Saturday, 15 October 1881

I spent the day at the Escorial¹ with my aunt, whom it bored, and who, while maintaining an indifferent demeanour, was trying to cheat — had I not heard the guide speak of them, she would have spirited the vaults away from me… so as not to tire me, and besides coffins — it is dreadful. What a bore to make this journey like that! In any case.

I saw as in a dream that immense block of granite, dark, sad, grandiose. Well, I find it superb — that majestic melancholy is a charm. The palace takes the form of the gridiron of St Lawrence² (consult the guidebooks), which gives it a somewhat barracks-like air — excuse the word — but it rises above a scorched, dark countryside rolling like a sea, and produces a profound impression: those granite walls as thick as a Paris house, those cloisters, columns, galleries, terraces, green ornamental pools, those courtyards. It is cold, they say — it is sad, yes — but it is a relief from the irritating silhouettes of Toledo.

Having visited the royal apartments, covered with tapestries rather ugly and rather garish… Yet the King’s study is a jewel — it has doors of inlaid wood with ornaments of polished iron and pure gold… Then a salon-oratory in embroidered silk — ravishing.

What a contrast with the cell of Philip II! That tyrant inhabited a sort of bare and poor cell opening onto a kind of low chapel of marble, which itself opened onto the church. From his bed he could see the altar and hear the Mass. I myself cannot properly remember the galleries, staircases, cloisters they lead one through — it is so vast! — and those long galleries with immense windows closed by coffered wooden shutters, massive doors devoid of ornament.

The church is of admirable simplicity — its vaults, grandiose and bare, are of an altogether imposing effect. The royal vault and the staircases leading down to it, all in various marbles, are of very great richness.

The coffins are in Toledo marble with repoussé copper ornaments. It is splendid. There remain only five spaces — and to think that the innocent Isabelle de Paris³ will rest in that dark and magnificent vault. The touching Mercedes⁴ waits in a small lateral chapel for the vault of the infantes and of queens without children to be rebuilt.

The choir enclosure⁵ is in wood without carving, but there is in the centre a marvellous lectern with books as tall as myself.

The library — oh! There are manuscripts I admired at length, though I know little about them…

And you want me to prefer prettiness to this dark majesty! What character, what sobriety — and how far we are from those indescribable heaps of ornaments in profusion and the brittle solemnities of Toledo.

Then they take you through a park where Alfonso hunts rabbits and have you visit the pavilion built in 1781, I believe.⁶ A jewel. The staircases and wall surfaces in coloured marbles, and a quantity of small drawing rooms and cabinets hung with paintings — fine paintings even — or with pale silks, deliciously faded, with ravishing embroideries of blue and rose flowers; the green, harmoniously faded, stands out delicately against a white that has become an incomparable ivory tone. Those small drawing rooms of faded white or barely blue satin with pale gold satin, ceilings deliciously painted or inlaid — it is enough to turn one’s head. There is a cabinet ornamented with embroidered pictures on the hangings — from a few steps away one would say they were paintings. And then ivories and miraculous pastes of glass.

Ah! Yesterday evening Escobar accompanied us to the circus.

Pollack came this evening — he cannot understand that I do not adore Toledo. But I return there on Monday.