We wasted an hour in walking through the palace. It is, like all
palaces, too fine and dreary to describe. Miles of drawing-rooms and
boudoirs, with an infinity of tapestry and gilt chairs, all the
apartments haunted by the demon of ennui. All idea of comfort is
sacrificed to costly glitter and flimsy magnificence. Some fine
paintings were pining in exile on the desolate walls. They looked
homesick for the Museum, where they could be seen of men.
The next morning we drove down the mountain and over the rolling plain
to the fine old city of Segovia. In point of antiquity and historic
interest it is inferior to no town in Spain. It has lost its ancient
importance as a seat of government and a mart of commerce. Its
population is now not more than eleven thousand. Its manufactures have
gone to decay. Its woollen works, which once employed fourteen thousand
persons and produced annually twenty-five thousand pieces of cloth, now
sustain a sickly existence and turn out not more than two hundred pieces
yearly. Its mint, which once spread over Spain a Danaean shower of
ounces and dollars, is now reduced to the humble office of striking
copper cuartos. More than two centuries ago this decline began. Boisel,
who was there in 1669, speaks of the city as "presque desert et fort
pauvre." He mentions as a mark of the general unthrift that the day he
arrived there was no bread in town until two o'clock in the afternoon,
"and no one was astonished at it."
Yet even in its poverty and rags it has the air of a town that has seen
better days. Tradition says it was founded by Hercules. It was an
important city of the Roman Empire, and a great capital in the days of
the Arab monarchy. It was the court of the star-gazing King Alonso the
Wise. Through a dozen centuries it was the flower of the mountains of
Castile. Each succeeding age and race beautified and embellished it, and
each, departing, left the trace of its passage in the abiding granite of
its monuments. The Romans left the glorious aqueduct, that work of
demigods who scorned to mention it in their histories; its mediaeval
bishops bequeathed to later times their ideas of ecclesiastical
architecture; and the Arabs the science of fortification and the
industrial arts.
Its very ruin and decay makes it only more precious to the traveller.
There are here none of the modern and commonplace evidences of life and
activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old,
moribund, and picturesque. It lies here in the heart of the Guadarramas,
lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its
senile dream of the glories of an older world.
