In The
Event He Proved A Very Intelligent Guide, As Guides Go, And I Really
Cannot Now See How We Could Have Got On Without Him.
He adapted the
Spanish names of things to our English understanding by shortening them;
a _patio_ became a _pat',_ and an old master an old mast'; and an
endearing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip II.
By the
diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but even to have Charles V.
brought nearer our hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our
guide exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I instructed
him that the emperor's name was Charles, and that only boys and very
familiar friends of that name were called Charley among us. He thanked
me, and at once spoke again of Charley Fif; which I afterward found was
the universally accepted style of the great emperor among the guides of
Spain. In vain I tried to persuade them out of it at Cordova, at
Seville, at Granada, and wherever else they had to speak of an emperor
whose memory really seems to pervade the whole land.
II
The genuine village of Escorial lies mostly to the left of the station,
but the artificial town which grew up with the palace is to the right.
Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which were and
are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the road to the palace
takes you far from the slag, with a much-hoteled and garden-walled
dignity, to the plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the
massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng of American
women wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back to
their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the
place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had
constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the
measureless courts and endless corridors.
At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the
gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one
shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the
circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the
advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have
passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than
that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace,
where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly,
as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining
with gold and polished marble.
It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to
eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the
dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the
edifice.
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