The Duel of the Spanish Bourbons: (Letter From Madrid)
IF there is one fact which shows more clearly than others the lack of modern civilization in Spain, it is the continued subservience of the better classes to the point of honor. In England the duel has fallen into the same disrepute in which it is held in America. In Germany it is given over to boys. In France it is a rare occurrence that a gentleman fights. The daily rencounters in the Bois de Boulogne are invariably among journalists and jockeys, — men uncertain of their position and Standing, who feel in their uneasy selfconsciousness the necessity to donner des preuves. The hired bravo of the Empire is Mr. Paul de Cassagnac, whose real name is Paul Granier. He has fought six duels with men who called him by his proper name, and the press of Paris has been cowed into accepting his usurped agnomen. He has great coolness, great skill in the use of arms, great readiness of foul invective, but there is probably no man in Paris less respected, unless we except his Imperial master.
But in Spain the duel is the resort of gentlemen. The point of honor is absolute in society. The phrase itself has been used so much, that its angles have been worn off and the three words rubbed into one, —pundonor (punto de honor). Not satisfied with that, the Spaniards have started from the basis of this barbarous abbreviation to build an adjective, pundonoroso, which conveys the highest compliment you can pay to a cavalier of Castile, To be touchy and quarrelsome, — bizarre, as they term it, — is the sure index of a noble spirit. If you are not bellicose yourself, you must at least always be ready to accept a quarrel with alacrity. This is a corvée to which every one is subject who pretends to be in the world.
You must not be too nice, either, in the choice of an adversary. The son of one of the most important families of the kingdom was recently killed in a duel with a man of greatly inferior social position. The Governor of the Philippine Islands fought a few weeks ago with a young clerk, whom he had imprisoned at Manilla for not taking off his hat when His Excellency passed by for his airing. The clerk bided his time and buffeted the Governor at the door of the Casino in Madrid, and hence the fight.
Neither youth nor age is a just cause of exemption. Two gray-haired lieutenant-generals went out this winter for a friendly interchange of shots. Two boys at the military school rode in from Guadalajara with their friends and fought before sunrise in the shadow of the monument of the Dos de Mayo in the Prado. One was left dead in the frosty grass at the foot of the obelisk, and the rest mounted their horses and hurried back to be in time for morning prayers at the college.
The duel is, therefore, in Spain not the absurd anachronism that it is in countries more advanced. It is a portion of the life of the people. It is an incident of the imperfect civilization which still exists in the Peninsula. It is believed in and respected as a serious and dignified end to a quarrel. There are men who see the utterly fhlse and illogical character of the custom; but even these, while deploring it, do not dare oppose it.
It is natural, in consequence of this attitude of public opinion in the country, that the duel which has just resulted in the death of Prince Henry of Bourbon, at the hands of his cousin the Duke de Montpensier, should meet with very different appreciation in Madrid from that which it receives in all other capitals. Yet we cannot but be pleased to see that even here it has occasioned wide discussion, and from the standing of the parties concerned has attained a vast publicity which must result in a salutary change of public sentiment.
No duel so important in the position of the parties, or in probable results, has taken place in recent times. The fight of Burr and Hamilton alone is to be compared to it. The combatants were both princes of the blood royal of Spain and France, — not only high in the hierarchy of two dethroned families, but of great importance in the actual situation, and factors of value in the problems of the future. Both were men of mature age and fathers of families. Montpensier is forty-five and Prince Henry was a year older. The first is a captain-general in the army, the second was an admiral in the navy. Both professed liberal sentiments. Both were exiled before the Revolution as dangerous to the dynasty, and the battle of Alcolea, in which neither took part, opened to both the gates of the country.
Here the parallel ceases. Montpensier returned rich, powerful, the head and hope of a large and active party, — the most prominent candidate for the vacant throne. Prince Henry came back poor, with few friends, with no interest, and so little influence that the government refused to restore him to his active rank in the navy of which he had been unjustly stripped by the government of Bravo. He was a man of a curious scatter-brained talent. He had great historical knowledge, a bright and quick imagination, and in conversation a vivid and taking style, which would have been florid were it not subdued and flavored by a dry, hard cynicism, which found only too inviting a field of exercise in the politics of his country. He was an ardent Republican,— of the school of younger brothers, like Philippe Égalité, and Prince Napoleon, and Maximilian of Austria, whose Republicanism was the fruit perhaps more of ennui and unemployed powers than a profound conviction. It was hard to resist the brilliant and picturesque talk of Prince Henry while you were with him, and yet no one seemed to trust the witty blond Bourbon, and Monarchists and Republicans alike treated him with cold civility, and rather feared his assistance. His preference for the Republic was frankly and openly expressed; but “ then,” he would add with the same fatal frankness, “we Republicans are not honest nor sensible enough as yet. Orense will think it an outrage if Castelar is president, and Castelar will sulk if we elect Orense. We cannot do without our First Tenor, or our Heavy Father. We must take refuge in the provisional. Espartero is our only choice. He has no brains, but he is a noble old figurehead, and will launch us cleverly on our way for a year or two, and we must learn how to take care of the government before he dies.”
It may easily be imagined that, with such a taste for the dangerous luxury of speaking his mind, Don Enrique did not get on rapidly in favor with either the situation or the opposition. He would not flatter the regency nor train with the Republicans. If he had confined himself to talking, it would have been far better ; but from time to time he found an unlucky pen in his way and issued preposterous manifestoes which everybody read and most people laughed at, but which nevertheless always had some uncomfortable barbs that pierced and stayed in the sensitive vanity of men whom he had better have conciliated. So while other inferior men got place and influence, the Ex-Infante was left to corrode his own heart in poverty and neglect. He was too proud to ascribe this to anything but his name. “I have an unlucky name,” he would say, “ but I did not give it to myself, and it seems to me unworthy of a democracy to proscribe a name. I am no better for being a Bourbon but — dame ! I am no worse. There are Bourbons and Bourbons. They call me descendant of Philip V. Eh bien! I am descendant of Henry IV. as well. I cannot afford to hide my name, like my friend Montpensier.” There was some little of bravado, even, in his resolving, after the Revolution, when the walls of Madrid were covered with curses on his name, to drop his title of Duke of Seville, which he gave to his son, and to assume his abhorred patronymic for constant wear. Enrique de Borbon, a Spanish citizen, was all the title he claimed.
Montpensier was always his special detestation. There was something in the grave formal life of the Duke, in his wealth, in his intense respectability, that formed perhaps too striking a contrast to the somewhat Bohemian nature of Don Enrique. He grew more and more violent as he saw his chances for rehabilitation in the navy fading away. He wrote a long letter to Serrano, which be sent through that irregular medium, the public press, and which caused great wincing in high quarters by its trenchant criticism and naïve indiscretion. It is remembered that Montpensier read it in Seville in his palace of San Temlo, and, crumpling the paper in his hand, said, “ That man will be my ruin yet.” Don Enrique appeared to have a like instinctive antipathy. When informed that Montpensier had come to Madrid he started, turned pale, and said, “ El ó yo ! ” He or I !
The Duke passed through Madrid in February on his way to the baths of Alhama. In Spain people go to watering-places when they need the waters, with a shocking disregard of fashions or the calendar. He remained a few weeks at Alhama, and on his way back to Seville stopped at Madrid, — as if a gentleman on his way from New York to Boston should halt for a rest at Washington. As in that case you would ask " what he was after,” so asked the Madrileños of the Duke, although the Castilian language lacks the graphic participial force which we give to that useful abverb. The curiosity grew so irritating that Mr. Cruz Ochoa, the youthful Neo-Catholic, interpellated the government, sternly asking what the Duke was doing in Madrid. To which the government, speaking through the phlegmatic oracle of Don John Prim, replied that the Duke was in Madrid because he chose to be, — that Spain was a free country, and the Duke of Montpensier was a soldier on leave, and could fix his domicile where he liked. The only thing noticeable in the speech of Prim was that he called the Duke Don Antonio de Borbon, whereas the Duke calls himself, and all that love him call him, Orleans.
His position thus, in a manner, made regular and normal by the explanations of the government, Montpensier began a course of life which, though unobjectionable in itself, was calculated to annoy his enemies beyond measure. It was the season of Lent, and he went regularly to church. It was the end of a hard winter in Madrid, and he fed droves of paupers at his gate every morning. It was touching to see the squalid army, encamped before his pretty palace in the Fuencarral, patiently waiting for the stout angel to come and give them bread. The laurels of Peabody seemed to trouble his sleep. He projected a home for indigent printers, and asked the municipal government for some vacant lots to build it on. The municipal government promptly refused, but the indigent printers felt kindlier to Montpensier than before. The ragged and hungry squad he fed day by day were all voters too ; and noisy and unemployed, of the class who could afford to devote all their leisure, which is to say all their waking hours, to politics.
That there was something like a panic among the opponents of the Duke is undeniable. After his defeat last winter for Oviedo, he had seemed so utterly impossible as a candidate, that the attacks on him had become less frequent. But now he seemed to be regaining that faint appearance of popularity which might be used as a justification of a sudden election by the government and Cortes. He was the only candidate, — he had at least one ardent supporter in Admiral Topete,— he needed watching.
All this inflamed to the highest point the animosity of Prince Henry. He could not brook even the tepid goodwill his wealthy cousin was gaining in Madrid. He listened to imprudent or interested advisers, — it is widely rumored that the first impulse started from the Tuileries, — and resolved to put upon Montpeusier an affront which, by the canons of Spanish honor, could only be met by a challenge à mort. Henry was a brave man, but he had accustomed himself to thinking so highly of Montpensier’s prudence and so ill of his spirit, that he probably thought the insult would pass unnoticed. The same opinion was openly entertained and expressed by the entire Isabelino and Napoleon interest in Madrid.
It was probably, therefore, with no apprehension and little excitement that Don Enrique wrote and published that extraordinary manifesto to the Montpensierists, in which he declared himself not only not subservient to the Duke, but his decided political enemy, with a profound contempt for him personally ; and further denounced Montpensier as a charlatan in politics, and ended by calling him a “bloated French pastry-cook.”
It is difficult to imagine a man of sense taking so absurd a document seriously. Yet all Madrid was in a flurry of excitement over it. The question asked everywhere in the places where the idlers congregate was, “ Will he fight ? ” And upon the answer depended the good name of Montpensier in Spain. The two or three days that elapsed before the duel showed plainly that he was falling in public estimation by his presumed patience.
The patience was only apparent. As soon as the paper fell into his hands he sent his aide-de-camp to ask Don Enrique if it was genuine. The Infante promptly sent him a copy with his autograph signature, avowing his full responsibility. The case was made up. The cousins were face to face, and, under the rules that both recognized, neither could recede. The next step of either must be over the prostrate body of the other.
The first proceeding of Montpensier was excessively politic. Instead of selecting his seconds from among his own personal and political friends, he sent for General Alaminos, the bosom friend of Prim, a leading Progresista, belonging to the faction which has been hitherto most hostile to the Orleans candidature. He associated with him General Cordova — the venerable InspectorGeneral of Infantry, a man of great and merited influence in the army — and Colonel Solis.
These veterans carried to the house of Prince Henry the hostile message of his relative. Several days elapsed before Don Enrique responded. The delay was occasioned, partly by his consulting the Masonic fraternity, of which he was a member of high rank, — of the 33d degree,— and whose sanction he received in the matter; and partly by the difficulty he found in procuring men of character and position to act as his seconds. Several grandees of Spain refused, — a circumstance unheard of in their annals. At last three Republican deputies consented to act. But they put in writing their protest against being considered as in the least responsible for the acts or opinions of their principal. This evident isolation seems powerfully to have impressed the unfortunate Prince,
The duel took place at eleven o’clock, in a desolate sandy plain southwest of the city, used as a ground for artillery practice. The officers on duty gathered round to enjoy this agreeable distraction from the monotony of garrison life. Sentries were posted at convenient distances to keep away any officers of the law who might be prowling in the neighborhood, and to check the curiosity of the peasants of the vicinity, who had no right to be curious in affairs of honor. The parties were placed ten metres apart in the stubble, which was beginning to grow green with the coming spring. Fortune was obstinately favorable to Don Enrique. He won the choice of pistols, choice of ground, and the first shot. The Duke, a large and powerful man, stood before him with his arms folded. His seconds had difficulty in making him assume an attitude more en règle. Don Enrique fired and missed. Montpensier fired and missed. The Infante fired again, with the same result. Montpensier fired the second time, and his bullet struck the barrel of Prince Henry’s pistol, splitting, and tearing his coat with the fragments. At this point Montpensier’s veteran seconds thought the affair might be properly terminated. But the other party, after consultation, decided that the conditions of the meeting were not yet fulfilled.
There seems a cool ferocity about this decision of Don Enrique’s seconds that is hard to comprehend out of Spain. If a duel is necessary, it must be serious. A great scandal was made a short time ago by two generals going out to settle a difference, supported by three other generals on a side ; and on the ground they were reconciled, without a shot, by one of the seconds throwing his arms around their necks and saying that Spain had need of them, — two such gallant fellows must not cut each other’s throats for a trifle. The party came in to breakfast in great glee, but all Madrid frowned ominously, and will not forgive them for forgiving each other. On the other hand, I have heard Spanish gentlemen speak with great enthusiasm of the handsome behavior in a recent duel of two naval officers of high rank, intimate friends, who had quarrelled over their cups. They fought twenty paces apart, to advance to a central line and fire at will. One walked forward, and when near the line the other fired and hit him. The wounded man staggered to the line and said: “ I am dead. Come thou up and be killed.” The other came up until he touched the muzzle of his adversary’s pistol, and in a moment both were dead, —like gentlemen, added my informant.
It is possible that another motive may have entered into the considerations of the Republican deputies who stood as godfathers — for this is the name given to these witnesses in Spain — to Prince Henry. They could not help thinking that if Montpensier fell, he would be safely out of the way ; and if he killed his cousin, he would be greatly embarrassed by it.
However this may be, they stood up for another shot, Prince Henry a little disordered by the shock of the last bullet. “ The Duke has got my range,” he said. He fired and missed. Montpensier, who had remained perfectly cool, fired, and Don Enrique turned slowly and fell, his life oozing out of a wound in the right temple, and staining his flaxen curls and the dry stubble and the tender grass.
Montpensier, when it was too late, began to think of what he had done. When informed of the death of his cousin, he was terribly agitated, so that Dr. Rubio, who was one of Don' Enrique’s seconds, thought best to accompany the Duke to his palace. When they reached the gate the Duke could scarcely walk to his door. When the crowd of mendicants saw him leaning heavily on the arm of the physician, they concluded he was wounded, and burst out in loud lamentation, fearing that the end of his bread-giving was near.
In an hour the whole city was buzzing with the news. The first impression was singularly illogical. Every one spoke kindly of Montpensier, and every one said he had lost his chance of the crown. But the general feeling was one of respect for the man who would toss away so brilliant a temptation at the call of honor. His prestige among army people was certainly improved. It seems that not a single voice was raised against him. The day had been fixed for the interpellation of Castelar. He heard of the duel a few minutes before the session opened, and was compelled to change the entire arrangement of his speech to avoid referring to Montpensier.
When the evening journals appeared, the same dignified reticence was observed. The Universal, which had been attacking Montpensier daily for months, stated in a paragraph of one line that the Infante Don Enrique had died suddenly that morning. The Época, the organ of the restoration, went further, and announced that the Prince was accidentally shot while trying a pair of pistols in the Campamento. The widely circulated Correspondencia made no mention whatever of the occurrence.
But the next day it became evident that the traditional treatment of silence could not be followed in this case. The Republican journals, without exception, made the incident the occasion of severe and extended comment. It was plain that the Spain of tradition and decorum had ceased to exist; that the democracy proclaimed by the Constitution was a living fact; and that this event, like all others, was to be submitted to the test of publicity. Heretofore it has never been the custom for newspapers to make any mention of duels. When death resulted, a notice was published in the usual form, announcing the decease of the departed by apoplexy, or some equally efficient agency, and no journal has ever dared hint a doubt of it. But in this instance the organs of absolutism and the advocates of the fallen dynasty vie with the Republicans in condemning an act that they hope may be used for their especial ends. As the hidalgos refused to act as Prince Henry’s witnesses because he was a Democrat, so the Bourbon newspapers call for justice on Montpensier because he is an aspirant for a throne they claim.
I cannot help thinking that this shows progress. Party spirit is an incident of a better civilization than chivalry.
The first judicial proceedings were eminently characteristic. The gentlemen who witnessed the duel went before the Judge of Getafe, within whose jurisdiction the event occurred, and testified upon their honor and conscience, each with his hand on the hilt of his sabre, that the death of Don Enrique Maria Fernando de Borbon was pure accident; that he went out with his well-beloved cousin, my Lord of Montpensier, to try some new pistols ; that while they were trying them one was unpremeditatedly discharged, and the ball entered the head of the said Don Enrique, causing his untimely death ; that my Lord of Montpensier was overwhelmed with grief at this mournful fatality, and was unable to appear and testify. This was the solemn statement of two veteran generals, gray-headed and full of honors, who would have the life of their brother, if he cast a doubt on their veracity.
But if the truth was considered too precious to be wasted on a lawyer and a civilian, they did not spare it in reporting the facts to the Minister of War, President of the Council, acting Autocrat of all the Spains, John Prim. He heard the whole story, said everything was regular, and advised them all to keep quiet a day or two, and the town would forget it, and the clatter of tongues would cease.
The people of Madrid, the lower classes, who from the mere fact of being wretched should sympathize with the unfortunate, gathered in great masses around the house where Prince Henry lay. It was, perhaps, not so much sympathy as the morbid appetite for horrors, so common in the Celtic races. It is probable that many of these beggars came full of meat from Montpensier’s palace gate, to howl for vengeance on him at the modest door of his dead rival.
Every means was taken to make the funeral a political demonstration, with indifferent success. Placards were posted, inviting all Spaniards to come and do honor to a Spaniard who had died to vindicate the honor and independence of his country. On his house a verse, equally deficient in reason and rhyme, was posted, importing, “ Here lived a Spaniard, the only loyal Bourbon, who, for telling the truth, died on the field of honor.” A great crowd of idlers followed the Prince to his grave But the means taken to attract the crowd kept away the better class. Mr. Luis Blanc, a man born with a predestinate name, made a little speech at the cemetery, in which he explained his presence there, by saying he came to the funeral of a Spanish citizen slain by a Frenchman.
If all this excitement results in subjecting duelling in Spain to the severe judgment of the press,and the impartial cognizance of the tribunals, Don Enrique will have done more good in his death than he could have done in life.
In a wider sense, there will be another result to this honorable fratricide that the world will not greatly regret. It places another barrier between Bourbons and thrones. I do not ignore the merits of the Orleans branch. There are good and bad Bourbons, and they are the best. But the whole family has been judged by history, and the case had better not be reopened.