Here They Take The Air As Free From
Snobbish Competition As The Good Society Of Olympus, While A Hundred
Paces Farther South, Just Beyond The Mint, The World At Large Takes Its
Plebeian Constitutional.
How long, with a democratic system of
government, this purely conventional respect will be paid to blue-ness
of blood cannot be conjectured.
Its existence a year after the
Revolution was to me one of the most singular of phenomena.
After Easter Monday the Castellana is left to its own devices for the
summer. With the warm long days of May and June, the evening walk in the
Salon begins. Europe affords no scene more original and characteristic.
The whole city meets in this starlit drawing-room. It is a vast evening
party al fresco, stretching from the Alcala to the Course of San
Geronimo. In the wide street beside it every one in town who owns a
carriage may be seen moving lazily up and down, and apparently envying
the gossiping strollers on foot. On three nights in the week there is
music in the Retiro Garden, - not as in our feverish way beginning so
early that you must sacrifice your dinner to get there, and then turning
you out disconsolate in that seductive hour which John Phoenix used to
call the "shank of the evening," but opening sensibly at half past nine
and going leisurely forward until after midnight. The music is very
good. Sometimes Arban comes down from Paris to recover from his winter
fatigues and bewitch the Spains with his wizard baton.
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