Infanta of Spain Eulalia

“ It is necessary, first of all, to simplify the causes of happiness. To illustrate my doctrine, I ask everyone to imagine the idyll in its true form, that is to say, as being the perfect presentment of the sentiment of love. Simplicity, whether in personal tastes, in the affections, or in daily actions, is the great secret of happiness.
With our nature, however justifiable it may be to acquaint ourselves with partial and transitory satisfactions, we cannot build up happiness on so fragile a foundation. Fortune is unstable; notoriety, whatever its cause, fades with time ”

“ It is the life of a little family isolated by an impervious etiquette from the immensities of life that are about it. One can read, and hear, and be aware of the life of the nation at second hand; one can not approach it intimately. And the little family revolves upon itself, with its own gossip, its own scandal, its own jealousies and ambitions, its own jokes, and its own quarrels, in a kind of royal cloister, surrounded by invisible walls. ”

“ Morality is a science, say some; morality is an art, say others; for many idealists it remains a revanche of reason, and M. Rodrigues sees in it the will which binds itself and which we bind. “Individual liberty,” he says, “if it exists, only plays a part on the second plane; in practice it signifies little when humanity in its entirety is considered. Bound to an organism, and still more to society, the psychological or moral consciousness, when it draws inspiration from within itself, finds there in effect what its milieu has placed there. ”

“ This was the testimony to the charm of Norway which Queen Maud gave me, when I saw her in her little home near Christiania in the autumn of 1913. She spoke with enthusiasm of her adopted country, and I was not in the least surprised, for Norway is undoubtedly the happiest and most progressive country in Europe. Indeed, if anybody wants to know what life will be like in the good time that is coming, when Capitalism will be dead and Democracy triumphant on both sides of the Atlantic, let him go to Norway and study its institutions and the life of its people. ”

“ For a man, a woman friend is everything; yet his feeling for her is the purest in the world, the affection which asks nothing in return.
Yet too great intimacy may kill friendship, which—to quote Emerson again—follows the laws of divine necessity; unless the things of daily life have become of common interest between the friends. But even then the friendship should be in some sort kept in a shrine apart lest it fall into the commonplace. ”

“ I could get no divorce, because divorce is not possible to any one in Spain—least of all to an Infanta—but I was at liberty to live my life in my own way, and that satisfied me.
When my mother died, I was able to get wholly clear of the formalities of Court life, and I left the Palais to rent an apartment for myself where I could live like a private person, with my maids, without even a lady-in-waiting. I bought a few acres of land on the seashore of my beloved Normandy, and built myself a summer cottage cooled by the happy breezes that I had known as a child. ”

“ The mass of the people, whose one instinct in former times was the bare preservation of life, is on the way to emancipation; the pressure from beneath is mounting like a wave, leaping upward to the social strata where hitherto the monopoly of lucre and jobbery has been jealously held; the workmen’s associations, in their war against capital, want themselves to capitalise; members of the working class, with growing improvement in education, are entering the professional field ”

“ To know the Grand Dukes and Grand Duchesses is to realise that they neither understand the aspirations of the democracy nor sympathise with them, for, reflecting the glory of Autocracy they are more firmly convinced than any other Royal persons in Europe that a gulf divides them from the rest of mankind. And this conviction is so deep that they appear to believe that the most ordinary actions are ennobled by the mere fact that they are performed by persons in whose veins flows the Imperial blood. ”

“ It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap. For, when men shall meet as they ought, each a benefactor, a shower of stars, clothed with thoughts, with deeds, with accomplishments, it should be a festival of Nature which all things announce. Of such friendship, love in the sexes is the first symbol, as all other things are symbols of love. ”

“ But as soon as we arrived at the Spanish port of Santander I forgot everything in the excitement of a reception that amounted to a carnival. With a staff of officers and dignitaries in uniform, and a troop of cavalry as escort, we were driven in an open carriage, drawn by four horses, through streets of which I could not see the fronts of the houses—they were so covered with the reds and yellows of flags and bunting that were dazzling in the vivid sunlight of Spain. ”

“ It must be said that the reasons for marriage are not the same as they were in the old days, when the bond was indissoluble, based on the instinct of ownership, on the government of a community. Besides, the marriage for love, the only one worthy of respect, has destroyed the original idea of the association, and, unable to guarantee its own continuance, calls for an adjustment of responsibilities by means of the law, so that the man shall no longer be the brutal master, and the woman—though she be more moral, more virtuous, and more temperate than he—humiliated and degraded. ”

“ In the present Tsar, Nicholas II., one finds a type of sovereign not only different from either King Edward or the Kaiser, but, in my experience, unique. Sovereigns may have moments of an affectionate emotion; they rarely have consistent tenderness. In their most intimate relations of family life they are apt to resume suddenly the frigid tones of royalty; and I have seen a king, talking even with his mother, get himself unexpectedly into his royal manner and speak as stiffly as if he were giving his mind to some lower breed of human being. ”

“ DOMESTIC SERVICE Since the disappearance of slavery, domestic service has taken on new forms—variable, oppressive—and now it seems likely to disappear altogether. The terms, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, misunderstood by some, misconstrued by others, have created great disquietude in society. The servant of former days—the wage-earning man or woman—who formed an integrant part of the family, exists no longer, and those succeeding have changed the old ways and manners to the point of rendering them unacceptable—from the time when attachment disappeared before a false conception of liberty. ”

“ What is one to expect of a man married in aversion to some foreign princess whom he is forced to take into his life for reasons of State that do not make her either beautiful to look at, or intelligent to talk to, or congenial to live with? If people will not allow a king to enjoy even the ordinary temptations to be virtuous, why should they exclaim if he seeks, outside of marriage, the happinesses of personal intercourse that are denied him in a wife? ”

“ Certainly, Don Juan and Ninon de Lenclos could not have been friends; but it is equally certain that a beautiful woman may win the purest friendship of a charming man, for friendship between man and woman springs from a train of circumstances which lead them into soul fellowship, the sharing of similar tastes, and an affection entirely of the spirit. The constant interchange of high thought, the brotherly and sisterly tone of the relationship, safeguard the friends against becoming lovers. ”

“ One good thing the war will leave in its train is a recurrence of simplicity. It cannot but be that the awful costliness of it all will reduce the means left for wastefulness in living. I wish the larger nations—and especially England and America—would study the life of the Scandinavian towns and see how much preferable is their simpler life, how much happier folk are when there is not this greed for gold, which takes up all one’s time and makes men forget the joy and the meaning of life while they are earning and cheating and hoarding. ”

“ By maturing the popular mind, by improved education, the time will come—in some far-distant future—when man will need no other dogma than that natural one which is faith in himself, without which he does not (consciously) exist.
On the day when religion shall no longer serve to govern morals, it will be useless. For many it is already a dead letter. That matters nothing in the case of those whose morality, I repeat, is based on reason; but how regrettable when it is a question of persons of inferior intelligence who, without fixed rules, are unable to attain the perception of good and evil! ”

“ The lives of these men, who are kings in fact as well as in name, are as full and interesting as the life of any one who has work to do and power to do it. They have something to compensate them for the restrictions of grandeur and the cramping stiffnesses of pomp. Their dignity has cause. Their isolation is inevitable. But, for every one of these, there are hundreds of little princes and princesses, grand dukes and archdukes, and such minor personages of royal blood, who are less free in their lives than kings are and have nothing to occupy their mental idleness. ”

“ It has been said that it is enough for a woman to be beautiful and to be a mother. That is altogether absurd nonsense. The woman has a right to the complete development of her faculties, a right to bring into play all the resources of her being. Noble women have proved that, quite apart from maternity, they are fit to walk in the immortal footsteps of heroes, artists and thinkers, and every day we see women ”

“ Education, and education alone, can establish the victory of democracy.
From my home in the capital of a great people, in whose motto is enshrined a profound belief in the brotherhood of mankind and the essential equality of prince and peasant, I look out over Europe and see the decay of old institutions and the movements which are slowly but certainly reducing those monarchs who still retain power to the position of decorative figureheads. ”

“ Every action entails reaction, every sorrow and every joy has its degree in the social scale. The man born rich will suffer more through the misery created by ruin than the poor man whose pockets are always empty. One has nothing to envy the other.
“No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him,” says Burke. Fear is the punishment of the unjust. The law of{191} compensation is not that of indifference, for, without the moral sense no excuse is found for error, and there is no satisfaction for a fault grown to a habit. ”