“It is true, I am a queen. But I die of sadness when from the throne I look back and see nothing of what other queens see.” “Well, and what do other queens see?” “For instance, the Queen of Spain sees a series of great and glorious kings, named Recaredo, Pelayo, San Fernando, Alonso the Wise, Isabel the Catholic, Ferdinand the Catholic, Charles V., Philip II., Charles III.—and those kings had blood of hers, and seated themselves on the throne, and loved and made great the people that she loves and makes great.” “You are right, wife. But you wish to do what is impossible, and that God alone can do.” “Well, then, those impossibilities are the very things that tease and exasperate me. What is the use of being a queen, if even in the most just desires one sees herself constrained, and unable to realize them? It is a fine afternoon, for instance, and I begin to get ready to go out for a walk in the palace gardens, but a wretched little cloud appears in the sky, as though to say to one, ‘Don’t get ready!’ And when one wishes to go out, that insolent cloud begins to pour down water, and one is obliged to remain at home, disgusted and fretting. What I want is to have power enough to prevent a miserable little cloud from laughing at me.” “But, woman, don’t I tell you that this power God alone can have?” “Then I want to be God.” Juan made the sign of the cross on himself, filled with shame and horror at hearing his wife give utterance to such a thing, whose head was undoubtedly turned by the demon of ambition. But he did not wish to exasperate the poor crazed being with lessons which, had she been in her right senses, she would have deserved. “But don’t you know, child,” he said to her with sweetness, “that the fulfilment of that desire is as impossible as it is foolish? The emperor has granted us whatever we have asked, but what you want now he cannot grant.” “Still, I want you to go and see him, and say so to him; for perhaps between him and the Pope they will be able to manage it.” “But if there is and never can be more than one God, how can you be made God?” “I have always heard say that God can do everything. If the emperor consults with the Pope, and the Pope has recourse to God, then you’ll see if God, who can do everything, will disappoint them both.” “But if God cannot?” “Hold your tongue, Jew, and don’t say such awful things. God can do everything.” Juan thought it would be more prudent to abstain from contradicting his wife any further. So he retired and summoned the chief physician of the court, in order to lay before him the new and extraordinary phase which the moral malady of the queen displayed. The physician said that in his long professional career he had met with cases of mental aberration even more extraordinary than that of the queen; and insisted that, far from contradicting the august invalid, they should comply with her every wish as far as it was humanly possible.