The Chapels On Each Side, The Most Beautiful In Spain,
Abound In Riches Of Art And Pious Memorials, With Chief
Among them the
Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral
has been likened
To, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero,
King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and
of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life,
if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint's
body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will
tell you, "the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors"
outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far
more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose
effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at
Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite
portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and
witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is
destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope
who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as
long as the boys' actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these
carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically
imperishable.
If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good
fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less
popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes,
and on the awful day, _dies irae,_ of the great Lisbon earthquake,
during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the
worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in
sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their
feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as
soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock
and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that
the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had
escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be
dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of
November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass,
with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the
people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the
conclusion of the ceremonial.
We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through
the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned.
He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that
we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than
Peter the Cruel's to have denied him, and he planted us at the most
favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions
which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta
and went his way.
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