A Barcelona Heiress Read Online Free PDF Page B

I made my way with some difficulty through the crowd, which was flanked by pairs of mounted Guardia Civil and government security officers.
    The occasion was a royal visit. At that time, the king of Spain, Alfonso XIII, did not often travel to Barcelona, in part for security reasons, and in part because, thanks to the escalating
catalanismo
, he hardly expected to receive the warmest of welcomes. The president of the Council of Ministers, my mentor Eduardo Dato, had shared with me that he had sought to persuade the monarch to visit more often, for it was on such short journeys when Don Alfonso really shined. He knew how to win people over, and he certainly had potential in Barcelona and Catalonia, for even there monarchical sentiment was still very much alive in many circles. Buton this occasion he had dispatched the infantes Doña Luisa and Don Carlos on his behalf for the inauguration of the new Red Cross Hospital. Don Carlos de Borbón de las Dos Sicilias, Count of Caserta, had taken as his first wife the infanta María Mercedes, Alfonso XIII’s elder sister, who would die during labor delivering her third child a few years later. The monarch’s brother-in-law was thus on close terms with the king, and resided at that time in Seville as the captain general of Andalusia. His second wife, Lluisa de Orleans, was the Count of Paris’s daughter, and a charitable soul who had thrown herself into efforts to promote the Spanish Red Cross, whose first patron had been Alfonso XIII’s first wife, Victoria Eugenia de Battenberg.
    In the morning their Royal Highnesses had arrived at the train stop on Paseo de Gracia, where all the city’s authorities and most prominent social figures had turned out to receive them, while a brass band struck up the Royal March. Leaving the station, they boarded the mayor’s carriage and crossed the city to the cathedral as the crowds honored the royal family with shouts of “
Viva
!” Security forces had scoured the entire route beforehand. After the perfunctory
Te Deum
and the subsequent tour of the city’s other emblematic church, La Basílica de la Merced, the infantes had headed for the Captaincy General, where their rooms had been prepared, lodgings which could hardly be called luxurious. Barcelona had no royal palace to accommodate crowned heads and their relations when visiting the city ever since the building near the port, which had once welcomed noble visitors, burned to the ground in 1875. In fact, when the Queen Regent María Cristina and Alfonso XIII, then two years of age, were in the city for the 1888 World’s Fair, they had to stay at the city hall.
    From the balcony of the Captaincy building, the infantes watched a parade featuring brigades of infantry regiments from Vergara, rifle battalions from Barcelona, and dragoons from Santiago, Montesa, and Numancia. In the afternoon the infantes had visited Tibidabo mountain.
    I had followed them everywhere since the editor of
El Noticiero Universal
, Julián Pérez Carrasco, had asked me to take charge of all the information, as was often the case when monarchs or other high-ranking national leaders visited Barcelona. In addition to theater reviews, I was usually assigned feature articles rather than covering events on the street, but certain occasions merited exceptions. The paper’s management toed a conservative and decidedly pro-Alfonso line, and both my political background as a member in my youth of
Las Juventudes Monárquicas
and my strong contacts in Madrid inspired the owner’s trust in me. The same could not be said of some of my fellow journalists who, while capable, were definitely more left-leaning. As my practice was still just getting off the ground, it was not difficult for me to balance my different activities.
    There was nothing like a royal visit to inspire and stir up social competition between Barcelona’s best families. The infantes’ evening began in the halls of The Ritz, inaugurated just months before.