ut no amount of gold can procure him a drop of fresh blood
to cure the hereditary poison in his veins. He is surrounded by
beautiful women, but if he feels arising the happy tremors of youth,
the sap of the spring of life, the predisposition of a family who have
only been notable for the victories won in love's battles, he must
remain cold and austere, under his mother's vigilant eye, who knows
that carnal passion would rapidly end a life so weak and uncertain.
And the end of all these sad-and painful privations--inevitable death.
Why was this poor creature born? Often the greatness of the earth is
worse than a malediction, and reasons of State are the most cruel of
all torments for an invalid, obliging him to feign a health he does
not feel. To speak of the illness of the king is a crime, and the
courtiers living under the shadow of the throne consider the slightest
allusion to the king's health as a sacrilege, a crime worthy of
punishment, as though he were not a human being subject like others to
death."

"I do not care much for politics," said the Chapel-master; "kings and
republics are all the same to me, I am a votary of art. I do not know
what monarchy may be in the other countries that you have seen, but in
Spain it seems quite played out. It is tolerated like so many relics
of the past, but it inspires no enthusiasm and no one is inclined to
sacrifice themselves for it, and I believe that even the people who
live in its shadow, and whose interests are most bound up with those
of the crown, have more devotion on their tongues than in their
hearts."

"It is so, Don Luis," said Gabriel; "for nearly a century the monarchy
has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando
VII. Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated
from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the
contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and
more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first
Bourbons. If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say,
'We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,' even the stones of the
palace would be scandalised. The Austrians have revived like those
parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little
while. If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past,
they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of
those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition,