V


It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most
distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the
dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare
with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more
determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed
ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of
civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any
circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was
a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the
time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go
and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when
the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the
arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we
would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away.
This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of
piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we
prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday
afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on
Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing
concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising
that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could
not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the
arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together