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Gautier Théophile
Wanderings in Spain

CHAPTER VIII
VISIT TO THE ESCURIAL

Aridity and Desolation of the Country – First View of the Escurial – Sombre appearance of the building – The Church – The blind Cicerone – The Pantheon Pictures – Anecdote of Spanish Robbers.

In order to proceed to the Escurial, we hired one of those fantastic vehicles, of which we have already had occasion to speak, covered with grey cupids and other ornaments in the Pompadour style, dragged by four mules, and enhanced by the presence of a zagal in a tolerable masquerading suit. The Escurial is situated about seven or eight leagues from Madrid, not far from Guadarrama, at the foot of a chain of mountains. It is impossible to imagine anything more arid and desolate than the country you have to pass through in order to reach it. There is not a single tree, not a single house; nothing but a succession of steep declivities and dry ravines, which the presence of several bridges points out as the beds of different torrents, and here and there a long vista of blue mountains capped with snow or clouds. Such as it is, however, the view is not without a certain kind of grandeur; the absence of all vegetation gives an extraordinary degree of boldness and severity to the outline of the ground. In proportion as you proceed further from Madrid, the stones with which the way is thickly strewed become larger, and evince, more and more, an ambitious feeling of being taken for rocks. They are of a bluish grey, and appear, as they are scattered over the scale-like soil, like so many warts upon the wrinkled back of a centenarian crocodile; they form a thousand strange shapes upon the outline of the hills, which resemble the ruins of gigantic edifices.

Halfway on the road, at the summit of a pretty steep ascent, is a poor isolated house, the only one you meet in the course of eight leagues. Opposite it is a spring, from which a pure and icy stream trickles down, drop by drop; you drink as many glasses of water as the spring contains, let your mules rest a short time, and then set off again on your journey. Soon afterwards you perceive, standing out from the vapoury background of the mountains, and rendered visible by a bright gleam of sunshine, that Leviathan of architecture, the Escurial. At a distance, the effect is very fine; you would almost fancy it to be an immense Oriental palace, the stone cupola and the balls which terminate all the elevated points contributing very much to keep up the illusion. Before reaching it, you pass through a large wood of olive-trees, ornamented with crosses, quaintly planted on large blocks of rocks, and producing the most picturesque effect. On issuing from the wood you enter the village and find yourself before the colossus, which loses a great deal from being viewed closely, like all the other colossi in the world. The first thing that struck me was the great number of swallows and martins, wheeling about in immense swarms, and uttering a sharp, strident cry. The poor little birds appeared terrified by the death-like silence which reigned in this Thebaid, and were endeavouring to impart a little animation and noise to it.

Every one is aware that the Escurial was built in consequence of a vow made by Philip II. at the siege of Saint Quentin, when he was obliged to cannonade a church dedicated to St. Lawrence. Philip promised the Saint that he would make amends for the church of which he deprived him, by one that should be more spacious and more beautiful; and he kept his word more faithfully than the kings of this earth generally do. The Escurial, which was commenced by Juan Bautista and completed by Herrera, is assuredly, with the exception of the Egyptian pyramids, the largest heap of granite that exists upon the face of the globe; it is called, in Spain, the eighth wonder of the world, making, as each country has its own eighth wonder, at least the thirtieth eighth wonder now existing.

I am exceedingly embarrassed in giving an opinion on the Escurial. So many grave and respectable persons, who, I am happy to believe, never saw it, have spoken of it as a chef-d'œuvre and a supreme effort of human genius, that I, who am but a poor, miserable, wandering writer of feuilletons, am afraid that I shall appear to have determined to be original, and seem to take pleasure in contradicting the generally-received opinion. Despite of this, however, I declare conscientiously, and from the bottom of my heart, that I cannot help thinking the Escurial the dullest and most wearisome edifice that a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant could ever conceive for the mortification of their fellow-creatures. I am very well aware that the Escurial was erected for an austere and religious purpose, but gravity does not consist in baldness, melancholy in atrophy, or meditation in ennui; beauty of form can always be united to elevation of ideas.

The Escurial is arranged in the form of a gridiron, in honour of Saint Lawrence. Four towers, or square pavilions, represent the feet of this instrument of torture; four masses of building connect the pavilions with each other, and form the framework, while other cross rows represent the bars; the palace and the church are situated in the handle. This strange notion, which must have hampered the architect very much, is not easily perceived by the eye, although it is very visible upon the printed plan. If the visitor were not told of it, he most certainly would never discover it. I do not blame this symbolical piece of puerility, which suited the taste of the times; for I am convinced that when a certain model is given to an architect, so far from shackling him, it will, provided he has genius, prove of great use and assistance to him, and cause him to have recourse to expedients of which he would, otherwise, never have thought; but it strikes me that, in this case, he might have arrived at a far different result. Those persons who are fond of good taste and sobriety in architecture, must think the Escurial a specimen of perfection, for the only line employed in it is the straight line, and the only order the Doric order, which is the most melancholy and poorest of any.

One thing which immediately strikes you very disagreeably, is the yellow clayish colour of the walls, which you would almost imagine to be built of mud, did not the joints of the stones, marked by lines of glaring white, prove that this was not the case. Nothing can be more monotonous to behold than all these buildings, six or seven stories high, without a moulding, a pilaster, or a column, and with their small low windows, looking like the entrance to a beehive. The place is the very ideal of an hospital, or of barracks: its sole merit consists in its being built of granite, a species of merit which is of no value, since at the distance of a hundred paces the granite may be easily mistaken for the clay of which stoves are made in France. On the top is a heavy dwarfish cupola, which I can compare to nothing more aptly than the dome of the Val de Grâce, and which boasts of no other ornaments than a multitude of granite balls. All around, in order that nothing may be wanting to the symmetry of the whole, are a number of buildings in the same style, that is to say, with a quantity of small windows, and without the least ornament. These buildings are connected with each other by galleries in the form of bridges, thrown over the streets that lead to the village, which, at present, is nothing more than a heap of ruins. All the approaches to the edifice are paved with granite flags, and its limits marked by little walls three feet high, ornamented with the inevitable balls at every angle and every opening. The façade, which does not project in the least from the other portions of the building, fails to break the aridity of the general lines, and is hardly perceived, although it is of gigantic proportions.

The first place you enter is a vast courtyard, at the extremity of which is the portal of a church, presenting no remarkable feature, except some colossal statues of prophets, with gilt ornaments, and figures painted rose-colour. This courtyard is flagged, damp, and cold; the angles are overgrown with grass; you no sooner place your foot in it than you are oppressed with ennui, just as if you had a weight of lead upon your shoulders; you feel your heart contract; you think that all is over – that every joy is henceforth dead for you. At a distance of twenty paces from the door you smell an indescribable icy and insipid odour of holy water and sepulchral caverns, which is borne to you by a current of air loaded with pleurisy and catarrh. Although, outside, there may be thirty degrees of heat, the marrow freezes in your bones; you imagine that the warmth of life will never again be able to cheer the blood in your veins, which has become colder than a viper's blood. The air of the living cannot force its way through the immense thickness of the walls, which are as impenetrable as the tomb, and yet, in spite of this claustral and Moscovitish cold, the first object I beheld, on entering the church, was a Spanish woman kneeling on the ground, beating her breast with one hand, and with the other fanning herself with equal fervour. I recollect that her face had a kind of sea-green tint, which makes me shiver even now, whenever I think of it.

The cicerone who conducted us over the interior of the edifice was blind, and it was really most marvellous to see with what precision he stopped before the pictures, naming the subject of each one, and the artist by whom it was painted, without the least hesitation or mistake. He took us up to the dome, and led us through an infinity of ascending and descending corridors, which rivalled in complication the "Confessional of the Black Penitents," or of the "Château of the Pyrenees," by Anne Radcliffe. The old fellow's name is Cornelio; he was the merriest creature in the world, and appeared quite to take a delight in his infirmity.

The interior of the church is mournful and naked. Immense mouse-grey pilasters formed of granite, with a large micaceous grain like coarse salt, ascend to the roof which is painted in fresco, the blue, vapoury tones of which are ill suited to the cold, poor colour of the architecture; the retablo, gilt and sculptured in the Spanish fashion, with some very fine paintings, somewhat corrects this aridity of decoration, which sacrifices everything to some stupid notion or other of symmetry. The style of the kneeling statues of gilt bronze on each side the retablo, representing, I believe, Don Carlos and some princesses of the royal family, is grand, and the effect is very fine. The chapter which is opposite the high altar is an immense church in itself; the stalls which surround it instead of being florid and decorated with fantastic arabesques, like those at Burgos, partake of the general rigidity, and have no other ornaments than simple mouldings. We were shown the place where for fourteen years the sombre Philip II., that king born to be a grand inquisitor, used to seat himself; it is the stall that forms the angle, and a doorway cut through the thickness of the panelling communicates with the interior of the palace. Without pretending to possess any very fervent amount of devotion, I can never enter a Gothic cathedral without experiencing a mysterious and profound feeling, an extraordinary sentiment of emotion; but in the church of the Escurial I felt so crushed, so depressed, so completely under the dominion of some inflexible and gloomy power, that I was for the moment convinced of the inutility of prayer. The God of such a temple will never allow himself to be moved by any entreaties.

After visiting the church we went down into the Pantheon. This is the name given to the vault where the bodies of the kings of Spain are preserved. It is octagonal in form, thirty-six feet in diameter and thirty-eight feet in height, directly under the high altar; so that when the priest is saying mass, his feet are on the stone which forms the keystone of the vault. The staircase leading into it is formed of granite and coloured marble, and closed by a handsome bronze gate. The pantheon is lined throughout with jasper, porphyry, and other stones no less precious. In the walls there are niches with antique-formed cippi, destined to contain the bodies of those kings and queens who have left issue. A penetrating and death-like coldness reigns throughout the vault, and the polished marble glitters and sparkles in the flickering torchlight; it seems as if the walls were dripping with water, and the visitor might almost imagine himself to be in some submarine grotto. The monstrous edifice weighs you down with all its weight; it surrounds, it embraces, it suffocates you; you feel as if you were clasped by the tentacles of an immense granite polypus. The dead bodies contained in the sepulchral urns seem more dead than any others, and it is with difficulty that you can induce yourself to believe that they can ever possibly be resuscitated. In the vault, as in the church, the impression is one of sinister despair; in all this dreary place there is not one hole through which you can see the sky.

A few good pictures still remain in the Sacristy (the best have been transferred to the Royal Museum at Madrid). Among them are three or four specimens on wood of the German school, possessing a very uncommon degree of merit. The ceiling of the grand staircase is painted in fresco by Luca Jordano, and represents, allegorically, Philip II.'s vow and the foundation of the convent. The acres of wall in Spain painted by this same Luca Jordano, are something truly prodigious, and we moderns who lose our breath at the slightest exertion, find it a difficult task to conceive the possibility of such labours. Pellegrini, Luca, Gangiaso, Carducho, Romulo, Cincinnato, and many others have painted in the Escurial cloisters, vaults, and ceilings. That of the library is the work of Carducho and Pellegrini, and is a good sample of light, clear fresco colouring; the composition is very rich and the twining arabesques in the best possible taste. The library of the Escurial is remarkable for one peculiarity, and that is, that the books are placed on the shelves with their backs to the wall and their edges to the spectator; I do not know the reason of this odd arrangement. The library is particularly rich in Arabic manuscripts, and must contain many inestimable and totally unknown treasures. At present that the conquest of Algiers has rendered Arabic quite a fashionable and ordinary language, it is to be hoped that this rich mine will be thoroughly worked by our young orientalists. The other books appeared to be mostly works of theology and scholastic philosophy. We were shown some manuscripts on vellum, with illuminated margins ornamented with miniatures; but, as it was Sunday, and the librarian was absent, we could not hope for anything else, and we were consequently obliged to depart without having seen a single incunable edition; which, by the way, was a much greater disappointment to my companion than to myself, who, unfortunately, am not an enthusiast in the matter of bibliography, or anything else.

In one of the corridors is placed a white marble Christ the size of life, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, and some very singular fantastic paintings in the style of the Temptations of Callot and Teniers, only much older. In other respects it is impossible to conceive anything more monotonous than these narrow, low, and interminable corridors of grey granite, which circulate all through the edifice like the veins in the human body; you must really be blind to find your way about them; you go up stairs and down stairs, you make a thousand twistings and turnings, and if you only walked about three or four hours you would wear out the soles of your shoes, for the granite is as rough as a file, and as harsh as so much sand-paper. From the dome you perceive that the balls which, when viewed from below, did not appear larger than horses' bells, are of an enormous size, and might serve as monster globes. An immense panorama unfolds itself at your feet, and you perceive at one glance the hilly country which separates you from Madrid; on the other side you behold the mountains of Guadarrama. From this position, too, you see the whole plan of the building; your eye plunges into the courtyards and cloisters, with their rows of superposed arcades, and their fountain or central pavilion; the roofs appear like so many simple ridges, just as they would in an engraving that gave a bird's-eye view of the place.

When we ascended to the dome, a stork with three little ones was perched in a large straw nest, that resembled a turban turned upside down, placed on the top of one of the chimneys. This interesting family presented the strangest appearance in the world; the mother was standing on one leg in the middle of the nest, with her neck stuck between her shoulders, and her beak reposing majestically upon her breast, like a philosopher in meditation; the little birds were stretching out their long beaks and their long necks to ask for food. I hoped to witness one of those sentimental scenes of natural history, where we see the large white pelican wounding her own breast to nourish her offspring; but the stork appeared to be very little moved by these demonstrations of hunger, and did not move more than the stork engraved on wood which adorns the frontispiece of the books coloured by Cramoisi. This melancholy group increased still more the profound solitude of the place, and imparted a kind of Egyptian character to this Pharaoh-like assemblage of buildings. After descending from the dome, we visited the garden, where there is more architecture than vegetation. It consists of a succession of large terraces and parterres of clipped boxwood, representing a series of designs similar to the patterns of old damask silk, with a few fountains, and pieces of greenish water; it is a wearisome, solemn garden, as formal as a Golilla, and altogether worthy of the morose-looking edifice to which it is attached.

There are said to be one thousand one hundred and ten windows in the exterior of the Escurial alone, a fact which greatly astonishes the cockney visitor. I did not count them, as I preferred believing the report to entering upon an undertaking of such magnitude; but the fact is not improbable, for I never saw so many windows in one place; the number of the doors is equally fabulous.

I took leave of this desert of granite, this monastic necropolis, with an extraordinary feeling of satisfaction and delight; it seemed as if I were restored to life, and that I could once more feel young, and enjoy the wonderful creation of God, which I had lost all hope of doing, while under these funereal vaults. The warm bright air enveloped me as with some soft cloth of fine wool, and warmed my body, that was frozen by the cadaverous atmosphere; I was freed from the architectural nightmare, which I thought would never end. I would advise those people who are absurd enough to pretend that they are suffering from ennui to go and pass three or four days in the Escurial; they will there learn what ennui really means, and, for the rest of their lives, will always find a fund of amusement in the thought that they might be in the Escurial, and that they are not.

When we returned to Madrid, all our acquaintances were astonished and delighted at beholding us once more alive. Very few persons return from the Escurial; they either die of consumption in two or three days, or blow out their brains, – that is, if they are Englishmen. Luckily, we both enjoy a very good constitution; and as Napoleon said of the cannon-ball which was to carry him off, the building that is to kill us is not yet built. Another thing which did not cause less surprise was the fact of our bringing our watches back with us; for in Spain there are always, on the high-road, persons extremely desirous of knowing what o'clock it is; and as there are neither clocks nor even sundials at hand, they are under the painful necessity of consulting travellers' watches.

Talking of robbers, I may as well seize this opportunity of narrating an adventure in which we nearly sustained two of the principal parts. The diligence from Madrid to Seville, by which we should have gone, but from the fact of there being no more room, was stopped in the province of La Mancha by a band of insurgents, or of robbers, which is exactly the same thing. The robbers had divided the spoil, and were on the point of conducting their prisoners into the mountains, in order to obtain a ransom from their families, (would you not suppose that all this happened in Africa?) when another and more numerous band came up, thrashed the first, and robbed them of their prisoners, whom they then definitively marched off into the mountains.

As they were going along the road, one of the travellers drew a cigar-case out of his pocket, which his captors had forgotten to search, takes a cigar, strikes a light, and lights it. "Would you like a cigar?" he says to the chief bandit, with true Castilian politeness; "they are real Havannahs." "Con mucho gusto," replies the bandit, flattered by this mark of attention, and, the next instant, the traveller and the brigand are standing opposite each other, cigar against cigar, puffing and blowing away, in order to light their cigars more quickly. They then commenced a conversation, and, from one thing to another, the robber, like all commercial men, began complaining of business: times were hard, things were in a bad state; many honest people had entered the profession and spoilt it; the robbers were obliged to wait their turn to pillage the miserable diligences, and, very frequently, three or four bands were obliged to fight with one another for the spoil of the same galera, or the same convoy of mules. Besides this, the travellers, who were sure of being robbed, only took with them what was absolutely necessary, and wore their worst clothes. "Just tell me," said he, with a melancholy dejected air, pointing to his cloak, which was threadbare, and patched all over, and which would have been worthy of enveloping Probity in person, "is it not shameful that we should be under the necessity of stealing a rag like this? Is not my jacket one of the most virtuous description? Could the most honest man in the world be dressed more shabbily than I am? It is true that we keep our prisoners as hostages, but relations, now-a-days, are so hard-hearted, that they cannot be induced to loosen their purse-strings, so that, at the expiration of two or three months, we are put to the extra expense of a charge of powder and shot to blow out our prisoners' brains, which is always a very disagreeable thing, when you have got accustomed to their society. In order to do all this, too, we are obliged to sleep on the ground, eat acorns, which are not always palatable, drink melted snow, make tremendous journeys on the most abominable roads, and risk our lives at every moment." So spoke the worthy bandit, more disgusted with his profession than a Parisian journalist, when it is his turn to write a feuilleton. "But," said the traveller, "if your profession does not please you, and brings you in so little, why do you not follow some other?" "I have often thought of doing so," replied the robber, "and so have my comrades as well; but what can we do? We are tracked, pursued, and should be shot down like dogs, if we were to go near a village. No, we must continue the same kind of life." The traveller, who was a man of some influence, remained a moment buried in thought; at last he remarked, "Then you would willingly give up your present calling, if you were allowed to benefit by the indulto (if you were amnestied?)" "Most certainly," answered all the band. "Do you think it is so very amusing to be robbers? We are obliged to work like negroes, and undergo all sorts of hardships." "Very well," replied the traveller; "I will engage to procure you your pardon, on condition that you set us free." "Agreed," replied the captain. "Return to Madrid; there is a horse, some money for your expenses on the road, and a safeconduct, which will ensure our comrades allowing you to pass without molestation. Come back soon; we will be at such and such a place, with your companions, whom we will entertain as well as we can." The gentleman went to Madrid, obtained a promise that the brigands should be allowed to take the benefit of the indulto, and then set out again to seek his companions in misfortune. He found them seated tranquilly with the brigands, eating a Mancha ham boiled in sugar, and taking frequent draughts from a goatskin filled with Val-de-Peñas, which their captors had stolen expressly for them – a most delicate mark of attention, certainly! They were singing and amusing themselves very much, and were more inclined to become robbers, like the others, than to return to Madrid. The captain, however, read them a severe moral lecture, which brought them to their senses, and the whole company set out arm in arm for the city, where both travellers and brigands were enthusiastically received, for it was something truly uncommon and curious for robbers to be taken prisoners by the travellers in a diligence.