically grand-ducal in this curious craze; it is simply Russian, and Moscow merchants will spend thousands of roubles in extravagant amusements between midnight and sunrise. The Grand Dukes are typical Russians. They have the virtues and the failings of the typical Russian, and—I am not sure whether it is a virtue or a failing—they are, like all the Russians I have ever met, exceedingly susceptible to feminine charms. To the Russian, love is everything, and in Russia women have more power to change men’s lives than in any other land.

To please the woman he loves a Russian will exile himself to a foreign country, will alter his habits, and change his manner of life completely. It is not, therefore, surprising that members of the House of Romanoff have deliberately incurred the anger of the Emperor and voluntarily left Russia to live abroad for the sake of the women they love. They make their homes in Paris or in the English countryside, and become the humble slaves of the wives{174} they have chosen; while these ladies, although perhaps of humble origin, find themselves treated by Society, always anxious to gain the approval of princes, with hardly less reverence than princesses of the blood royal.

But if the majority of the members of the Imperial family love extravagant amusement, there is one notable exception to the rule. The Grand Duchess Elizabeth, widow of the Grand Duke Serge, who was assassinated by revolutionists, shares the simple tastes of her sister, the Empress, and detests the empty formality of Courts as much as I do. When we were girls we saw a great deal of each other at Windsor and in the Isle of Wight, and it was a great delight to me to talk over the old days when I visited her in her palace within the fantastic battlements of the Kremlin.

She was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful women in Europe, and her husband was extraordinarily handsome; indeed, their beauty and their bearing made them the most distinguished couple at the great gathering of Royal personages I met at Buckingham Palace when the Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated. After the terrible death of her hus{175}band, the Grand Duchess devoted herself to the education of the Grand Duke Paul’s motherless children, the Grand Duke Dmitri and the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and, that task accomplished, she became a sister of charity. She has founded a convent in Moscow, where she follows a severe rule and devotes herself to hospital work and the care of the poor, realising that even a princess has no excuse to shirk the responsibilities of life and to lead a useless existence.

How is it that there is such a marked difference between the tastes of the Emperor and those of his uncles and cousins? The answer is not difficult to find. The Emperor’s love of simplicity comes from his mother, the Empress Marie, who, now that she can indulge her own tastes, lives the greater part of the year with Queen Alexandra in a small villa on the Danish coast. When I visited them there I found that they were living as simply as private persons who know nothing of the life of Courts.

But, while recognising the influence of his mother in the formation of the Emperor’s character, I like to think that something of the spirit of Peter the Great has been conserved in the Imperial family,{176} and that the love of work, the courage, and the simplicity displaced by Nicholas II. are in some measure gifts from his great ancestor. One afternoon I drove out to the Islands in a troika, a sledge that might have come from Fairyland, covered with glistening trappings and luxurious furs and drawn by three horses abreast, and, on my way, I stopped to visit the little house in which Peter the Great lived when he was building his new capital. It is a tiny cottage, a mere hut, with two rooms. Nothing could be simpler or more unlike the vast Winter Palace. Yet I felt, as I left this humble abode, that the spirit of the man who was content to live in it still reigns in the splendid home of his descendant, the present Emperor.

I have alluded to the courage of Nicholas II., and it may surprise those who only know him by repute that I should emphasise this trait of his character. I myself had often heard that he was timorous and dreaded assassination. It was therefore a great surprise to me to find that he often walked from the palace to my hotel, with only a single aide-de-camp in attendance. Although his grandfather had been assassinated by revolutionists, he himself appeared{177} to be absolutely fearless and to disregard the risk he ran by walking about Petersburg. If precautions are taken to protect him now, he permits them solely because he is convinced that his life is of value to his people. Russia is his one thought. During recent months he has proved this, too, by the way he has identified himself personally with the campaign in which his soldiers are engaged.

Those who do not know him often speak or write of him as cruel, tyrannical, caring for nothing but the conservation of the Imperial power and wealth. That is an absolutely false estimate of his character. One has only to look into his beautiful blue eyes to realise that he is neither harsh nor cruel and to understand his great tenderness. Indeed, it is his tenderness that distinguishes him from most of the sovereigns I know. His affection for his mother, his devotion to his wife and children, are the outcome of this quality, and its exercise is not confined to his domestic life. I have heard him speak on more than one occasion with the utmost feeling of persons who had been condemned to exile in Siberia. It was perfectly clear to me from the way in which he spoke of them that, had he followed the dictates{178} of his own heart, he would have cancelled the sentences and pardoned the offenders. I could see that the thought of their sufferings made him suffer himself, and that it was only a stern sense of duty that made him acquiesce in penalties he regretted.

The bulk of the Tsar’s subjects are peasants, and he very often spoke of their life and their customs. Indeed, he displayed the keenest interest in plans to better their condition and to raise their standard of culture. Sovereigns, I have noticed, carefully eschew any reference to questions which they and their ministers are unable to solve, and it is to me significant that neither the Tsar nor the Kaiser has ever spoken to me of the Polish question. The Tsar was, however, aware that the Bourbons and the great Polish family of Zamoyski are now connected—my cousin, Princess Caroline of Bourbon, married a Zamoyski—and he very delicately appointed a gentleman of that family to be in attendance on me during my stay in Petersburg. From intercourse with this gentleman and with other Poles I met in Russia I discovered that there is a profound difference between the Russian and the Polish character. There always remains something of the Asiatic in{179} the Russian, but the Pole belongs to the West. He has the Slav charm and the Latin culture. I know of nothing sadder than the tragedy of Poland. That splendid nation, which once saved Europe from the Turks, has been parcelled out between three Empires, but neither the iron will of the German Emperor nor the autocratic power of Nicholas II. has succeeded in killing the Polish spirit. Small wonder that both at Berlin and Petersburg the subject was not broached at Court. Since then the war has come. Will the end of it witness the resurrection of Poland as a nation?

The Emperor is perfectly well aware that my sympathies are with the democracy. But naturally I never attempted to force my ideas upon him. I am able to understand that a sovereign who wields absolute power and to whom the most powerful of his ministers is obliged to yield may be necessary for Russia at the present day. I am convinced that the world will be happier—princes and people alike—when democracy has triumphed, but I realise that in a country like Russia, the bulk of whose population is unlettered, it would be foolish, as well as dangerous, to introduce suddenly and without prepara{180}tion methods which are successful in the West. Education, and education alone, can establish the victory of democracy.

From my home in the capital of a great people, in whose motto is enshrined a profound belief in the brotherhood of mankind and the essential equality of prince and peasant, I look out over Europe and see the decay of old institutions and the movements which are slowly but certainly reducing those monarchs who still retain power to the position of decorative figureheads. In Norway the process is already finished, and, although I confess that I was first surprised, I was immensely pleased to find, during a recent visit to King Haakon and Queen Maud, that they were simply the first among equals. I am firmly convinced that this will be the ultimate form of monarchy throughout Europe, but long years must pass before the Russian people have the culture and political knowledge which make a simple Norwegian the equal of his sovereign. Meanwhile, it is satisfactory to know that the man guiding the destinies of the Russian people possesses the fine qualities which distinguish Nicholas II.{181}

CHAPTER IX

THE REGAL POSE

Will democracy ever rule in some countries? I will not dare to prophesy, only in so far as there is a tendency gradually spreading which gives hope that in the end it will permeate the entire Western life. Many years will be necessary for its development here and there—in Russia, for instance—but most peoples are almost ready for the change, and unless kings meet the movement and, so to speak, merge themselves in it, leading it, they will pass and their thrones with them. Some great crisis will occur, and suddenly the people will themselves displace their dictators.

But the tentacles of royalty are firmly fixed into the beings of many nations. In Austria, for example, before the war there was so much royalty that half the Austrian Army seemed doing sentry duty round the palaces of archdukes. In that country there is a vast amount of clericalism and a vast amount of Court stupidity, which, however ridicu{182}lous it may appear to the outside observer, is really the prop upon which the monarchy rests. I should think that the Court life there must be one degree duller than in Spain.

In Italy the people are more clever; the country is alive and prospering, and the King is sufficiently Socialistic in his leanings to be in sympathy with the progress and the ambition which he helps to direct.

Unfortunately, on our visit to Rome, we had arranged, through our Ambassador, to be presented both to the Vatican and to the Court; and at the eleventh hour, before going to the Vatican, we were notified by letter that the Pope would only receive us on condition that neither before nor after seeing him should we call on the King. This stipulation had been withheld from our Ambassador, with characteristic cleverness, until it could put us in a position of insulting the Throne by failing to keep an appointment that we had solicited. We were saved from the awkward situation by a telegram that called us back to Spain, with the news that my mother-in-law was seriously ill. But that is one of the things that can make the travels of Royalty not altogether comfortable.{183}

The princes of the house of Orleans have almost all been very clever. They are good financiers, shrewd politicians, witty, and easy in their address. The late King Leopold of Belgium had these qualities in a high degree, together with the cynicism that often accompanies them. He was less like a king in his palace than like a banker in his counting-house; and he left Belgium established in wealth. When his nephew, the present King Albert, succeeded to the throne it was the problems of wealth and the dissatisfaction of the working classes that confronted him. How tragic that fact sounds to-day with the country laid waste and despoiled and her people scattered. He is one of the few sovereigns in Europe who have clearly seen the power and virtue of the modern Socialist movement; and he seemed to me to be alone in his ability to lead it beneficently for itself and its opponents. He had made it an effective engine of social reform instead of a disruptive force of revolution. The King of the Belgians is a man of such quiet tact and modesty that he was little known in Europe, but that did not prevent him from being one of the wisest and cleverest of its rulers. Through a peaceful reign{184} he would have done much for his country. Apart from the share he took in the war, he, by his ability as a sovereign, would have been a factor to be reckoned with in world politics. As it was, his success so far in the internal affairs of his kingdom could give lessons to half the Governments of Europe. If I did not go, at least twice a year, to see for myself what he had been doing, I had come to feel that I was neglecting my best opportunity of education. There are few kings for whom one can feel that!

Another sovereign of the Orleans family, recently little known but certain to become important, is King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the strength of whose secret hand was shown in the downfall of the Turkish power in Europe. He is a son of the only daughter of Louis Philippe of France, and therefore my cousin by marriage; and I knew him intimately before he was called to the throne of Bulgaria. He has made that country almost single-handed, building it up commercially, attracting money to it for railroads and industrial development, and administering its finances as ably as he administers his own private fortune. His cleverness in using rightly for his own ends circumstances that would pass unper{185}ceived by any one less astute, made him one of the marked men of Europe. He used to flatter me that I was the only person who understood him; and I could reply that it was lucky for him, since, if others understood what he was trying to do, they would surely stop him. He has a wonderful mind.

The lives of these men, who are kings in fact as well as in name, are as full and interesting as the life of any one who has work to do and power to do it. They have something to compensate them for the restrictions of grandeur and the cramping stiffnesses of pomp. Their dignity has cause. Their isolation is inevitable. But, for every one of these, there are hundreds of little princes and princesses, grand dukes and archdukes, and such minor personages of royal blood, who are less free in their lives than kings are and have nothing to occupy their mental idleness.

It astonished me as I went among them to find them supported by a consciousness of self-importance that seemed to me pathetic. I could name a score of such persons, quite unknown, who would never believe that their existence is not a matter of eager public interest to the whole world. They apply{186} themselves to the observances of royal etiquette devotedly. They patronise and condescend to the lesser orders of mankind with a touching sense of their own supremacy. They defend themselves jealously in their degrees of royal blood and precedence, and see themselves as conspicuously exalted as if they had high seats in some hierarchy of heaven just below the Eternal Throne.

After a little experience, one can recognise these lesser royalties at a glance and pick them out in a crowded drawing-room. They all have the same high-shouldered carriage, stiff-backed, with a stretched neck to carry a raised chin. Their lips smile very easily, but their eyes almost never. They are accustomed to being stared at; indeed, they would be disappointed if they did not attract stares; and they seem to present their faces even to a private company, not nervously, nor quite self-consciously, but with an expression of friendly and impenetrable self-complacency that becomes recognisable as the royal mask. They are usually, because of their training, rather stupid, but their dignity makes them look wise. They are always concerned with their own popularity, are gracious by policy,

King Albert of Belgium

{187}

and try to leave each individual with the impression that he has been personally distinguished by their notice. They are not only playing a part, but they believe that they are really the part they play; so that any true conversation with them is largely impossible. Their minds, like their faces, are always making a public appearance and considering effect.

When they are alone with their own kind, they are free to talk of the matters that really interest them, and it is a conversation as typical as the little gossip of a group of nuns. They have no opinions to express on the problems of government; “it is a duty that they owe the crown” to express none, and consequently they rarely acquire any. They know little of the world around them, and say less. To arrive at any speaking acquaintance with matters of literature and music and art, one must make a mental effort in study, to which the Court life of busy empty-mindedness is not conducive. They converse, therefore, about royalty only—the latest marriage, the most recent engagement, the death of this prince, the illness of that, a birth in Spain, an archduke’s affair with a mistress in Austria—family happenings considered only in their family aspect, as{188} idle as gossip, largely innocent, wholly uninteresting.

I can understand the respect paid to power; and royalty with power is far from ridiculous, even when it is unintelligent; but royalty without power is as great a bore as an aristocracy without the estate to support its pride. We are no longer in the feudal ages. Money has now the rule that used to belong to rank. And the chief use of the lesser royalties seems to be to dignify wealth by associating with it. Hence the court that the rich pay to them—the eagerness to entertain them, to take them on private yachts, to amuse them with automobile trips, to promote their fortunes on the Stock Exchange, and even to give them money if they will take it. They are usually too proud, of course; and the money is made by canny aristocrats who charge wealthy “climbers” for introductions to Court circles. The unfortunate royalties stifle in stuffy drawing-rooms, smiling on the compliments of aspiring riches, without even receiving a little “tip” for their complacency. Life in Court was little to my taste; I had found it no place for any one with an instinct for independence. But the accepted life of royalty outside of Court seemed to me worse. It was a life for gulls.{189}

When my father was on his death-bed, at the age of eighty, my mother asked him, as she was leaving the sick-room: “When do you want me to come back to see you?” He replied: “No more. No one. Let me, at last, have my desire for solitude. Let me die alone.” And he did.

Before these years of travel were over, I had come to the same conclusion about myself. Since there was no life that I thought worth living in Courts, and no social life for royalty outside the Courts, I would have solitude. But it is easier to find solitude to die in than solitude to live in. By this time I had two sons growing up, whose careers had to be considered; I could not cut them off from the opportunities of advancement that would come from powerful friends and Court influence. I was very happy with them, in a companionship that had none of the lack of intimate parental affection so often denied to royalty; and I began to live for them, contentedly, as mothers do.

After all, that is the real life—the natural life—and the best of life while it lasts.{190}

CHAPTER X

THE SCANDINAVIAN DEMOCRACIES

“I am so glad that I am queen of a country in which everybody loves simplicity.”

This was the testimony to the charm of Norway which Queen Maud gave me, when I saw her in her little home near Christiania in the autumn of 1913. She spoke with enthusiasm of her adopted country, and I was not in the least surprised, for Norway is undoubtedly the happiest and most progressive country in Europe. Indeed, if anybody wants to know what life will be like in the good time that is coming, when Capitalism will be dead and Democracy triumphant on both sides of the Atlantic, let him go to Norway and study its institutions and the life of its people.

“When I am at Lourdes,” said a devout Catholic, “I do not believe—I know.” And when I was in Norway I did not need to make an act of faith in democracy, as I must in Paris or New York or Lon{191}don; I saw for myself that a nation is happier when its life is based on democratic principles.

“How deadly dull!” said a fashionable woman to me, when I told her of the simplicity of life in Christiania. “Surely Your Royal Highness does not want to eliminate the colour and brilliancy of life!”

She had never realised that the glitter and magnificence of Society in great capitals can only exist against a background of misery and starvation. Norway is not a wealthy country and it does not afford capitalists opportunities for piling up fortunes. Nobody is very rich, and everybody appears to have a sufficiency. The cosmopolitan plutocrats, who corrupt the Society of Western Europe, would be wretched there, and, in point of fact, they avoid a country in which they are perfectly well aware they would be unable to display their wealth. And if the citizens of Christiania are deprived of the sight of millionaires darting about the town in illuminated motor-cars, with jewelled wives and daughters, they are compensated for the loss by the knowledge that, thanks to the equitable distribution of such wealth as the country possesses, crime and{192} robbery are practically unknown. Education and common sense have broken down the barriers of pride of purse and pride of rank, which separate man and man in other countries, and the King himself is simply the first among equals.

When the Norwegian people determined that the industrial and commercial life of the country should no longer be hampered by Sweden, and declared their independence, they placed a king at the head of the State. They were clever enough to see that the country would have more prestige in the eyes of Europe as a monarchy than as a republic, and they were wise enough to give the king no power. Possibly they thought that a prince, who, if the expression be allowed me, is born to the business, would make a more effective figure-head than a commoner, and they may have considered that the peaceful succession of hereditary monarchs is less agitating to the nerves of the nation than recurring presidential elections. However this may be, their king is to them what their flag is: a symbol of national unity. Both are saluted with respect, but neither one nor the other is invested with power.{193}

King Haakon’s fine figure and handsome face make him look the part he has to play. He is a man of great tact and kindliness, and has the simple tastes characteristic of the Danish Royal Family. To these advantages the King adds the supreme one of having a clever Queen, who helps him wisely and loyally in his work. Their son, little Prince Olaf, is utterly charming and, in spite of being an only child, not the least spoilt.

I had not seen Queen Maud in her kingdom until I went to Norway in the autumn of 1913, and I wondered whether her rise from the rank of mere “Royal Highness” to that of a “Majesty” would have altered or spoilt her. She was staying at a little château near Christiania when I arrived in the city, and she asked me to come out and have luncheon with her. When a royal carriage arrived at my hotel to take me to the country, and I noticed that the servants wore plain, dark liveries, instead of the regal scarlet, I began to feel that the charming Maud had not changed. Half an hour’s drive brought me to the château, and as the Queen welcomed me I felt ashamed of the suspicions I had{194} entertained, and realised that she remains the same simple and unaffected girl I used to know in England.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said, and as she spoke I heard in her voice and saw in her manner the charm she has inherited from her mother, Queen Alexandra.

The château is a small house of one story, standing in a public park. A plot of ground has been railed off round the house, so that the King and Queen may have a garden in which they can enjoy privacy. Not that they are annoyed, like most kings and queens, with demonstrative manifestations of loyalty. The Norwegians contrive to make life agreeable for the Royal Family by allowing them to go about the countryside or through the streets of the capital as freely as ordinary citizens. Queen Maud revels in her new liberty.

“I find it so nice to be able to go out shopping without any fuss,” she said, and told me that she could go into a shop in Christiania without anybody taking any notice of her, buy what she wanted, and leave with her parcels tucked under her arm to walk back to the palace.{195}

I could understand her delight better than most people, for in Madrid I have experienced the misery of knowing that I can not get in or out of a carriage without attracting a small crowd. To find oneself perpetually a public show is beyond words exasperating.

Queen Maud’s Court consists of two ladies-in-waiting and a Grand Mistress, a suite which is no larger than that of the least important of the numerous Austrian archduchesses. And, moreover, these ladies do not make deferential curtsies to Her Majesty. The Queen shakes hands with them when she meets them, and treats them, not as glorified servants, but as friends. The point may appear trivial, but it is worth mentioning, for it shows with what tact a princess, accustomed to the etiquette and the splendour of the English Court, has adapted herself to the spirit of a democratic people.

“You were perfectly right,” she said to me, “in what you used to tell me about the happiness of simplicity.”

“Of course I was right,” I said, “and I do not believe you would care to go back to the old Court life.{196}”

“I am much happier in this life,” she said, and then it was that she told me how glad she was to be Queen of a country in which everybody loves simplicity.

It was obvious to me that both the King and Queen adore the fascinating little Olaf; but I noticed that he has been very well brought up and is very obedient. He is being educated with Norwegian boys of his own age and leads a healthy out-of-door life.

“I want you to see Olaf driving the motor-car his grandmother has sent him,” said the Queen; and Queen Alexandra’s present, the tiniest and most dainty little car imaginable, was brought round to the door of the château. The little prince made a splendid chauffeur, and evidently thoroughly enjoyed rushing round the park in his car.

I left the château feeling that I had had a glimpse of ideal family life, and thoroughly convinced that the democratic Norwegian Court is the nicest in Europe.

I do not in the least mind confessing that when I advocate democratic principles I have the interests of the royal personages at heart as well as those of{197} their peoples. There are plenty of princes and princesses, bound hand and foot by etiquette and galling restrictions, who, whatever their present views may be, will welcome the liberty democracy will bring them. Happy King Haakon and Queen Maud; although they are addressed as “Your Majesties,” they are allowed to live in a tiny red bungalow, up in the mountains at Holm Kelm, when winter comes, and there they and Prince Olaf dart about on skis, talking to everybody, making every one happy, happy themselves in being three Norwegian citizens.

And beyond the circle of the Court the constitution of Norwegian society is utterly different from that of society in the more powerful European countries. Both the law and society regard woman as in every respect the equal of man. Women have the same civic rights as men and use them. At the last parliamentary elections, in 1913, 75 per cent, of the women of the towns who had the right to vote used it; indeed the proportion of women who did their duty as citizens and recorded their votes was higher than that of men. All the higher professions are open to women, and at the present time the most{198} important of the professors at the university is a woman and the leading lawyer connected with the Supreme Tribunal is also a woman. The Norwegians refuse to tolerate cheap female labour; if a woman does the same work as a man she gets the same pay.

Society is equally just. It does not apply one standard of morals to man and another to woman. Both are judged by the same standard, and a girl does not lose her position in society for conduct which in other countries is blamed in a woman and condoned in a man. Some Norwegian couples prefer to contract free unions instead of legal marriages, and now that the influence of Lutheranism on the life of the country is practically dead, society does not look at such unions askance. Married and unmarried couples live in peace and associate freely. In a country where everybody works there is little time or opportunity for the development of crimes passionels, so if a couple find that they have made a mistake and that life in common is too difficult, they just part without quarrelling and build up their lives anew.

The happy relations existing between the men

King Haakon of Norway

{199}

and women of Norway are, I am convinced, largely due to the fact that they are educated together at school and in the university. The equality of male and female students at the university seems to be symbolised by the wearing of identical caps of the same gay colours. From childhood they grow up together and become good comrades, understanding each other thoroughly and without arrière pensée, having the same moral code and the same views of life. In most countries boys and girls are segregated apart and only allowed to meet under the supervision of their elders. The system is not a good one. Indeed, I have often thought that nothing gives a girl’s brain such a wrong twist as the false view given her at school about the companionship of men. Why perpetually dread man and see in him only the seducer? By doing so I believe we very often wake up in him instincts that might otherwise lie dormant.

The education the girls and boys receive together is an excellent one. Norwegians understand the importance of acquiring foreign languages, which they require in commerce and for dealing with the numerous foreign tourists who make their beautiful fiords{200} and mountains a holiday playground. Hence both English and German are taught in all the schools, and the instruction given is so good that the children actually learn to converse in these languages. More than once I was astonished to find that a cabman could answer me in English or German.

The Norwegians are a vigorous and hardy race. In their veins flows the blood of Vikings, and they are determined that the nation shall not deteriorate physically. With this end in view the law provides for the protection of the mother during her time of expectation and for her support and comfort during the six weeks following the birth of her child. Moreover, careful provision is made for the upbringing of children born outside wedlock, and neither father nor mother is allowed to shirk the responsibility of parentage.

The separation of Norway and Sweden was due to the desire of the Norwegians, whose merchant fleet is twice the size of the Swedish, to have their commercial interests abroad properly looked after by an independent consular service. This was the formal cause of separation, but undoubtedly the marked difference between the social organisation of the two{201} countries facilitated the unloosing of the bonds that held them together. Sweden still has an aristocracy, and the nobles who sit in the Upper House of the Swedish Parliament are able to check in some degree the advance of democracy. Yet in their love of simplicity the two nations are alike. This was made clear to me in rather an amusing way soon after my arrival in Stockholm during my autumn tour. I was going to the theatre with a friend, and when she arrived to fetch me I was getting into an evening gown.

“Is Your Royal Highness going to wear a low dress?” she said in a manner that made me feel I was doing something thoroughly unconventional.

“Oughtn’t I to?” I asked.

“We do not go in evening-dress to the theatre,” she said.

“Then what am I to wear?” I asked.

“Just a skirt and blouse,” she said.

And accordingly in a skirt and blouse I went. It was rather a pretty blouse—I confess that I love pretty things—and when I got into the theatre I felt just a trifle overdressed.

“What sensible people you Swedish women are!{202}” I said to my friend, when I looked round the theatre and saw how simply the women were dressed. “You save hours and hours which women in London and Paris fritter away at their toilet-tables.”

In point of fact the Swedish woman has not usually either the time or money required to turn herself into a woman of fashion. And even if she had, she is too sensible to make her appearance the absorbing care of life. Careers which are closed to women in other lands are open to her, and she prefers to be independent and to earn her living. At the present time the Swedish women have not been granted electoral rights, but there can be no doubt that they will obtain the same right as men in the course of time. The Conservative party in the Upper House shrinks from yielding to the demands of the women, fearing that their votes will strengthen the Socialists in the Lower House. But the nobles are certain to do justice to women sooner or later, and at the present time there is only a majority of twelve in the Upper House against the granting of the suffrage to women.

As it is, that Upper House puts too strong a brake on the wheels of progress. At one Swedish{203} railway-station I saw a number of emigrants who were starting for America. They did not display the least sorrow at leaving their native land; on the contrary, they were bearing wreaths of flowers and singing joyfully, as if they were only too thankful to get away from Sweden. It was a sad and eloquent testimony to the evils that still mar the social structure of Sweden. Indeed, the stream of emigrants who cross the Atlantic to enrich the life of America with their work is so great and so constant that a Royal Commission has been endeavouring to find out its causes. In their report the Commissioners state that the principal cause of emigration is the failure of the Government to accelerate legislation for the improvement of the conditions of the working classes. In the circumstances, it is but natural that there should be a powerful Socialist party in the country. The Crown Prince is clever enough to see that this party is one which will increase in power with the lapse of time, but his efforts to establish friendly relations with its leaders have not been very well received. He talks good-humouredly and shakes hands with prominent Socialists, but the party appears to see in these little attentions nothing more{204} than a symptom of the future king’s fear of the rising power of the working classes.

The Court of Sweden is, however, characterised by Scandinavian simplicity, although this is naturally not so strongly marked as at the ideal Court of King Haakon and Queen Maud. The Queen of Sweden’s health is too bad to allow her to appear in public. Hence the principal figure at Court, apart from the King, is the Crown Princess, before her marriage Princess Margaret of Connaught, and she has contrived to give it just a touch of the elegance of the Court of St. James’s. I lunched with her when I was in Stockholm, and she told me how much she loves her Swedish life. Her marriage is a very happy one. King Gustav has inherited from his father a great charm of manner and a fine figure, which devotion to tennis helps him to keep. He is fond of all sorts of sport and is an excellent shot.

I used to see a good deal of the late King Oscar. His French ancestry and his personal charm made him very popular in France, a country he loved, and during his numerous visits to Paris I had the opportunity of getting to know him well, and I became very fond of him. I was in Sweden in 1897, travel{205}ling incognito, and I remember sitting down to rest one day within sight of Sophie Rue, King Oscar’s Norman villa, and, as I looked at the peaceful home of my old friend, I hoped that his last years would not be embittered by the dissolution of the union between Sweden and Norway. But the blow came to the “poet king,” whose spirit seemed to live above the dull realities of life, and it came when he was old and broken down with the illness which at last caused his death. Kings must yield to the imperious will of democracy, and I look forward to the time when Sweden will have the advantages enjoyed by her sister kingdom.

I visited Denmark as well as Norway and Sweden that autumn, and there also I remarked the growth of democratic ideas. It is a peaceful country, and the souls of the people seem as clear as their blue eyes. The Danes are a kind, industrious and simple race, and, if they strike one as being less hardy and vigorous than the other Scandinavian races, they certainly have the same courteous manners as the Swedes and the Norwegians.

The first time that I visited Denmark King Christian, the father of Queen Alexandra and the Empress{206} Marie, was reigning, and the castle, in which his large family used to assemble for those reunions which he loved, was looked on by the Danes with a sort of reverence. But I remember that once, when I was travelling incognito, I drove past the castle in a cab, and the friendly driver, anxious to oblige a tourist, told me that a great family gathering was taking place there. He reeled off the names of the world-famous personages who had gathered round the King, and he did so with as much indifference as a London cabman displayed when he pointed out Mme. Tussaud’s to me the first time I was in London, and casually explained that wax figures were kept there. The attitude of the Danish cabman towards the Royal Family, which seemed to me curious years ago, appears to be that of most Danes at the present time. They have ceased to take any particular interest in the doings of their Sovereign and his relations. Nothing strikes me more, as I go about Europe, than the fact that, if I may be allowed the expression, the market value of princes and princesses has enormously decreased.

I went to an hotel in Copenhagen, and I had not{207} been long in the capital before a card, inscribed with a single Danish word, was brought to me. I stared at it, not recognising the name and wondering who it was had been to see me. Then it suddenly dawned on me that the word on the card was simply the Danish for “Queen.” Her Majesty had been to see me, and, of course, I went to see her. The Royal Family appears now to live in retirement, and its members form a small caste, penned off from the rest of mankind by their rank. Their chief amusement seems to be paying calls on each other. Most of them live at their country villas and châteaux, and in these pleasant homes there is a constant succession of cousinly meetings, when family news is exchanged, and while the children play the elders take a stroll in the park surrounding the house at which the family gathering is taking place.

The King displays that peculiar form of wit which I have often noticed is characteristic of crowned heads who have lived much in retirement. With them the gaiety of childhood seems, with the passing of the years, to turn into a curious spirit of mockery. Trifles create shouts of laughter, enlivening the fam{208}ily circle and confusing those who are unacquainted with the type of witticisms which goes down in royal circles.

And beyond the tranquil enclosures of the royal parks the Danish people is moving surely and steadily towards a broader and more democratic life than it has hitherto enjoyed. And women are in the forefront of the movement. The Danish women refuse to be slaves of fashion and display a certain charming coquetry in their dress. Numbers of them earn their own living and are thus independent of men. This is the sure road for women to take if they desire to have the same rights and privileges as men. As it is, the Danish woman has established for herself a position which her Latin sisters may well envy, and the law secures her independence. She will, I am convinced, be given electoral rights, and she will have no need to resort to militant methods to obtain them.

On the road between Copenhagen and Helsingfors a milk-white villa stands out against the faint blue background of the northern sky. There it was that I passed the happiest moments of my stay in Denmark, and there I found at least two crowned heads{209} who have remained human in spite of the crushing weight of the crowns they have worn for so many years. The Italian villa is the home of Queen Alexandra and the Empress Marie, and the two sisters, who adore each other, are absolutely happy in each other’s society, and in the simplicity of the life they lead. They welcomed me with enthusiasm, kissed me, and were quite excited to have somebody to whom they could show their little house. In the sitting-room they share they both wanted to show me their special corners at the same time.

“Come and see my writing-table,” said the Empress, pulling me to her end of the room.

“No,” cried Queen Alexandra gaily, pulling me in the opposite direction; “come and see my writing-table.”

How we all laughed!

“This is my chair,” said the Empress, showing me one in her corner of the room.

“And this is my chair,” echoed the Queen, calling my attention to the favourite chair in her corner.

I had to see everything and admire everything. The two sisters seemed particularly proud of their kitchen garden, and seemed to be delighted to find{210} that I knew something about growing vegetables. I have a kitchen garden of my own in Normandy, where I have a little house, and we were able to compare notes.

And after we had inspected flowers and vegetables we went through an underground passage, which their Majesties have had cut beneath the road that divides the garden of the cottage and the sea-shore, a tiny stretch of which has been walled off, so that the Empress and the Queen may enjoy it undisturbed. When we were inside the cottage the Empress offered me a thin Russian cigarette, and lit one herself. Then Queen Alexandra showed me their tea-kettle and the little kitchen in which they make their own cakes and brew their own tea.

“This is where I make my tea,” cried the Queen.

“And this is where I cut the bread-and-butter,” said the Empress.

They were as happy as two schoolgirls, revelling in the simple life of a home where they can live like two ordinary women, untrammelled by Court etiquette and without even a single lady-in-waiting to attend them.

After visiting the Norwegian cottage I had to see{211} a new marvel. We went down to the beach, and the two sisters explained to me that it was a splendid place for picking up bits of amber. I had seen so much amber in the Castle of Rosenberg and in the shops of Copenhagen that it seemed improbable that there could be any more in the Baltic. Nevertheless, there appears to be plenty left, for both the Empress and the Queen showed me the boxes in which they store the treasure they find on the shore. The Empress is luckier in finding amber than the Queen, and her box contained more than her sister’s.

“It is most unfair,” said the Queen gaily.

“I always pick up more than you do,” said the Empress triumphantly.

We searched for amber until it was time for me to go, and we enjoyed ourselves like children.

Both the Empress and the Queen have played the great parts they have had to fill on the stage of life with dignity and distinction, but they are Danes, and they have never lost the love of simplicity which is the most notable characteristic of the peoples of Scandinavia. Now that they can live their lives as they like, they deliberately leave their palaces and spend a great part of their time more simply{212} than many commoners. To see their happiness made me happier myself, and, indeed, my tour in Scandinavia has given me new courage. All that I saw and heard made me feel that the time will come when democracy will make many of the crooked things of this life straight.{213}

CHAPTER XI

THE COURTS OF ITALY

I was at Genoa, and one spring morning I strolled through a network of narrow streets to the harbour. The sea was as blue as a turquoise, gleaming like a jewel in the sunshine, and I could not resist the temptation to hire a boat and waste an hour gliding over the enchanted waves. The boatman who rowed me was a lively fellow. Luckily for me, as I afterwards realised, he had not the faintest idea who I was, and I let him chatter to his heart’s content.

“The old Duke of Galliera gave many million lire to make that,” he said, indicating, with a jerk of his head, the new harbour, hidden from sight by the building on the Molo Vecchio.

“The Duke of Galliera,” he went on, “was a fine gentleman. The Duchess was left a widow, and inherited the enormous, the colossal fortune of her husband. And what did she do? Does the signora know what she did?{214}”

I did know, but I thought it prudent to shake my head.

The man leant on his oars, and looked intently at me.

“The Duchess,” he said, “left the title and every lira she had, and her palace in Bologna, and all the estates of her Duchy, to foreigners. A curse on them! And the Duchess belonged to Genoa; she had relatives in Genoa. Everything went to the Duca di Montpensier, a Frenchman who had become a Spaniard, and now it belongs to his son.”

“Really,” I said; and I did not mention that the Duc de Montpensier was my father-in-law, and that I was actually Duchess of Galliera.

“If I could get hold of that man and his wife, although she is an Infanta of Spain, I would kill them,” he shouted at me fiercely. “I would show them no mercy.”

On the whole I was not sorry when I found myself on land again, and I am convinced that the man would have upset his boat and let me drown, if he had discovered who I was. And I have often wondered who he was; perhaps a relative of the old Duchess. There was truth in the story he told, a{215} mystery which neither I nor anybody else is ever likely to solve. The Duke of Galliera had a son, Philippo Ferrari, who refused absolutely to use the privileges which his birth bestowed upon him. What were his reasons, nobody knows. And why in default of the son, one of the richest duchies in Italy was left to my father-in-law is a question which remains, and is likely to remain, unanswerable. And partly through the strange connection of the family into which I married with Italy, partly through my love of the most beautiful and romantic land in Europe, I have lived there a great deal. I used to stay often at the magnificent palace of the Galliera family in Bologna, a sumptuous place with vast rooms paved with mosaic and glittering with rare marbles. The people of that city of colonnades and cool courtyards took a kindlier view of the new owners of the palace than the Genoese boatman did, and the ancient families of the place had that charm of manner which gives such a fascination to the cultured society of Italian towns. It was a great delight to receive them, and I used to enjoy the balls and parties in that wonderful palace.

In most countries society gathers in the capital,{216} and when there is a Court it acts as a magnet to draw people from the provinces. The unification of Italy, and the erection of the Italian kingdom, had not materially altered the structure of Italian society. It remains what it was when Italy was divided into a number of small states. Rome and the Quirinal do not attract the nobles of Venice, or Florence, or Bologna, or of other historic Italian towns: they continue to spend the winter in the cities with which their families have been associated for centuries, giving to them a certain brilliance which is not to be found in the provincial towns of France or England.

It seems to be the special prerogative of a Queen Mother to be Queen of Hearts, and Queen Margherita holds the same place in the affection of the Italian people as beautiful Queen Alexandra—has ever a Queen been more beloved than she?—holds in England, and the Empress Marie in Russia. I paid a visit to her and King Humbert at the Castle of Monza, their summer home in the outskirts of the town in which the kings of Lombardy were crowned, and, although the etiquette of the Court was severe, she had a charm which made one tolerate the restric{217}tions of palace life. Those about her used to complain that she hardly ever sat down. I have remarked that several queens whom I know have this rather trying capacity for standing, and, as nobody can sit down while they stand, their guests and their ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting are sometimes a good deal fatigued. Numbers of women are not aware that they owe to Queen Margherita the pretty fashion of wearing a string of pearls in the daytime. But she did not limit herself to the single string of pearls worn by women of fashion, she was simply hung with ropes of pearls morning, noon and night; in fact, I have never seen her without them.

Although the King of Italy made Rome his capital, the other members of the Royal Family have never gone to live there, and continue to make their home in Turin. Among these are the Duke and Duchess of Genoa and the Duke and Duchess of Aosta, and the exasperating etiquette peculiar to Royal personages is rigorously maintained in their palaces. Gentlemen-in-waiting and ladies-in-waiting are always in attendance on them, and it used to surprise me that people could be found to devote themselves to such an insufferably dull occupation{218} as that of serving in miniature Courts, until I remembered that some of them might be glad to do the work, if work it can be called, for the sake of being maintained and of receiving the salaries attached to their offices. English princesses have the daily distraction of opening bazaars, but little happens to enliven the Courts of Turin. When I have stayed there, the chief excitement of the day has invariably been a drive to a park outside the city, where the Royal personages walked for a little, attended by the inevitable ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting, and after half an hour of that mild form of exercise, drove back to their homes. These proceedings did not appear to awaken any great interest in the citizens of Turin, for in Italy, as in most other countries, the public has ceased to concern itself about the little doings of princes and princesses.

The Dowager Duchess of Aosta sometimes shows her independence by freeing herself from Royal bonds when she is abroad, and I remember her once arriving in Paris entirely unattended. She was Princess Lætitia Bonaparte before her marriage, and enjoys the style of Imperial Highness, while, rather oddly, the young Duchess of Aosta is a Princess of

Infanta Eulalia at Window of Her Apartments

{219}

the House of Bourbon and sister of the Duc d’Orleans. She is a somewhat masculine type of woman, and spends a great deal of her time in Abyssinia. She leaves her husband and two boys and, with no companion except an elderly Englishwoman, sets out on a hunting expedition. She is lost in the heart of Africa for months, and then suddenly reappears and settles down to the humdrum life of her palace. But soon she hears again the call of the wild, and is away once more. What she does in Abyssinia nobody knows, if one excepts the elderly Englishwoman. The country seems to have cast a spell on her, and she cannot resist its fascinations. The Duke of Genoa, Queen Margherita’s brother, and his wife, who is a Bavarian Princess, live in the same palace as the Dowager Duchess of Aosta, but their households are independent and, in point of fact, the two duchesses rarely see each other. The duke is almost a recluse; he spends several hours in his private chapel every day, lost in prayer and meditation.

I was a little surprised the first time I went to Turin to find that the Piedmontese dialect of Italian was spoken in Royal circles. To understand{220} what was said sometimes required close attention, even when one knew Italian well, and I have found a similar difficulty in other Italian cities. In Bologna, for instance, where I have lived so much, the cultured classes, as well as the peasants, talked dialect, and travelling about Italy one seemed constantly under the necessity of learning new words and phrases.

There are so many beautiful Italian cities in which agreeable society may be enjoyed that had one to choose one in which to live permanently it would be difficult to come to a decision. Venice is one of the most adorable, and the time I spent with the Duke and Duchess of Genoa at the King’s palace there was a dream of delight. But there is one objection, and that a serious one to a prolonged stay in Venice, and that is the difficulty of getting proper exercise. As everybody seemed prepared to spoil me when I was there, I made it clear that it was essential for me to do something more vigorous than gliding down silent canals in a gondola or strolling in the Piazza. It was therefore arranged that I should play tennis at the Arsenal, and that indulgence gave me the one thing that seemed lacking{221} in the charming life of the city. Italians can play tennis very well when they choose, and Monsignor Montagnini, the Papal Legate who was turned out of France when diplomatic relations between the Republic and the Vatican were ruptured, was a case in point. He played an excellent game, and we often had a set together in Paris. Little did I guess what his means were, and never will I forget his false behaviour when his papers were captured. In Venice too, I found some good players, and so managed to get the vigorous exercise I needed. Apart from this, I lived the life of the Venetians—walked in the Piazza from half-past eleven to half-past twelve, took the air in a gondola about half-past five, went occasionally to the opera at the Fenice, that most exquisite of theatres, and ended the day by dancing in the enchanted palaces that rise from the sea. It was often sunrise when I stepped into a Royal barge with gondoliers in scarlet and, to the rhythmic music of oars that cut the water and the splash of the spray that fell from their blades, floated through the rosy dawn to the Royal palace.{222}

CHAPTER XII

ADVENTURES IN AMERICA

It was during these years of travel in Europe that I was offered the opportunity of going to America to represent the Throne of Spain at the World’s Fair that was to be held in Chicago to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery. I accepted the invitation with joy. I had no longer my childish idea that if I could only take a boat and sail to America I should be really “free”; but I had still in my mind the household saying that I was “only fit for America,” and I felt sure that I should like the great democracy, and I was eager to see it. It was planned, also, that I should visit Cuba—in the usual administrative hope that a Royal visitor might revive the loyalty of a rebellious colony exasperated by misgovernment. The misgovernment was a thing for which the Royal Family was as little to blame as the Cubans themselves; but I was willing to be made use of, in one of the few ways that royalty can be of use in a constitutional{223} monarchy, and I prepared to see—and be seen by—Cuba, too.

There were such stories in Spain of the dangers from yellow fever in the colony that ladies-in-waiting were as reluctant to make the trip as the sailors of Columbus; and though my husband took a large suite of gentlemen, I found only one lady-in-waiting to go with me, and one maid, a faithful old servant who had been in the family for thirty years. We set out, in April, 1893, on board the Reina Maria Cristina from Santander, after the inevitable Te Deum in the cathedral of Santander, a State dinner and reception, an illumination of the harbour, and a choir in a tender to sing us off. There were more Te Deums and receptions and illuminations at the Spanish ports and islands where we called; and at one port we were met by the authorities with a black-bordered protest against the suppression of the local capitan general. The paper was signed by a “defence assembly.” The officials warned us that it would be unwise for us to land. I insisted on it. They went away, and as soon as I understood that they had gone for a police order I went ashore without any escort except our suite, and walked through the crowded streets to the{224} cathedral. This proceeding aroused such a furore of popular enthusiasm that I might have been another Jeanne d’Arc entering a beleaguered town that she had relieved; and for the rest of my trip I had no hesitation about putting aside the officials and trusting myself to the people. At Las Palmas I got on so well that in the cathedral, when the bishop was singing the Te Deum, the crowd forgot they were in church and interrupted him with shouts of “Vive la Infanta!” As a matter of fact, I have found that the danger to royalty comes not from informalities of this sort so much as from the parade of bodyguards and escorts that exasperate the unhappy people by personifying the power of the social conditions that oppress them. It is usually on the most impressive occasions that bombs are thrown.

We arrived outside the wonderful harbour of Havana early in May, and I watched for the first sight of Morro Castle with curiosity. I had heard from my mother that it had cost her grandfather, King Charles IV., such an incredible sum to build that he had longed to see it, as he said, “if only through a keyhole.” I understood that I was the first of the Royal Family to look at it. Certainly,{225} I was the last. And the fact that I should probably be the last was the strongest impression that I got from Cuba.

My first impression, of course, was of the heat. Immediately on my arrival I was visited by a physician, who came to warn me of all the diseases I might catch, and to tell me of all the things that I must do and must not do to avoid them. It was terrifying to listen to him. I had insisted on having cold drinks, and he was sure that cold drinks would be fatal. I had been installed in the palace of the capitan general, and I was going about on the marble floors in my stockinged feet to be cooler. This also I was told was dangerous. “Well,” I said at last, “if I don’t cool myself down, I shall surely die of the heat, anyway, so what matter?” And I decided to do what I wanted and let my natural vitality take care of the consequences. Because of this policy I made what appears to have been a startling impression of energy on the Cubans. There is nothing more popular than energy in a royal person—perhaps because it is so unexpected. I had, for once, the good luck to please by doing what I pleased.

The heat was so great on my first night in the{226} palace that I could not sleep, and being by no means fat, and my bed being without springs—just the stretched canvas of a “petate” fastened on a bed frame—I ached with the hard discomforts of it. At two in the morning I demanded a mattress. My maid sent for one. After a half-hour of waiting a young aide-de-camp appeared, in full uniform, and when I asked why he had come, he replied: “But it is I who have made your bed; if it is wrong, I must fix it.” I roared. He explained that in order to have the bed prepared with all possible care for me, it had been decided that an officer should make it. I told him to send me a mattress, and go back to his sleep. My maid, a simple old soul, was in a state of distraction. “My poor Infanta! My poor Infanta!” she kept wailing. “What will become of her, with no one but these stupid men to look after her!”

When the mattress arrived we arranged it ourselves, and I settled down again; but it made the bed so much hotter that I could not sleep any better than before; and I did not dare to make any more demands for fear of disturbing the officer again. At seven in the morning a deafening uproar of military{227} music suddenly broke out in the salon that adjoined my bedroom, and my maid went wild with panic, crossing and blessing herself and saying frantic prayers. I hurried into a dressing-gown and opened my door on a German regimental band that had received a cable from the Kaiser to serenade me with the traditional “Guten Morgen,” and had marched at once on the palace as if they were going to take a fortress, and were now blowing their trumpets and beating their drums with an obedient diligence that seemed likely to crack the walls. None of the palace servants had understood what this was for; and these servants, by a horrible custom not uncommon in parts of Spain, were convicts who wore leg-chains and worked in the palace as in a prison, going about in livery and bare feet, and dragging their chains on the marble floors. They were as bewildered as my maid, and they were scuttling around as helplessly. As soon as I saw the uniforms that the musicians wore I guessed what had happened; and, the noise drowning my voice, I tried, by smiling and bowing, to reassure the general panic. When the music stopped I got things straightened out, but while it lasted we were a scene from a madhouse or a thea{228}trical burlesque. I went back to my mattress feeling that my first night in Havana had not been too tame.

My day had been more successful, because of a curious accident that had made my arrival almost triumphant. My maid, as we neared the shore, had packed all my gowns but the one I had decided to wear—a striped gown of blue and white, around the collar of which the dressmaker had put a red edging. When I came on deck in it, some one protested at once: “But, Your Royal Highness, that is the uniform of the insurgents!” It seemed impossible, but it was so: they wore just such a blue-and-white stripe with red facings. There was consternation. My trunks had been taken from my state-room. We were nearing shore. No one seemed to know what to do. And while we delayed, talking and arguing, the boat proceeded. It was soon too late to do anything, and I said: “Never mind; it will not matter. No one will notice it.”

But they did. They not only noticed it, but they supposed that I had worn it purposely with I do not know what idea of pleasing the people or showing that the Throne of Spain was above the quarrels of the factions in the island. It aroused incredible en{229}thusiasm. And after that beginning I was received everywhere with the honours of a national hero. Whenever I drove out my carriage was showered with pamphlets of loyal congratulations and poems and panegyrics. At a bullfight given in my honour, not having thought to bring a present for the torero when he made his speech to me from the arena, I threw him one of my finger-rings; he was offered huge sums for it, but refused to sell it, as if it had been Aladdin’s. Everything I did was accepted as admirable—whether I rode horseback at the military review when I wanted the exercise, or received in my arms a little girl who slid down a sort of fire-escape at an exhibition of the volunteer fire brigade, when I was afraid that she might fall and break her neck in my honour if some one did not catch her.

It was evident that I was making “a personal success.” But as soon as I talked to men who knew the situation in Cuba, I was convinced that the success was only personal. For too long had Spain been sending out officials to Cuba who had no ambition but to fill their pockets at the expense of the Cuban people; and the Cubans had made up their minds that they would endure it no longer. In administrative{230} circles, every one who was candid confessed that “it was too late.” In Spain, the people, though the victims of the same sort of corruption, had the consolation of knowing that the government was their own; here the corruption was imposed on them by a government in which they were not represented. In Spain the army could be used to suppress armed rebellion; but here, the army itself was so enfeebled by corruption, so badly led, so wasted by yellow fever, that it was nearly useless. At a dinner to the influential men of the colony I had to change the conversation several times in order to avoid hearing Spain abused. Leaders of both political parties, whether they were for or against Spain, were of the one mind: “It was too late.” Cuba was determined to be free of a maladministration which no sensible person could blame her for refusing to endure. All the sensible people were aware, at last, that the conditions ought to have been corrected, and one could only say to one’s self: “It’s too bad you didn’t think of it sooner.” As we sailed away from the harbour of Havana I was oppressed with the conviction that the Crown of Spain, in my person,{231} was saluting for the last time the Spanish flag flying over that fortress. Cuba was gone.

Steaming northward, the weather turned delightfully cold, and I revelled in it, reviving myself after the strenuously exhausting days of our crowded week in Havana. When we picked up our pilot off Sandy Hook I was on the upper deck, promenading happily in the chill wind in light clothes, and the pilot remarked to one of the boat’s officers that it “was dangerous for that young girl” to be exposed in such a way to such weather. He was told that I was “the Spanish Infanta,” and he laughed uproariously at the idea; and the more seriously the officer assured him of it the more he enjoyed the joke. I saw him looking at me and laughing, so I inquired what was the matter; and when I found out I was slightly puzzled.

His amusement proved to be typical of my whole reception in the United States. As one of the newspapers put it, they had expected a “big, dark Spanish princess with a black moustache,” and it was with a tickled surprise that they found me “like any of the girls you see walking down Fifth Avenue.” Their{232} pleased curiosity was reflected in the accounts that the reporters gave of me. No conceivable personal detail escaped them. One reporter even discovered that I had a gold crown on one of my back teeth, and I was mystified to know how he could have seen it. Surely my smile was not so broad as all that! I tried myself before a mirror. No! By no possible grimace could I expose that tooth. I remained mystified. I do still.

The amusement, however, was not altogether on their side. The newspapers had not prepared me for this familiar but kindly tone of the American Press; and the people of European countries had not the simple benevolence of the curiosity that brought the smiling crowds to greet me in the United States. The American young girl is the spoiled darling of the nation, and they were all as willing to spoil me—and I was willing to be spoiled—by their almost affectionate and chivalrous desire to give me “a good time.”

I cannot pretend that I saw anything at all of the problems of government in the country—nothing of the poverty, of the industrial exploitation, of the inequalities of opportunity and the control by the{233} moneyed classes, of which we have since come to hear so much in all the kingdoms and republics and democracies of this changing world. I was merely a caller in the parlour. I knew nothing of the family life in the house, much less of the difficulties below-stairs.

We did not land at New York, but at Jersey City, where a special train was waiting to carry us to Washington. It would have taken us in Spain twenty-four hours to go the distance; we covered it in five hours, and I did not feel shaken. In Spain, if luncheon had been served us on the train it would have been “to kill time”; here it was served us “to save time.” One was struck at once by the busyness of the life and its efficiency. We had been caught up by an organisation that transported us, fed us, housed us, delivered us into the hands of a host or at the doors of an entertainment, returned us to our hotel, took us on excursions, provided us with drives, protected us from intrusion, conducted us through crowds, intelligently, suavely, without any hitch, comfortably, almost invisibly, with a foresight that seemed to provide for every contingency that could happen, and to be prepared for any change{234} of plan that we could wish. And the spectacle of the life, through which we hurried, had the same air of having conquered the material agents of existence to the same end; namely, that every one should get as much as possible done in a day with as little friction as possible in the mechanical means of doing it.

From some of the Americans whom I have seen abroad I had not got a very happy impression, and now I understood why. They had been out of their element; they had left at home their reason for being. The women, for example, were less conspicuously dressed than some I had seen in Paris, and less nervously self-assertive; and the men were more easy and more natural. They were not on the defensive among foreigners whom they felt to be critical, or whom they desired to impress. They were not blatant nor apologetic. They were happy, intelligent, hospitable, and altogether engaging. I found no one with whom conversation was not instantly possible; and the volubility of my conversations was a matter of amused comment with our suite. The truth was that I was not only sympathetically interested in all I saw and eager to talk about it, I was also at once aware of the friendli{235}ness of the eyes that watched and listened; and I talked, and my vis-à-vis talked, without any awkwardness of restraint.

There were no royal “monkey tricks” expected of me. I was unable to dance—though I often longed to—because I was on an official visit, and questions of precedence would have made it necessary for me to choose the most important personage in the room as my partner, or take the risk of offending him. And the most important person at a dance is not always the best dancer. But I was not set apart on a dais as I would have been at home—“always on a stand, like a harp,” as I used to complain—and I enjoyed myself. I felt that I was really meeting the people whom I met. I was not merely royalty; I was a sort of national guest, whom every one tried to interest and entertain.

One accepted as an inevitable part of one’s public character the army of reporters and photographers who surrounded us at every official appearance. They were not intrusive; and having learned that I could not give interviews they did not try to get any. The goodwill of the crowds, who were as omnipresent as the newspaper men, was always de{236}lightful. They gathered, of course, merely out of curiosity, but their stares were not, as in other countries, either awed or inimical, or just curious. They greeted you, as they might greet one of their own representatives, with amiable smiles and cheers, waving their handkerchiefs. In the thronged streets of the exposition they could not be held back by our police escort, who struggled with them good-naturedly as they, good-naturedly, pressed in upon us; and one could not help but accept their pressure with a smile. It was all quite human and jolly and inoffensive—a democratic crowd, democratically unrestrained in its interest in everything and everybody. When I was complimented on the popular impression which I seemed to make I could reply, quite truthfully, that if the Americans liked me it must be because they could see how I liked them. I liked them immensely.

They seemed all prosperous and all happy. We had no begging letters and petitions for alms thrown into our carriage, such as would have overwhelmed us at home. We did not meet any of those affected excesses of deference to royalty which would have been so out of place in a country where there is no{237} Crown. If people crowded to see us, out of curiosity, I could not complain; I was just as curious to see them. They were not rude—and I hope I was not.

Any one who makes a royal visit to any country must see it superficially; and if I wrote here that President Cleveland and his beautiful wife were charming hosts, that the country around Washington reminded me of England, that the lake front in Chicago (which was about all of Chicago that I really saw) was handsome, that New York was New York, and the Hudson River the Hudson River—I should not relieve my mind of anything that even Lewis Carroll’s conversational walrus would have cared to hear. And I should not interest even myself by writing it. If I had come to America as a person distinguished by intellect instead of merely by birth, I might have been very proud of the crowds that came to see me; and my contact with American life might have been an illuminating experience worth detailing. As it was, my apparent popularity could mean nothing to me personally; and my experiences, though pleasant, can mean nothing to any one else. Nothing had happened to change my belief that my{238} public life as a royal personage was a busy futility. And when our steamship drew away from the shores of New York, and all the farewells had been said, and the last cheers of the last crowd had sounded, I was at once sad to watch a land recede that I felt I should never see again, and glad to be alone with my own thoughts and free to lay off my public character.

I suppose the truth is that I do not easily reflect the “collectif” sentiment. I am not able sincerely to laugh or cry because others are laughing or crying. And I return gladly to solitude, because it is only in solitude that I seem to be myself.

As I have said before, this desire for solitude had been growing in me for years. And for years I was held in royal circles by my desire to establish a future for my sons. But my eldest son inherited the fortune of the Duc de Montpensier, and my youngest the fortune of the Duchess; and they became independent of me. The death of the Duc deprived me of one of the few dear friends I had in the world, and broke the last of the few sympathies that had made my life with my husband possible. We had discovered no affection for each other. He had freed{239} himself, in all but name, from the marriage contract. We had never quarrelled; I should say we were never sufficiently interested in each other to quarrel. I decided that we should separate. And in spite of the opposition of Royalty, who would have had me endure anything rather than bring a scandal near the Crown, I forced the separation with the aid of my husband’s relatives, who sympathised with me. I returned to my mother’s home in Paris, the Palais de Castile, and it was one of the happiest mornings of my life when I awakened there, alone, and free. I could get no divorce, because divorce is not possible to any one in Spain—least of all to an Infanta—but I was at liberty to live my life in my own way, and that satisfied me.

When my mother died, I was able to get wholly clear of the formalities of Court life, and I left the Palais to rent an apartment for myself where I could live like a private person, with my maids, without even a lady-in-waiting. I bought a few acres of land on the seashore of my beloved Normandy, and built myself a summer cottage cooled by the happy breezes that I had known as a child. And here I can say, and do, and think, and write what I please, un{240}troubled by the prohibitions of crowned heads, who can enforce no command on me and impose no punishment—except to deny me an entrance to Courts from which I have been only too glad to escape.

When my first little book was about to be published, the King of Spain wired me that I could not publish it without his consent. I repudiated that control of my liberty, and they threatened to deprive me of my title and the small income that comes with it. I was puzzled to know what they would decide to call me, if not “the Infanta Eulalia”; and I was interested to see if the King would set a precedent for depriving the “inviolable” Royal Family of its titles and its property by legislative enactment. He decided, wisely, to let the matter drop, and I heard no more of it.

It is my final realisation of freedom that I celebrate now in these pages. I have escaped, mind and body, from my gilded cage. It has taken a lifetime, but it was worth it. I have no respect for anything in the world except intelligence. I live in France because it is the most intelligent of all the countries I have known. I have seen the world waking to the fact that the rule of money is no better than the rule{241} of rank, except when it is more intelligent; and I can foresee the day when the inequalities of property will have no more authority than the inequalities of rank to oppress mankind. I read and write to keep my own intelligence in health by exercising it. And I am afraid of no critic except the one who may find my intelligence feeble, with a prison pallor, in spite of its joy in its escape.{242}

CHAPTER XIII

AFTER THE WAR

What interests—fascinates—the student of contemporary humanity rather than of contemporary politics is to what extent the war will either advance or set us back as a civilisation; shall we be better for it, will life be better for it?

I have always had a horror of war. I hoped and thought up to the last moment that it would be averted. It seemed impossible that France and Germany could come to blows; the cost looked to be too big. Yet I see the Kaiser swept away by the war party behind him, urged by that mysticism, which always characterised him, to believe that war was a divine duty. This is the only reason I can find for his declaration. He loved to preach and pray and live and talk among the stars. The impulse of religious fervour ran riot in him, and he persuaded himself that to plunge the world into the most horrible war of all time was his divine mission.

The horror of war which we feel was naturally{243} enough not shared by the Kaiser and the war party in Berlin. They had grown used to the idea, for years it had been among their ambitions, and many of them had spent all their lives training for it. In fact, that is the biggest and most tragic mistake of modern history—Germany’s conception that to conquer the rest of Europe was her divinely appointed mission; you can see it in every bellicose utterance of the Kaiser! This was never a mere pose. He was in his private life exactly the same man as in his public utterances.

What is to be the result of this war? The setbacks are obvious. It will take Great Britain, with all the wealth and resources of her Empire, a dozen years to recover from the exhaustion of it. France, with large stretches of her country desolated, and crippled financially, will perhaps take longer. Russia will feel it less in many ways, and certainly will reap one big benefit in that the war will, I do not doubt, help to cement her scattered and immense population and bring in a new era of unity.

It may well be, indeed, that the end of the war will see a Russia reborn, rid of her antiquated systems of local government, released from methods{244} which were mediæval—a country set upon a definite road to freedom.

I do not mean that a Russian republic is a likely result. I think the war will strengthen the monarchy; a successful war always does.

Why, even in France to-day there is a widespread feeling that a return to monarchy would be welcome. Personally, however, I do not believe the monarchical party will gain much headway; the whole tendency of the world is against it.

The spirit of the times is democratic. When a people realises that kings and queens are in no way superior mortals it gradually brings about a republic. This is the only natural and logical conclusion of things. France has learned this lesson well enough, she will never go back from her present methods of government—methods which have developed the natural genius and intelligence of her people and brought such prosperity that she has become one of the wealthiest countries in the world. The aristocracy of France has not sufficient power to overthrow the people, especially now when the people have been fighting with true patriotism, not for the ideal{245} of a kingship, but for the ideal of a country—confraternity.

This spirit of democracy, I think, will extend all over Europe. Republics will arise, not by force of arms, mutinies or revolutions, but by natural evolution. To kill a king does not make a republic; that comes from the natural growth of ideas and ideals, from the development of the democratic spirit, the spirit of freedom, which follows in the wake of liberal education.

One effect of the war, then, may be to substantiate monarchy for the time being, save in France, where I think it will create a bigger confidence in the Republic. In other words, if the Allies emerge with considerable success, conditions of government as they are will be strengthened, particularly in Russia.

A great deal has been written in the past about the tottering power of the monarchy in Russia. All of this has been mostly untrue, and certainly misleading. I can recall statements in print of the fear of the Tsar to appear before his people. This is not the truth. When I was in Petrograd he often came to visit me practically unattended, and whenever he{246} has been counselled to take precaution he has adopted such measures only because he has thought it best for his country. He loves Russia; how much has been splendidly evident since the war broke out, and when all is over one effect will surely be that he will be all the more beloved by Russia. I see, too, as a result of his generous attitude the possibility of a resurrected Poland, whose populace will freely give suzerainty to Nicholas II. because they recognise amid all the riot and disaster of to-day that he is their friend.

Exaggerated statements have also been made that the Tsaritza fears assassination. The writers have based their reports no doubt on the fact that the Tsar’s grandfather met his death in this way, and they have no doubt assumed the fears of the present monarchs as a matter of course. The Empress is said visibly to tremble in public, but this is occasioned simply because she is unhappily a sufferer from timidity!

But what about Germany? Who shall dare to prophesy?

But more interesting than these things is the question of armament—or rather disarmament. Is the{247} latter possible? Arbitration in council instead of the sword and the gun—shall we, any of us, live to see that dream come true? Democracy, and a world-wide development of a Hague Conference of the Powers—these are the hopes of those who think. Is it too near the Utopia of the Romanticists? Is it the impossible Millennium?

I do most honestly believe this will be the last big war; it will be a lesson to the wide world of the cost of fighting, the cost in lives, in comforts, in money. The English will surely feel this; they are fond of luxury. When I visited England I was impressed by the almost reckless extravagance of living; money did not count so long as entertainment was obtained; women seemed to have a careless disregard of all things save pleasure. I have wondered and marvelled at the way they have acted since war broke out; now no sacrifice is too great for them to make. Truly the English are remarkable; they are on the surface lovers of ease and lazy luxury, so as to seem almost degenerate. Yet, beneath it all, there is stamina, grit, the power to bear hardship, the spirit of the real adventurer. The war will do English social life good—for a time; but though for a little{248} while the English will eschew gaiety perhaps—I mean the recklessly extravagant gaieties which were their wont—will their phlegmatic nature presently allow this disturbance to be forgotten and the old conditions to recur?

Sincerely I hope not. To end some of the senseless dissipations would be one of the best results of the war; there is no room in life for stupid extravagances, for heedless rushing after novel excitement. For English Society I hope the lesson will go too deep to be forgotten lightly. And I am interested too in the movement which is just now on foot in England to prohibit, or at least to curtail so extensive a sale of alcohol. An abstemious Europe would have made the war almost worth while. And why should it be impossible? France has closed down the sale of absinthe, Russia sells and consumes no more vodka. In England the evil is whisky.

But the question of disarmament: there is so much to hinder it. Each country has a different condition of things to consider; England, for instance, has never kept her army for her own insular needs; her army has been maintained to protect and uphold the ends of her Empire—and those needs will remain;{249} how can she disarm altogether when India has to be considered, and while she has interests to defend, not against the great Powers, but against the native insurgent in so many parts of the world, it is vital to her—and the present crisis emphasises it beyond mistake—that the seas should be kept open, and were there no force behind that need she as well as her food supply would be at the mercy of any pirate. Similarly France has colonies which call for a guard by land and sea.

But the day of the big military power will surely pass with the defeat of Prussian militarism, and the nations should see to it that never again shall one country deliberately arm herself so as to be a menace to the world’s peace. Is it not possible that the great nations should have an amalgamated navy and army powerful enough to command peace from insurgents—to be a sort of world-wide police? Surely at some conference of the Powers a decision should be arrived at by which the boundaries and influence of nations could be fixed for all time, with due regard to the scope required for the natural development of the ambitions of each.

It is certain that there is enough territory in the{250} world for the peoples of the earth; it is equally certain that the laws of supply and demand would balance and leave a reasonable living for all the people of the world if only economic conditions could be properly adjusted. I fancy that here lie the big problems of the future—not the conquering of one another by the force of sword and gun, but the equalisation of the possibilities of possession. There are too many men with big fortunes and too many homes with not sufficient income; on the face of it there should be a way to balance these discrepancies, and there the big thinkers and the students of political economy will step in. The ultimate destiny of the world, when this terrible war is over and done with, will rest upon the shoulders of those thinkers and economists, and upon the success of their efforts will depend the peace and happiness of our children’s children.

I know that here I am laying down the ethics of Socialism, but not the Socialism that depends upon labour upheavals in which the worker merely seeks to get all he can from the employer, but that larger Socialism whose aim is the good of the community{251} as opposed to the fortune of the individual in the pursuit of the general well-being.

I see all over the world evidences that this spirit is alive and prospering. In Switzerland, for instance, if a company earns more than a certain percentage upon its capital the surplus goes to the State to be used in the public interest—subsidise education and mitigate such poverty as there may be. As a fact—and as a result—you see very little poverty in Switzerland. In the Scandinavian countries, too, no man may become absurdly wealthy, and even in rich England a levelling-up process is in the act of formation by means of taxes upon the very wealthy. Soon I am hopeful that this spirit will spread among our Governments; it is the way to universal peace, for unquestionably money and the acquisition of money lies at the back of most international unrest.

It lies, if you think of it, behind this war. What was at the back of Germany’s dream of world-wide conquest? Was it not the expansion of her commerce? Was it not her envy of other nations’ wealth that drove her to seek a first place among the nations? She wanted to extend her borders, to en{252}large her trade, to increase her wealth. End this amazing of private fortunes and you will end this constant fighting and intriguing for power and position. America’s worship of the almighty dollar influences her attitude to-day.

I wonder shall we ever find a substitute for money which will reduce its value. The value of money is the curse of life; it leads to wars, it creates half the intrigues in Court and political life, it provokes senseless luxury. But I am talking of a Utopia, and we live in an age of greed and personal aggrandisement, however sure to those who look beneath the surface are the signs of coming reform.

One good thing the war will leave in its train is a recurrence of simplicity. It cannot but be that the awful costliness of it all will reduce the means left for wastefulness in living. I wish the larger nations—and especially England and America—would study the life of the Scandinavian towns and see how much preferable is their simpler life, how much happier folk are when there is not this greed for gold, which takes up all one’s time and makes men forget the joy and the meaning of life while they are earning and cheating and hoarding. There{253} should be a law preventing great possessions. I don’t mean that the genius in his business or profession should not be able to earn enough to give him greater comforts than those who have not succeeded so well as he—probably because they have not tried so hard. To give the industrious and the indolent an equal reward, to be sure, would set a premium on laziness, and much of the world’s work would go undone. But there ought to be a limit to what a man can own, or what one company can earn, especially when there are so many quite deserving poor who are poor not because of indolence but through lack of opportunity.

This is a part of Socialism, and I know in England Socialism is a bad word to use. Socialism is unfortunate in its champions in England; Socialism has come to mean, in the popular, thoughtless sense of the word, strikes and demands for improved wages and conditions. No doubt Socialism would so revolutionise industry that the present wages and conditions would then seem antiquated to the point of mediævalism, but I think your wise men of England are those who carry on the work of social reformation and leave the word Socialism alone. Mr. Lloyd{254} George has the right idea; I call him a Socialist, though perhaps he wouldn’t agree with the designation.

Will the new era which follows the close of this European holocaust be one of social advancement? If so, the war will not have been in vain. And everything points that way.

In a second way, the war will bring improvement more complete than a generation of peace could ever have done. On the battlefields of France the British aristocrat and the boy from the slums will have met and become brothers. Class distinctions will break down not a little, and this is a good thing, for the private who came from the estates whereon his ancestors have lived for centuries, and the soldier who came from the foundry or the pit, have found each other of the same flesh and blood, comrades in a common cause. Hitherto the class distinctions have been very definite; they did not merge. After the war those barriers will become far more shadowy.

Surely also if there are no more gigantic wars, but a vast curtailment of armaments, millions and millions will be saved, and this money, after settling the{255} war bills, will be available for setting our houses in order.

I do not think there will be any great hardships and poverty when the war is over. On the contrary I anticipate a great trade revival, and in this respect the understanding between the present Allies will greatly increase the business done by them. Germany will no doubt be crippled, her military role will end, and her business men—among the best in the world—will find many of the old works closed. It will take Germany many years to rebuild her fortunes, for she will have made her one gigantic throw for world power, and lost.

France and England and Russia have between them most of the necessities of life, and this should tend to keep down the cost of those necessities. But I hope that a revival of trade will not mean a return to riotous living and deadening indulgence.

To all the Allies the war has brought individual unity within their own boundaries; there was danger of internal trouble in all three a year before the cloud burst. Undoubtedly the fears of civil war in Great Britain had some foundation; France was in a certain sense in a condition of unpreparedness;{256} and Russia was on the edge of a revolution. In a day these questions were laid aside. To-day the French army is as one man; France has behaved with a splendour that cannot be over-extolled, and she will never lose that power of cohesion she gained through the opening stages of this conflict. Indeed, in all the countries of the Allies I fancy the old questions will never recur in the same degree.

On the whole, then, the outlook has its bright side. We are appalled at the loss of life, at the desolation of territory, at the complicated wastage of war. But the Allies will come out of it stronger in many ways, not only with recovered territory—France with her long-lost children returned, and Russia no doubt with her southern port (which means her emancipation)—but with ancient instincts of race reawakened and sharpened, with broader views, particularly on the part of France and Great Britain; for this war has killed the distance across the English Channel, and England, losing her insularity, will become more and more closely attached to her great Republican neighbour.{257}

{258} 

{259} 

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z

Abdul Hamid, Sultan, 151, 152
Absinthe, sale of, prohibited in France, 248
Albert, King of the Belgians, 183
Alcazar, the palace of the, 35
description of, 36
life at, 37 et seq.
Alcohol, the War and, 248
Alexander II., Tsar, assassination of, 176
Alexandra, Queen, 129, 131, 175, 194, 205, 209
Alexis, Grand Duke, 172
Alfonso XII., King, 2, 28
a family reunion, 27
a love match, 74
a visit to the French hospital, 60
and the Spanish aristocracy, 93
at the Escurial, 27-28
buried in the Escurial, 97
death of, 96, 97
grief at death of his wife, 90 et seq.
his activities, 93 et seq.
his children, 96
his education, 46
his popularity, 52
his second marriage, 95
ill-health of, 91
marries Mercedes, daughter of the Duc de Montpensier, 80
proclaimed King, 20, 48, 49, 58
the Infanta and, 5, 7, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 34-5, 44-6, 64, 66, 68, 81, 89, 90 et seq.
Alfonso XIII., King, birth of, 96, 104
Amadeo of Savoy, Prince, 49
Amber, a Royal search for, 211
America, a democratic crowd in, 235-6
the author in, 222 et seq.
the Press of, 232, 235
the railways in, 233
Antoine of Orléans, Archduke, 68 et seq., 74, 99
marries the Infanta Eulalia, 100
separated from his wife, 238-239
Aosta, the Dowager Duchess of, 218 et seq.
Aosta, the Duke and Duchess of, 217, 221
Aranjuez, the palace of, 100
Arbitration, democracy and, 247
Argyll, Duchess of, 130
Armada, dispatch of the, 28
Atoche, the church of, 104
{260} Austria before the War, 181

Belgians, Albert King of the, 183
Belgium, King Leopold of, 183
Berlin, Court life in, 134 et seq.
“Blood Royal,” prerogatives of, 3-4, 11, 31, 32 et seq., 62, 63, 84
Boer War, the, 113, 136
Bologna, 215
Bonaparte, Princess Lætitia (See Aosta, Dowager Duchess)
“Bossism” in America and Spain, 55-6
Bourbon, Princess Caroline of, 175
British rule in India, the, 111
Bulgaria, King Ferdinand of, 184-5

Caciques in Spain, 56 et seq.
Calomarde, Señor, 50
Campos, General Martinez, 48
Canovas, Señor, 85
Cara de Dios, la, 98
Carlo, Don, and the Spanish succession, 49-51
Caroline of Bourbon, Princess, 178
Charles III., 43
Charles IV., 224
Chicago: the World’s Fair, 222
Christian, King of Denmark, 205, 207
Christiania, author at, 190 et seq.
Cleveland, President, 237
Coburg, Duchess of, 130
Connaught, Princess Margaret of, 204
Princess Patricia of, 130
the Duchess of, 130
the Duke of, 129
Constantinople, the Kaiser’s visit to, 151
Court diplomats, 87-9
life, anomalies of, 105 et seq.
life in England, 110-12, 129
Cuba, 222, 225 et seq.
Spanish corruption in, 229-30

Democracy and arbitration, 247
and monarchy, 244
education and, 180
in Denmark, 205, 208
in England, 123, 132
in Norway, 190 et seq.
in Russia, 160
Denmark, democracy in, 205, 208
the King of, 205, 207
Disarmament, the question of, 246, 248-9
Dmitri, Grand Duke, 175

Echegaray, José de, 73
Edinburgh, the Duchess of (now Duchess of Coburg), 131
Education and democracy, 180
Edward VII., King, 112
and the entente cordinale, 127
and the Kaiser, 114, 134, 137, 138
{261}entertains the Author, 129
his American and Jewish friends, 132
his punctuality, 129
Elizabeth, Grand Duchess, 174
England and Germany, industrial and commercial rivalry between, 114
and Socialism, 253
and the English, 106 et seq.
author’s visits to, 108
and the question of disarmament, 248
changing customs in, 120
country life in, 116 et seq.
democracy in, 123, 132
her international affairs, 127
love of extravagance in, 115-16, 132, 247
strikes and internal disorders in, 113, 248
taxing the wealthy in, 251
the aristocracy of, 110, 115, 132
the charm of home and country, 117
the landlord system in, 122
the veneration of Royalty in, 131
English, author’s views of the, 114
Court, the, a canon of Court etiquette, 131
character of the, 114, 125
diplomats, 89
Royal Family, the, 111
the, their superiority in diplomacy, 126
Entente cordiale, the, 127
Escurial, palace of the, 26 et seq.
Alfonso XII. buried in, 97
arrival of Royal Family at, 28
interment of Queen Mercedes in, 90
Royal tombs in, 28
Eulalia, the Infanta, a guest at Sandringham, 129
a separation from her husband, 238-9
Alfonso XII. and, 7, 18, 21, 27, 35, 44-5, 64, 66, 68, 74, 81, 90 et seq.
and Court etiquette, 31-2
and democracy, 179, 244
and Izzet Pasha, 151
and Edward VII., 128 et seq.
Eulalia and the death of Alfonso XII., 96 et seq.
and the English Royal circle, 130 et seq.
and the language of eyes, 65
asserts herself, 8, 26, 30, 40
at Rome, 182
at the convent of the Sacré Cœur, 9 et seq., 108
at the Norwegian Court, 193 et seq.
at the Ordensfest in Berlin, 138, 139, 140
at the palace of the Alcazar, 36 et seq.
at Richmond, 119-120
death of her mother, 239
her engagement, 69, 74, 99
her father, 17, 189
her First Communion, 14
{262}her growing desire for solitude, 238
her irksome duties as a Princess, 22 et seq., 142 et seq.
her love of books, 46 et seq.
her “mortal sin” and confession thereof, 70
her mother, 2, 4, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 38, 45, 75
her sisters, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 25, 40, 41, 44, 52, 60, 61, 68, 81
her sons, ix, 189, 238
in America, 232 et seq.
in Russia, 160 et seq.
marriage of, 100
Prince Napoleon a playmate of, 4
the Kaiser and, 134 et seq., 140-41
the King of Spain and, 240
visits Queen Victoria at Windsor, 108-9

“Face of God, the,” 98
Ferdinand, King of Bulgaria, 183-4
Ferdinand VII. of Spain, 15, 50
Ferrari, Philippo, 215
France and the Great War, 242-3
and the question of disarmament, 248
country life in, 119
Louis Philippe, King of, 72
Royalty in, 107
Francisco, Infante, father of Infanta Eulalia, 17, 189
Frederick, Empress, 130
Frederick the Great, the library of, 153
French, the, diplomacy of, 127

Galliera, the Duke of, 213, 215
Genoa, the Duke and Duchess of, 217, 219
George V., King, the simplicity of his life, 132
George, Mr. Lloyd, 253
German Emperor, the (see William II.)
Royal Family, the, 136
Germany and the Great War, 246, 255
growth of Socialism in, 137
her greed for power and wealth, 251
industrial and commercial rivalry with England, 114
military party in, 155, 242
Great Britain and the Great War, 243
Great War, the, 115, 125, 132, 133, 179, 184
author’s reflections on, 242
good results of, 252 et seq.
the Allies’ individual unity, 255
Tsar Nicholas II. and, 176
Gustav, King of Sweden, 204

Haakon, King of Norway, 180, 192, 193 et seq.
Havana, author visits, 224
convicts as servants in, 227
the author’s curious predicament in, 228
{263}Houlgate, an adventure at, 7
Humbert, King of Italy, 216, 217

India, British rule in, 111
Infection, immunity of Spanish to, 84 (cf. Viaticum)
Isabel the Infanta, 44, 53, 95, 151
marriage of, 69
Isabelle II. (mother of the Infanta Eulalia), 2, 4, 14, 17, 19, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31, 35, 38, 42, 45, 239
an anecdote of, 102
attempted assassination of, 46
dethronement of, 49
intrigues against marriage of Alfonso XII., 42, 71
returns to Spain, 20, 22
succeeds to the throne, 50
Isle of Wight, 130, 162, 174
Italian Court, the, and the Vatican, a quarrel between, 95
Italy before and after the unification, 216
dialect in, 219
King Humbert of, 216, 217
King Victor Emmanuel of, 49, 182
miniature Courts in, 218
Queen Margherita of, 216, 217
the Courts of, 213 et seq.
Izzet Pasha, 151

Kaiser, the, and his Court, 134 et seq. (see also William II., Emperor)

La Granja, the summer palace of, 86
Las Palmas, the author at, 224
Leopold, King of Belgium, 183
London, the author in, 109
Louis XVI. and the Court of Versailles, 144
Louis Philippe, King, 72, 184
Louise, Princess (see Argyll, Duchess of)
Luisa Carlota, the Infanta, 50
marriage of, 69

Madrid, a popular feast in, 98
an audience—and a kitten, 60-1
an embarrassing street decoration, 43
the Royal palace of, 43
Margaret, Princess of Connaught, 204
Margherita, Queen of Italy, 216
Maria Cristina (wife of Alfonso XII.), 95, 118, 151
Maria Cristina, Queen (wife of Ferdinand VII.), 15, 51
character of, 17
romantic marriage of, 16
Maria Padilla, the bath of, 38
Maria Pavlovna, Grand Duchess, 175
Marie, Empress, 175, 206, 209
Mary, Queen of England, 120
her simple life, 132
Maud, Queen of Norway, 180, 190, 193 et seq.
Mercedes, Queen, 80
{264}death of, 90
Mohammedanism, Spain and, 57
Montagnini, Monsignor, 221
Montpensier, the Duc de, 71, 214
a unique marriage, 75
and his orange crop, 93
and Isabella II., 71
and Queen Victoria, 109
appearance of, 77
death of, 238
head of the Orleans party, 72-3
his religious ideas, 76
marriage of, 72
Monza, the Castle of, 216
Moors, the, 57
Morro Castle, 224

Napoleon III. and Isabella II., 4
Netherlands, the, war in, 28
Nicholas II., Tsar, and his people, 157 et seq.
as host, 169
courage of, 158, 176, 245
happy married life of, 166-167
his autocratic power, 164
his children, 166
his great tenderness, 177
his love of simplicity, 168, 176
his personality, 158
his strenuous days, 170
Normandy, the Spanish Court removes to, 5
Norway, democracy in, 180, 190
education in, 199
free unions in, 198
Queen Maud of, 190, 193
the King of, 180, 192, 193
Norway and Sweden, union of, repealed, 192, 200, 205

Olaf, Prince of Norway, 193, 196, 197
Ordensfest, the, 138, 139, 140
Orléans, Antoine d’, 68 et seq., 74, 99
Orleans family in France, 104
party, the, 73
the House of, 183, 184
Oscar, King of Sweden, 204-5

Palais de Castile, the Infanta’s life in, 4 et seq.
Paris, flight from: the Infanta’s recollections of, 5
the author in, 107
Paris, Comte de, exiled from France, 105
the Comte and Comtesse de, at Tunbridge Wells, 105, 116
Patricia of Connaught, Princess, 130
Paul, Grand Duke, 175
Paz, the Infanta, 44, 53
Pedro the Cruel, 39
Peter the Great, 175
Petersburg. (See Petrograd)
Petrograd, 160, 166
the Twelfth Day ceremony at, 161, 163-4
Philip II. and the Escurial, 28
Pilar, the Infanta, 44, 53
death of, 91
Poland, the tragedy of, 179
{265} Polish question, the, 178

Quirinal, the, 216

Recruiting in England and Germany, 136
Richmond, author’s visit to, 119
Romanoff, the House of, and democracy, 171
Rome, the Infanta Eulalia at, 14, 182
the Pope of, 182
Russia and the Great War, 243
and the Orthodox Church, 164
creation of the Imperial Duma, 160, 165
Empress of, her beauty, 162
her devotion to her children, 167
her natural timidity, 246
her religious instincts, 164
the Blessing of the Waters in, 161, 164-5
the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses of, 171 et seq.
the peasantry of, 178
Tsar Nicholas II., 157
Russian Court, the, a charming custom at, 169
the mazurka a favourite dance at the, 168

Sacre Cœur, convent of, 9, 108
Sagasta, Premier, 85
St. Lorenzo martyrdom, of, 28
Salic law in Spain, the, 50
San Jean de Luz, 22
Sandringham, a curious practice at, 129
Sans-Souci, the palace of, 153
Santander, 86
the Cathedral of, 25, 223
Savoy, Prince Amadeo of, 49
Scandinavia, Socialism in, 251
the simple life of, 252
Scandinavian democracies, the, 190 et seq.
diplomats, 89
Serge, Grand Duke, assassination of, 174
Seville, 36 et seq.
Shakespeare, the Infanta Eulalia and, 47
Social reform versus Socialism, 253
Socialism in Belgium, 183
in England, 253
in Germany, 136
in Italy, 182
in Sweden, 202
the ethics of, 250 et seq.
Spain, “anti-clerical” revolts in, 57, 58
becomes a republic, 1
caciques in, 56 et seq.
corruption in, 55, 94
influence of the Duc de Montpensier in, 72
intricacies of Government in, 55 et seq.
king-making in, 48 et seq.
medical science in, 90-92
priests and their rule, 56
religion and politics in, 57
Republicanism in, 58
taxation in, 56
the aristocracy of, 93
the Catholicism of, 98
the church and courtship, 66-7
{266}the claque in, 52-3
the Clerical party in, 73
the question of succession, 42
the Salic law in, 50
the Viaticum in, 81 et seq.
tricks of deception in, 54
Spanish Court, the, life at, 85
the diplomats, 87 et seq.
Strikes and Socialism, 113, 249
Sweden, King Gustav of, 204
King Oscar of, 204-5
Socialism in, 203
the aristocracy of, 201
the Court of, 204
the Crown Prince of, 203
the Crown Princess of, 130, 204
the Parliament of, 202
the Queen of, 204
Sweden and Norway, union of, repealed, 192, 200, 205
Switzerland, true Socialism in, 251

Teck, the Duchess of, 120
Tunbridge Wells, the Comte and Comtesse de Paris at, 105, 116
Turin, the Courts of, 217

United States, “bossism” in the, 55, 56
Universal peace, the ideal way of obtaining, 251

Vatican, the, and the Infanta Eulalia, 182
and the Italian Court: a quarrel, 95
Venice, 220 et seq.
Versailles, 32
of Spain, the. (See La Granja)
Viaticum, the author’s experiences of, 81 et seq.
Victor Emmanuel, King, 49
Victoria, Queen, and a problem of Court etiquette, 131
description of, 109
jubilee of, 112, 174
Vienna, the Court of, 95
Vodka, prohibition of, in Russia, 248
Voltaire, 153

Wales, Albert Edward, Prince of, at the wedding of Alfonso XII., 129
Prince (Edward) of, his birth, 120
Princess of (now Queen Mary), birth of her first son, 120
Whisky, the evil of England, 248
Wight, Isle of, 130, 162, 174
William II., German Emperor and Edward VII., 114, 134, 137, 138
and the divinity of kingship, 135-6, 140, 154, 165, 243
and the Great War, 242-3
as host, 146-7
at the Ordensfest, 138-140
his children, 145
his flattery of the author, 141
his literary tastes, 153
{267}his love of Berlin, 147-8
his personality, 134, 137
his punctuality, 144
his religious instincts, 135-6, 242
the household of, 134-5
the Infanta Eulalia’s visit to, 134
Windsor Castle, the author at, 109
Woman, the equality of, in Norway, 197 et seq.
World’s Fair, the, 222

Zamoyski family, the, 178