All there was good of her is interred with her bones. Her
frailties live on in scandalized history.
Twice, it is said, the coffin of the emperor has been opened by curious
hands,--by Philip IV., who found the corpse of his great ancestor
intact, and observed to the courtier at his elbow, "An honest body, Don
Luis!" and again by the Ministers of State and Fomento in the spring of
1870, who started back aghast when the coffin-lid was lifted and
disclosed the grim face of the Burgess of Ghent, just as Titian painted
him,--the keen, bold face of a world-stealer.
I do not know if Philip's funeral urn was ever opened. He stayed above
ground too long as it was, and it is probable that people have never
cared to look upon his face again. All that was human had died out of
him years before his actual demise, and death seemed not to consider it
worth while to carry off a vampire. Go into the little apartment where
his last days were passed; a wooden table and book-shelf, one arm-chair
and two stools--the one upholstered with cloth for winter, the other
with tin for summer--on which he rested his gouty leg, and a low chair
for a secretary,--this was all the furniture he used. The rooms are not
larger than cupboards, low and dark. The little oratory where he died
looks out upon the high altar of the Temple. In a living death, as if by
an awful anticipation of the common lot it was ordained that in the
flesh he should know corruption, he lay waiting his summons hourly for
fifty-three days.
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