The Grande Duchesse of
Gerolstein, the cheeriest moralist who ever occupied a throne, announces
just before the curtain falls, "Quand on n'a pas ce qu'on aime, il faut
aimer ce qu'on a." But how much easier it is to love what you have when
you never imagined anything better!
The bulk of the good people of
Madrid have never left their natal city. If they have been, for their
sins, some day to Val-lecas or Carabanchel or any other of the dusty
villages that bake and shiver on the arid plains around them, they give
fervid thanks on returning alive, and never wish to go again. They
shudder when they hear of the summer excursions of other populations,
and commiserate them profoundly for living in a place they are so
anxious to leave. A lovely girl of Madrid once said to me she never
wished to travel, - some people who had been to France preferred Paris to
Madrid; as if that were an inexplicable insanity by which their
wanderings had been punished. The indolent incuriousness of the Spaniard
accepts the utter isolation of his city as rather an advantage. It saves
him the trouble of making up his mind where to go. Vamonos al Prado!
or, as Browning says, -
"Let's to the Prado and make the most of time."
The people of Madrid take more solid comfort in their promenade than any
I know. This is one of the inestimable benefits conferred upon them by
those wise and liberal free-thinkers Charles III.
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