With the arrival of March came a new horror of heat; and as the summer progressed it seemed impossible to live through each new day. The sun was unendurable. The soldiers on guard had to be changed every quarter of an hour, and many of them were taken from their posts fainting. The birds fell dead from the trees in the garden. The air was full of an odour of melting asphalt, and even at night the pavements would be so hot that they would burn the soles of the shoes. Indoors the sealing-wax would melt on your writing-desk. And the mosquitoes! To study, or to write, we had to sit under mosquito bars, or we would be so pestered that we could not work. I was unable to eat. I lived on lemon and water, ill with the heat and with longing for the cool, green freedom of our country summers in Normandy--with the grey-blue skies and the grey-green fields, and the shade of the deep, hedge-hidden byways. How I yearned for them! As one yearns for the comfort of health in the semi-delirious miseries of fever! I would say to myself, “Oh, if Spain would only have another revolution!” Then one of my sisters, who was less robust than I, became seriously prostrated. They were afraid that I, too, might collapse, because I would not let them give me food. My mother had quarrelled with my brother about some political differences, and she wished to take us to France; but since the King was unmarried, and one of us--or one of our children--might inherit the throne, it was not permitted to us to leave Spain, for fear of foreign influences. We were prisoners for life! It was decided that we should join our brother in Madrid, and our mother should go away to France without us. I was never to live with her again, but I parted from her without anxiety, since at last I had my wish--to be with my brother. CHAPTER III PULLING THE STRINGS OF SOVEREIGNTY If our fortunes had carried us directly from Paris to stay with my brother in the palace of Madrid, perhaps I should have found myself still caged there. But freedom is only by comparison; and, after my unhappiness in the Alcazar, it seemed to me now as if my life had really been given wings. Our arrival was almost private; the people in the streets, accustomed to the sight of royalty, did not make a great to-do about us (for it is chiefly curiosity that draws crowds, I find, even to see kings!), and the one thing that looked like a public decoration in our honour was the washing, which it is the custom in Madrid to hang from the street windows to dry. It was an embarrassing decoration, because the articles were, as one might say, very intimate. They made a joke for us.