Arnaud and the rest of the cool gamblers were
playing their last desperate stake on that fatal night, really persuaded
himself that the work was his, and that _he_ had saved society. That the
fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that
the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should
take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them
all,--there is the true miracle.
We must confess to a special fancy for Philip II. He was so true a king,
so vain, so superstitious, so mean and cruel, it is probable so great a
king never lived. Nothing could be more royal than the way he
distributed his gratitude for the victory on St. Lawrence's day. To
Count Egmont, whose splendid courage and loyalty gained him the battle,
he gave ignominy and death on the scaffold; and to exhibit a gratitude
to a myth which he was too mean to feel to a man, he built to San
Lorenzo that stupendous mass of granite which is to-day the visible
demonstration of the might and the weakness of Philip and his age.
He called it the Monastery of San Lorenzo el Real, but the nomenclature
of the great has no authority with the people. It was built on a site
once covered with cinder-heaps from a long abandoned iron-mine, and so
it was called in common speech the Escorial. The royal seat of San
Ildefonso can gain from the general public no higher name than La
Granja, the Farm.
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