to him my connection.

I lodge in the Rue Hillerin-Bertin with a poor widow, who takes
boarders. My room faces south and looks out on a little garden. It is
perfectly quiet; I have green trees to look upon, and spend the sum
of one piastre a day. I am amazed at the amount of calm, pure pleasure
which I enjoy in this life, after the fashion of Dionysius at Corinth.
From sunrise until ten o'clock I smoke and take my chocolate, sitting at
my window and contemplating two Spanish plants, a broom which rises out
of a clump of jessamine--gold on a white ground, colors which must send
a thrill through any scion of the Moors. At ten o'clock I start for my
lessons, which last till four, when I return for dinner. Afterwards I
read and smoke till I go to bed.

I can put up for a long time with a life like this, compounded of work
and meditation, of solitude and society. Be happy, therefore, Fernand;
my abdication has brought no afterthoughts; I have no regrets like
Charles V., no longing to try the game again like Napoleon. Five days
and nights have passed since I wrote my will; to my mind they might have
been five centuries. Honor, titles, wealth, are for me as though they
had never existed.

Now that the conventional barrier of respect which hedged me round has
fallen, I can open my heart to you, dear boy. Though cased in the armor
of gravity, this heart is full of tenderness and devotion, which have
found no object, and which no woman has divined, not even she who, from
her cradle, has been my destined bride. In this lies the secret of
my political enthusiasm. Spain has taken the place of a mistress and
received the homage of my heart. And now Spain, too, is gone! Beggared
of all, I can gaze upon the ruin of what once was me and speculate over
the mysteries of my being.

Why did life animate this carcass, and when will it depart? Why has that
race, pre-eminent in chivalry, breathed all its primitive virtues--its
tropical love, its fiery poetry--into this its last offshoot, if the
seed was never to burst its rugged shell, if no stem was to spring
forth, no radiant flower scatter aloft its Eastern perfumes? Of what
crime have I been guilty before my birth that I can inspire no love? Did
fate from my very infancy decree that I should be stranded, a useless
hulk, on some barren shore! I find in my soul the image of the deserts
where my fathers ranged, illumined by a scorching sun which shrivels up
all life. Proud remnant of a fa