We arrived in high spirits at the royal palace, and I was glad to find it not only gorgeous, but most comfortable. It had been built by Charles III.--as everything in Madrid seems to have been built--but my brother had had it modernised with those conveniences of heating and plumbing which our antique splendour had hitherto done without in Spain. He had allotted a whole wing to us three Infantas (my sister Pilar, my sister Paz, and I), and we each had our own maids and servants from Sevilla, so that we made quite a household. He had installed in another wing my sister the Infanta Isabel, whom I hardly knew, because she had not been with us in France during the revolution. She was to take our mother’s place towards us. She had been married at sixteen to a prince of Naples; she had lived all her life among the forms and traditions of royalty, and she was genuinely devoted to their maintenance. I should have been afraid for my new liberty if I had not foreseen that her direction over us would be tempered by my brother’s indulgence. I knew that he had as much impatience as I for what we called, jocularly, between ourselves, the “singeries” (monkey tricks) of royalty. And so I began, with great expectations, what proved to be the happiest period of my life. I was able to rise early, because my brother was always up at half-past seven, to ride in the Casa Campo for an hour, and I rode horseback with him--to my great joy. Then, at nine, we girls had our lessons while he met his Ministers. Early rising is not a Spanish habit. My mother, when she was Queen, had met her Ministers after the theatre, at midnight, and worked with them more in the nighttime than during the day. And my brother’s Ministers had protested against his nine o’clock Cabinet meetings; but he had won them to it with the smiling and tactful determination that always secured him his own way. At midday we lunched with him, the whole household together, a score at table, with ladies and gentlemen-in-waiting, officers, and aides-de-camp; but, on account of the presence of the latter, conversation was always formal. It was different on the afternoon drives. Then we were alone, for he drove himself, and I sat beside him; there were just the two servants on the rear seat, and no one to overhear us. Best of all were the visits I paid him in his apartments, where it was not considered necessary that I should be followed by a lady-in-waiting, since I was under the protection of the King. The guards only took me across the public gallery in the centre of the palace--a soldier on each side of me and an officer in front, because in this gallery some attempts had been made to kill my mother when she was Queen--and the ushers, who led me down the halls, left me when I entered my brother’s antechamber. He had collected a large library for his own use, and he made me free of it on condition that I should not tell any one. At last I had books! And more than I could read.