“the time has come,” the walrus said,
“to talk of many things,
“of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
“of cabbages and kings.”
alice in wonderland.
once, when i was making an official visit to the south of spain with my brother (who was then king), we were told of a gentleman of the province of sevilla who had had a talking parrot sent to him from south america; and this parrot had been taught to say “viva la reina!”—that is, “long live the queen!” but soon after its arrival in sevilla there was a revolution, and spain became a republic; and it was not at all comfortable for the gentleman to have a parrot screaming “long live the queen!” so he shut it up in a room in his house and set himself to teach it to cry “viva la republica!”—“long live the republic!” it was a very intelligent parrot, and he easily taught it to say “viva la republica!”; but it had a 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 c?ur, 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.
