Within her heroic memory, within her heroic land, Spain wanders unobtrusively and scatheless. She does not forget nor remember. Upon the surface of her life, intellect pricks, passion stirs, action clamors. But her depths are limpid in a dark and dreamless slumber.... _c. Madrid_ In the eighteenth century one Spaniard out of three is an ecclesiastic, a noble or a servant. (This takes no toll of rogues and beggars.) The special rights of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia are annulled. Those of the Basques are a dead letter, although they linger on the books until the Carlist wars. Spain has become a receding unity, under a single monarch. Her American possessions wait only the full tide of growth in order to set loose. Castile’s will has leveled Spain. Her huertas give wine and fruit just in the amount to balance the desert dearth about them. Her high towns are fossils of recalcitrance, or backfires smoldering against each other. Although the diapason of will has its home in every Spanish soul, no one city is its symbol. Toledo, Avila, Seville, Barcelona, Jaca, Murcia, Mérida, Oviedo ... they bespeak their pasts, their individual dynamisms, whose sum is zero. To be the symbol of this sum--Spain’s tragic consummation--there must be a modern city. Madrid stands for the ultimate achievement--and for none of its factors. It is the capital of Spain--and of no old Spanish region. It is a pleasing town. Its populous quarters bespeak the eighteenth century. The cabs blotched under gas-lamps, the shuttered stores, the sumptuous theaters, the cobbled streets and alleys holding a bar, a flower-stand, a beggar, recall old prints of Paris. The reminiscent age of Balzac and of Daumier has taken refuge here. In Paris, the twentieth century has jostled out the last; it seems to keep better terms with the Paris of Louis XIV, of Henri IV, even of François Villon than it does with the Paris of Voltaire. But in Madrid, the eighteenth century has mellowed to the next; they strike together a plaintive reminiscence against the modern city: the Madrid of broad Avenidas, of the Gran Via, of dapper taxicabs and monumental banks. This Madrid is pleasant also: it might be almost any provincial capital of central Europe. Madrid is noisy. In the modern streets, the chauffeurs toot as if they had just discovered horns and were intent, like children, to break the new toy ere bedtime. In the older, more populous streets there is a texture of ancient voices. Shut your eyes and the windowed walls of Europe fade away: the breath of the desert and the steeps of the mountain north, the watery chatter of the Catalan, the grunt of the Aragonese, the gracious Andalusian palaver merge into a music of the air and make Madrid a maze of memory.