His death seemed like the end of my own life to me. I had no longer any interest or happiness in Spain. I had no friends there, except the Duc de Montpensier and our little family. I found myself always a foreigner when I went outside the palace. I could not understand the popular religion, which is not Catholicism as it is known in other countries, but only the outward form and name of Catholicism filled with superstitions and fetishisms divorced from the moral purposes of religion. They have, for example, in Madrid, a popular feast called “_La Cara de Dios_” (“The Face of God”), when there is exposed under glass, to be kissed by the people, the handkerchief with which Christ is supposed to have wiped the bloody sweat from His face on His way to Calvary, and thereby to have imprinted on the fabric a portrait of His features, which has been miraculously preserved. In front of the church where this relic is set out, booths are erected and an all-night debauch of drinking and dancing and brawling is begun. Between carouses the people go to kiss “the Face of God,” return to their excesses, and only interrupt them to make another pilgrimage to the relic. It seemed to me that the whole religion of the common people was a sort of feast of “_La Cara de Dios_,” that profited nobody but the keepers of the shrine. I could not turn to such a religion for consolation in my grief. I could not look forward to any happiness in a Court where only my love for my brother had made the stupidities of our days endurable. I wanted to get away. But I could not get away unmarried. That was impossible. I was still engaged informally to the Duc de Montpensier’s son, Antoine d’Orléans; but now that my brother was gone I wished to break the engagement, because I had only entered into it with the idea that such a marriage would keep me near to him. My determination aroused an amazing alarm. Members of the Government came to plead with me to hold the Duc’s interest to the throne by marrying his son; if I refused, they were afraid that he would enter politics again, to the extent even of making another revolution. That was absurd. But it was not absurd that I was as fond of the Duc as if he had been my father, and he wanted me for a daughter-in-law. It was considered a necessity of State that I should marry at once in order to protect the succession. I felt as my brother had felt after the death of his first wife. I did not care.