File:Court life from within (1915) (14760125721).jpg

Identifier: courtlifefromwit00eula (find matches)
Title: Court life from within
Year: 1915 (1910s)
Authors: Eulalia, infanta of Spain, 1864-
Subjects: Courts and courtiers Europe -- Social life and customs
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and company
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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wn inone place mechanically. It was as much worse thanthe Escurial as the Escurial had been worse than thePalais de Castile; and when it came home to me thatthis, now, was to be my life for ever, I felt that Ishould go mad. Every afternoon my mother gave audiences to theladies of Sevilla; but what good was that? Evenwith us children they did nothing but curtsy, andkiss the hands, and look at us, awed, as if we werenot human. They could not say anything to us, andwe did not know what to say to them. Generalscame to salute my mother, and remained for dinner;and every day one officer of the guard had luncheonwith us; but we girls were not allowed to speak tomen, except to exchange formal words of greetingunder the eyes of the governess. One day, the governess being absent, I got intoconversation with an ofllcer at the table, innocently,when lie had been speaking about the bath of MariaPadilla in our garden. It was a large stone baththat had been built by Pedro the Cruel for this Maria 38
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Gardens of the Alcazar, Seville IRKSOME DUTIES OF A PRINCESS Padilla when she had lived at the Alcazar; and Ihad longed to have it filled with water so that I mightuse it. The officer told me that once, after MariaPadilla had bathed there, Pedro the Cruel, in a jest,had invited a courtier to drink some of the water toshow his devotion, and the courtier replied, Imafraid if I tried the sauce, I might get a taste for thepartridge. I thought this very clever of the cour-tier, and I repeated the story to my governess, afterdinner, and she was horrified. It was the last oppor-tunity I got to speak with the officer. And I did not get the bath. Indeed, at that timeit was difficult to get a bath of any sort, except asponge bath, piecemeal. The ladies-in-waiting de-clared that it was sinful to bathe; and when I laughedat that they argued that it was indelicate to take offall ones clothing at once. (I imagine that their an-tipathy to bathing must have come from the feelingagainst the Moors, who

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