Within the high walls In these
degenerate days Saragossa has taken to itself a suburb—the
first and deadliest sign of a city’s progress.
Thirty years ago, however, Torrero did not exist,
and those terrible erections of white stone and plaster
which now disfigure the high land to the south of the
city had not yet burst upon the calm of ancient architectural
Spain. Here, on Monte Torrero, stood an old convent,
now turned into a barrack. Here also, amid the
trees of the ancient gardens, rises the rounded dome
of the church of San Fernando.
Close by, and at a slightly higher level, curves the
Canal Imperial, 400 years old, and not yet finished;
assuredly conceived by a Moorish love of clear water
in high places, but left to Spanish enterprise and
in completeness when the Moors had departed.
Beyond the convent walls, the canal winds round the
slope of the brown hill, marking a distinctive line
between the outer desert and the green oasis of Saragossa.
Just within the border line of the oasis, just below
the canal, on the sunny slope, lies the long low house
of the Convent School of the Sisters of the True Faith.
Here, amid the quiet of orchards—white
in spring with blossom, the haunt of countless nightingales,
heavy with fruit in autumn, at all times the home of
a luxuriant vegetation—history has surged
to and fro, like the tides drawn hither and thither,
rising and falling according to the dictates of a
far-off planet. And the moon of this tide is Rome.
For the Sisters of the True Faith are a Jesuit corporation,
and their Convent School is, now a convent, now a
school, as the tide may rise or fall. The ebb
first came in 1555, when Spain threw out the Jesuits.
The flow was at its height so late as 1814, when Ferdinand
VII—a Bourbon, of course—restored
Jesuitism and the Inquisition at one stroke. And
before and after, and through all these times, the
tide of prosperity has risen and fallen, has sapped
and sagged and undermined with a noiseless energy
which the outer world only half suspects.
In 1835 this same long, low, quiet house amid the
fruit-trees was sacked by the furious populace, and
more than one Sister of the True Faith, it is whispered,
was beaten to the ground as she fled shrieking down
the hill. In 1836 all monastic orders were rigidly
suppressed by Mendizabal, minister to Queen Christina.
In 1851 they were all allowed to live again by the
same Queen’s daughter, Isabel II. So wags
this world into which there came nineteen hundred
years ago not peace, but a sword; a world all stirred
about by a reformed rake of Spain who, in his own words,
came “to send fire throughout the earth;”
whose motto was, “Ignem veni metteri in terram,
et quid volo nisi ut accendatur.”
