shelter I am in to the Hotel Inglaterra, to double all rates. We don’t do anything half-way. Then for any left who have not been beatified by the actual Resurrection taking place before their eyes (in a square, you can’t miss it, turn left here, yes, right near the Public Conveniences) there follows a Fair of monstrous and pagan proportions. Drinking and bangles in the ears are in order; broughams, surreys, coupés fairly dripping Girls (24 count them 24) in costumes of ‘Old Spain’ wheel through any streets wide enough to accomodate them (the carriages I mean) and The People, for five days, dream that Charles V is king, and that the Spanish Armada will win for Our Side . . . (it was launched, you know, in 1588 by Philip II, and fanatic is a dull word for him, in an effort to crush Protestantism as it flowered in England; I do believe that the people here still hold the destruction of the Armada against Me).
But one immensely important feature of the Fair: a bullfight every day, and some of the best toreros in the country, which makes me hope to manage to stay, in spite of the mayor, who knows a good thing when he sees it, and continues his hospitible legislation.
Did I write you? about a hysterical letter I had from our Barney-in-London, setting out for here on an apple-green bicycle? Oh, how I shall miss it, how I had looked forward to seeing him; because, quite reasonably, he reformed toward the last and retracted; in this form, that he was about to set out for Perpignon (a French town in the Pyrenees, just over the border), and could I meet him there for a week; even, imagine, offering to wire me the fare there and back! But no; he, seeing the ornate arrangement of difficulties before one entering Spain, has no notion of what lies before one who wishes to leave, especially if that one wishes to return. And so that is lost, and I am sad about it. You may imagine how I had pictured the two of us here,
menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment . . .
Other civilised friends have decamped, in the direction of Paris Fr., which, I must confess, begins to look more like the fountainhead daily. But I feel that this land has a few more disasters to be enjoyed before abandonment, perhaps the summer . . .
I am glad to read in your letter that things are going well for you; it all (NY) seems a great distance away—far from this funny-house, which I have just thrown into an uproar by asking for Hot water and a ‘bath’, and pleading, demanding, that a lock, a hook, a catch, anything, be put on the door of the water-closet.
with love,
W.
Becky Sharp: Vanity Fair, chap. 41.
TVA: Tennessee Valley Authority, the hydroelectric power company established, like the Hoover Dam, during the Depression.
“Tote dat barge . . . Lif’ dat bale”: from the song “Ol’ Man River,” from the musical Showboat
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