There will be two of you listening, dancing, having your fingertips squeezed. It would make me very happy to be amusing myself in Paris while you are mother to a family at La Crampade, for such is the name of our bastide. Poor man, who thinks he is marrying only one woman! Will he ever realize they are two? I am beginning to say foolish things. And as I can no longer do foolish things but vicariously, I will stop here. I hereby give you a kiss on both cheeks; my lips are still those of a girl (he has dared take only my hand). Oh! we are rather distressingly respectful and respectable. Ah, there I go again. Farewell, my dear!

P.S. I have just opened your third letter. My dear, I have some thousand livres at my disposal: use them, then, for pretty things that cannot be found around here, nor even in Marseille. As you shop for yourself, think of your recluse in La Crampade. Remember that neither my intended nor I have grandparents with tasteful friends in Paris to make their purchases. I will answer that letter another time.

6

FROM DON FELIPE HÉNAREZ TO DON FERNAND

Paris, September

The date of this letter will tell you, my brother, that the head of your house is out of danger.[15] Although the massacre of our ancestors in the Court of the Lions made of us Spaniards and Christians in spite of ourselves, it also instilled in us the prudence of the Arabs; perhaps I owe my salvation to the Abencerrage blood still flowing in my veins. Terror made of King Ferdinand such a convincing actor that Valdez believed his protestations. Were it not for me, that poor admiral was a dead man. No Liberal will ever understand the nature of a king. I myself long ago grasped that Bourbon’s character; the more His Majesty assured us of his protection, the deeper my mistrust. A true Spaniard has no need to repeat his promises. He who speaks too much seeks to deceive. Valdez boarded a ship bound for England. As for myself, as soon as the sad fate of my beloved Spain was sealed in Andalusia, I wrote to the steward of my holdings in Sardinia with orders to provide for my safety. Skilled coral fishermen were awaiting me with a boat on a coastal point. As Ferdinand was ordering the French to take me into custody, I was in my own barony of Macumer, amid bandits who scoff at all laws and all threats of reprisal. Grenada’s last Hispano-Moorish house rediscovered the deserts of Africa, and even the Saracen horse, on lands passed down from the Saracens. Those bandits’ eyes glowed with savage joy and pride on learning that they were protecting their master, the Duke de Soria, from the King of Spain’s vendetta, that they had among them a Hénarez, the first to have visited them since the island belonged to the Moors, they who only the day before feared my justice! Twenty-two rifles offered to take aim at Ferdinand de Bourbon, that son of a race unknown on the day the Abencerrages arrived in triumph on the banks of the Loire. I thought I might live on the revenues brought in by those lands, to which we have unfortunately given so little thought; my stay there showed me my mistake and the truthfulness of Queverdo’s accounts. The poor man had twenty-two human lives at my service and not a real, twenty thousand arpents of open land and no house, virgin forests and no furniture. It would take a million piastres and half a century of the master’s attention to fully develop those magnificent lands; I will consider that. As they flee, the defeated turn their thoughts to themselves and their losses. With tears in my eyes, I imagined that noble corpse insulted by the monks, and I saw the sad future of Spain herself.