s
carnivorousness interested the priests at home. They put night around
them, a night in which there was flame, fireworks of flesh at which a
punctilious etiquette required that royalty should assist and which, while
inducing the hysteria that there entered into love, illuminated the path
of empire from immensity to nothingness.

At the close of the seventeenth century, Spain, bankrupt through the
expulsion of the Jews, barren through loss of the Moors, was a giant,
moribund and starving. Only the Holy Office, terribly alive, was terribly
fed. Every man was an object of suspicion and every man was suspicious.
The secret denunciation, the sudden arrest, the dungeon, the torture, the
stake, these things awaited any one. The nation, silent, sombre, morbid,
miserably poor, none the less was draped proudly enough in its tatters.
The famine, haughty itself, that stalks through the pages of Cervantes is
the phantom of that pride. Beside it should be placed the rigid ceremonial
of an automaton court where laughter was neither heard nor permitted,
where men had the dress and the gravity of mutes, where women counted
their beads at balls, where a minutious etiquette that inhibited a queen
from looking from a window and assumed that she had no legs, regulated
everything, attitudes, gifts, gestures, speech, the etiquette of the
horrible Escorial through which gusts of madness blew.

Other courts had fools. The court of Spain had Embevecidos, idiots who
were thought to be drunk with love and who, because of their condition,
were permitted, like grandees, to wear the hat in the presence. On
festivals there were other follies, processions semi-erotic, wholly
morbid, through cathedrals haunted by entremetteuses, through chapels in
which hung Madonnas that fascinated and shocked, Virgins that more nearly
resembled Infantas serenaded by caballeros than queens of the sky and
beneath whose indulgent eyes rendez-vous were made by lovers whom,
elsewhere, etiquette permitted only the language of signs.[69]

To journey then from Madrid to Paris was like passing from a picture by
Goya to a tale of Perrault. Paris at the time was marvelling at two
wonders, an earthly Olympus and real love. The first was Versailles, the
second La Valliere. Louis XIV created the one and destroyed the other.
Already married, attentive meanwhile to his brother's wife, he was
coincidentally epris with their various maids of honor. Among them was a
festival of beaut