In The
Principal Court There Is A Fine Medallion Of The Illustrious Founder And
Protector, As He Delighted To Be Drawn, With A Sword In One Hand And A
Crucifix In The Other, - Twin Brother In Genius And Fortune Of The
Soldier-Priest Of France, The Cardinal-Duke Richelieu.
On his gorgeous
sarcophagus you read the arrogant epitaph with which he revenged himself
for the littleness of kings and courtiers:
-
"Praetextam junxi sacco, galeamque galero, Frater, dux, praesul,
cardineusque pater. Quin, virtute mea junctum est diadema cucullo, Dum
mihi regnanti patuit Gesperia."
By a happy chance our visit was made in a holiday time, and the students
were all away. It was better that there should be perfect solitude and
silence as we walked through the noble system of buildings and strove to
re-create the student world of Cervantes's time. The chronicle which
mentions the visit of Francis I. to Alcala, when a prisoner in Spain,
says he was received by eleven thousand students. This was only twenty
years before the birth of Cervantes. The world will never see again so
brilliant a throng of ingenuous youth as gathered together in the great
university towns in those years of vivid and impassioned greed for
letters that followed the revival of learning. The romance of Oxford or
Heidelberg or Harvard is tame compared with that electric life of a
new-born world that wrought and flourished in Padua, Paris, and Alcala.
Walking with my long-robed scholarly guide through the still, shadowy
courts, under Renaissance arches and Moorish roofs, hearing him talking
with enthusiasm of the glories of the past and never a word of the
events of the present, in his pure, strong, guttural Castilian, no
living thing in view but an occasional Franciscan gliding under the
graceful arcades, it was not difficult to imagine the scenes of the
intense young life which filled these noble halls in that fresh day of
aspiration and hope, when this Spanish sunlight fell on the marble and
the granite bright and sharp from the chisel of the builder, and the
great Ximenez looked proudly on his perfect work and saw that it was
good.
The twilight of superstition still hung heavily over Europe. But this
was nevertheless the breaking of dawn, the herald of the fuller day of
investigation and inquiry.
It was into this rosy morning of the modern world that Cervantes was
ushered in the season of the falling leaves of 1547. He was born to a
life of poverty and struggle and an immortality of fame. His own city
did not know him while he lived, and now is only known through him.
Pilgrims often come from over distant seas to breathe for one day the
air that filled his baby lungs, and to muse among the scenes that shaped
his earliest thoughts.
We strolled away from the university through the still lanes and squares
to the Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains
some vestige of traffic.
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