TRANSLATION: The Court of Carlos IV
The second book in the Episodios Nacionales of Spain
THE COURT OF CARLOS IV by Benito Pérez Galdós.
The second volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain
The Court of Carlos IV plunges young Gabriel Araceli into the treacherous world of Madrid’s theatrical and aristocratic circles on the eve of Spain’s greatest political crisis. It is 1807, and Gabriel, now sixteen, serves as errand boy and general factotum to Pepita González, a spirited actress at the Teatro del Príncipe. Through her, he enters a dazzling and corrupt world: rival actresses, jealous leading men, aristocratic patrons whose drawing rooms double as nests of political conspiracy, and the great tragedian Isidoro Máiquez, whose volcanic temper and ill-fated passions drive much of the novel’s action.
Two women dominate Gabriel’s orbit. Lesbia, a beautiful young duchess with an angelic face and faithless heart, plays men against one another with practiced ease. Amaranta, a noblewoman of striking beauty and genuine moral substance, takes a mysterious interest in Gabriel and draws him into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the royal family. When the Prince of Asturias conspires against his own parents, Carlos IV and Queen María Luisa, Gabriel finds himself carrying secret letters and navigating a labyrinth of espionage, jealousy, and betrayal that he barely understands.
At the novel’s center is a brilliantly staged private theatrical performance of Othello, in which the passions on stage mirror and ignite the real jealousies of the performers. Máiquez, half-mad with love for the inconstant Lesbia, nearly strangles Amaranta during the performance. The theatrical world and the political world collide as the conspiracy of El Escorial unfolds in the background, with Fernando plotting against his father, Napoleon’s agents pulling strings, and every aristocrat in Madrid choosing sides.
Pérez Galdós expertly weaves political history, theatrical comedy, romantic intrigue, and sharp social observation into a panoramic portrait of a Spain sleepwalking toward catastrophe. The novel is at once a comedy of manners, a political thriller, and a coming-of-age story, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.
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About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written; only 8 of its 46 volumes have ever been translated into English. Pérez Galdós was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times but never won.
Excerpt
In the course of this faithful history my exploits will emerge, and with them the diverse and complex services I rendered. For now I shall introduce my mistress, the peerless Pepita González, omitting nothing that might convey a perfect idea of the world in which she lived.
My mistress was a young woman more graceful than beautiful, though this first quality shone in her person so superlatively that it presented her as perfect without her being so. Everything that in the physical realm is called beauty and all that in the moral bears the name of expression, charm, coquetry, allure, and the rest, was concentrated in her dark eyes, which were capable by themselves of saying with a single glance more than Ovid said in his poem on the art that is never learned and always known. Before the eyes of my mistress, that talk of combustible asps and flaming optical discharges which Cañizares and Añorbe applied to the gazes of their heroines ceased to be hyperbole.
Generally, of the people we knew in our childhood we remember either the most marked features of their person or some other trait which, despite being quite insignificant, remains engraved indelibly in our memory. This happens to me with the memory of la González. When I bring her to mind, two things present themselves with the utmost clarity: her incomparable eyes, and the tap-tap of her shoes, those abbreviated prisons of her lovely pedestals, as Valladares or Moncín would have said.
I do not know whether this will suffice for you to form an idea of so winning a woman. I, in remembering her, see those great dark eyes whose glances could raise the dead, and hear the tip-tap of her light step. This is enough to resurrect her in the dark precinct of my imagination, and there can be no doubt — it is she. I realize now that there was no dress, nor mantilla, nor ribbon, nor ornament that did not become her wonderfully; I realize too that her movements possessed a special grace, a certain indefinable something, an enchantment that might be expressed when the language acquires the richness to designate with a single word both malice and modesty, both reserve and provocation. This rarest of contradictions lies in the fact that nothing is more hypocritical than certain forms of composure, or else that cunning has discovered the best way to conquer modesty is to imitate it.
But whatever the case, what is certain is that la González electrified the public with the graceful sway of her body, her beautiful voice, her pathetic declamation in sentimental works, and her inexhaustible wit in comic ones. She triumphed equally whenever she was seen in the street by the throng of her admirers and mosqueteros, whether going to the bulls in a calash or a hired cab, or leaving the theatre in a sedan chair. The moment they saw her smiling face appear at the little window, framed by the lace of her white mantilla, they acclaimed her with shouts and clapping, saying, “There goes all the grace in the world! Long live the salt of Spain!” and other phrases of that kind. These ovations left them very satisfied, and also her — which is to say us, for servants always appropriate the triumphs of their masters.
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