Gautier, Théophile, 1811-1872 -- Travel -- Spain; Spain -- Description and travel; Spain -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
coincidence, that will be the very time when railways will be in
full activity. What will be the good of making a long journey at
the rate of ten leagues an hour, to go and look at a number of
streets lighted, like the Rue de la Paix, with gas, and full of
well-to-do citizens? We do not think that it was for this that
Nature modelled each country in a different shape, supplied it
with plants peculiar to itself, and peopled the world with races
dissimilar to each other in conformation, colour, and language.
It is giving a bad interpretation to the meaning for which the
world was created, to wish it to force the same livery on men
of every climate; and yet this is one of the errors of European
civilization: a coat with long narrow tails makes a man look
much uglier than any other costume would, and keeps him quite as
barbarous. The poor Turks of Sultan Mahmoud have certainly cut a
fine figure since the reform made in their old Asiatic costume, and
the progress of knowledge among them has been prodigious indeed!
In order to reach the parade, you must go along the Carrera del
Darro and cross the Plaza del Teatro, where there is a funereal
column raised to the memory of Joaquin Maïquez by Julian Romea,
Matilda Diez, and other dramatic _artistes_: the façade of the
Arsenal, a structure of bad taste, besmeared with yellow and
decorated with statues of grenadiers painted mouse-grey, looks on
the square.
The Alameda of Granada is certainly one of the most agreeable
places in the world; it is called the _Saloon_, a singular name
for a parade; fancy a long walk furnished with several rows of
trees of a verdancy unique in Spain, and terminating at each end
by a monumental fountain, the top basins of which support on
their shoulders aquatic gods, curious by their deformity, and
delightfully barbarous. These fountains, contrary to the custom of
such constructions, throw out the water in large sheets, which,
evaporating in the form of fine rain and mist, spreads around
a most delicious coolness. In the side walks run streams of
crystalline transparency, encased in beds of different coloured
pebbles. A large parterre, ornamented with jets of water and
crowded with shrubs and flowers, myrtles, roses, jasmines, with all
the riches, in fact, of the Granadian Flora, occupies the space
between the Saloon and the Xenil, and stretches as far as the
bridge constructed by General Sebastiani at the time of the French
invasion. The Xenil runs from the Sierra Neveda in its marble bed,
through woods of laurel of the most incomparable beauty. Glass and
crystal form comparisons too opaque and too thick to give a true
idea of the purity of the water which, but the evening before,
was still flowing in sheets of silver on the white shoulders of
the Sierra Neveda. It is like a torrent of diamonds in a state of
fusion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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