The Lowells reached Madrid on the fourteenth of August, and on the eighteenth of the month Lowell was presented at court, the King being at his summer residence at La Granja, about fifty miles from Madrid. He has given a brief narrative of the ceremony[69] which was his initiation into diplomatic life, and, as we have seen, he began at once his work at the legation, insisting upon using his Spanish in all negotiations. But the first few weeks in Madrid were anything but agreeable, since besides the worries of house-hunting he was tortured with gout, which after a couple of months permitted him to hobble to the office, only if he put on large walking shoes and handled a crutch. Meantime he had found a pleasant apartment at No. 7 Cuesta de Santo Domingo, with a large endowment of sunshine. Indeed, the sunshine of Spain warmed his spirits thoroughly. “The weather,” he writes, “is beyond any I ever saw. I got out on the balcony this morning, and there was all the warmth and, what is more, all the freshness and hopefulness of spring.” And to Mr. Longfellow: “It beats Italy. Such limpidity of sky!” After he was well adjusted in his new quarters, he wrote: “Our household is truly _Complutensian_. Our cook is an old Alsacian woman, toothless as one of Gil Blas’s robbers. She speaks French, German, Spanish, and perhaps Arabic, for she lived eight years in Algeria. Our chambermaid, Pepa, is a brown-yellow Spaniard with an immense wad of false hair on the back of her head, like all her class here. My valet and factotum is an Italian from Trieste, speaking French, English, and Spanish. His wife (Fanny’s maid) is a Parisienne. Since Babel there have been few such chances for learning the languages. My man has four names according to the tongue I address him in, Giacomo, Santiago, Jacques, James. With Carolina I sometimes jabber a little German. Our rooms are not yet furnished, though we have been in them seven weeks. Except the dining-room. We bought ten old chairs, highbacked and covered with a flowered plush, which oddly enough exactly matched our wall-paper. They are handsome, and I believe were just finished when I bought ’em (period of Philip II.). However, they are worm-eaten, which has a savor of authenticity about it, and the maker has been more successful in reproducing the past than Mareschal McMahon seems to be. By the time I get them home, they will be genuine old Spanish chairs at any rate, and there is such a thing as considering too nicely.”