I had a literary friend in London, and as he once returned to his residence by Regent's Park after a long walk, and asked had anyone called during his absence, the housekeeper replied "No;" but, correcting herself, added, "leastways, nobody, sir, except one of them 'ere Spanish kings!" The Spanish king who was of no consequence was one of the race of Pretenders, and had the proud blood of countless generations of thick-lipped Bourbons meandering through his veins. In the February of 1873, from which my personal knowledge of Spain dates, there were quite a number of these Spanish kings on the carpet. Amadeus, the Italian, had vacated the throne on the 11th, in a message which substantially affirmed that the peaceful government of Spain was hopeless--his Majesty gave it up as a bad job--and the two Chambers, combining as the sovereign Cortes, proclaimed the Republic by a majority of four to one. Of the aspirants to the crown there were notably Don Carlos Maria de los Dolores, the legitimate heir--if there be any virtue in legitimacy--and Don Alfonso, only son of the deposed Isabella, a boy of fifteen, at school at Vienna, a legitimate claimant if the abolition of the Salic law in 1830 be acknowledged. There was one who might have been a king, but sensibly declined the proffered honour, in the person of the ancient Espartero, Duke of Victory, Prince of Vergara; and there was a Prussian princeling, a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who had been nominated king in the midsummer of 1870, and whose nomination afforded the coveted pretext for the war between France and Germany. Besides, every Captain-General in the country--and the allowance is five--was a king _in prospectu_, not to mention the multifarious leaders of the many parties in the Congress, all of whom were qualified to be kings in their own conceit. Spain being thus suffering from a plethora of kings--as one result of which the Republic existed--it struck those who had commissioned me to chronicle the humours of besieged Paris that I might find some material for instructive and entertaining writing at the other side of the Pyrenees.