On the third day after the massacre, a note from an intimate friend obliged me to cross the greatest part of the town; but though my way lay through the principal streets of Madrid, the number of Spaniards I met, did not literally amount to six. In every street and square of any note I found a strong guard of French infantry, lying beside their arms on the pavement, except the sentinel, who paced up and down at a short distance. A feeling of mortified pride mixed itself with the sense of insecurity which I experienced on my approaching these parties of foreign soldiers, whose presence had made a desert of our capital. Gliding by the opposite side of the street, I passed them without lifting my eyes from the ground. Once I looked straight in the face of an inferior officer--a serjeant I believe, wearing the cross of the _Legion d’honneur_--who, taking it as an insult, loaded me with curses, accompanied with threats and the most abusive language. The Puerta del Sol, that favourite lounge of the Madrid people, was now the _bivouac_ of a French division of infantry and cavalry, with two twelve-pounders facing every leading street. Not a shop was open, and not a voice heard but such as grated the ear with a foreign accent. On my return home, a feeling of deep melancholy had seized upon me, to which the troubles of my past life were lighter than a feather in the scale of happiness and misery. I confined myself to the house for several days, a prey to the most harassing anxiety. What course to take in the present crisis, was a question for which I was not prepared, and in which no fact, no conjecture could lead me. My friend, the friend for whose sake alone I had changed my residence, had a mortal aversion to Seville--that town where he could not avoid acting in a detested capacity.[53] Some wild visions of freedom from his religious fetters, had been playing across his troubled mind, while the French approached Madrid; and though he now looked on their conduct with the most decided abhorrence, still he could hardly persuade himself to escape from the French bayonets, which he seemed to dread less than Spanish bigotry. [53] That of a Catholic Clergyman. But my mind has dwelt too long on a painful subject, and I hope you will excuse me if I put off the conclusion till another Letter. LETTER XIII. _Seville, July 30, 1808._