These are very trivial matters to recall, but consider that it is one of the chief pleasures of most royal persons to dress themselves in costume and play the parts of resplendent figure-heads that have never been allowed to think, or see, or know anything for themselves. The small restraints against which a healthy body made me struggle in infancy were the attempted beginnings of those impassable walls of isolation and ignorance and inexperience from which, in later years, I should never have escaped.
When my sisters and I were sent as day-scholars to the convent of the Sacré Cœur, my real escape began. We wore the dark blue uniforms of the school, as all the girls did, and we were treated exactly as the others were. We studied in the common classrooms and played with our class-mates at the recreation hour in the convent grounds. How can I tell how eagerly I went to school in the mornings with the governess who took us through the streets? Or how happily tired I came home at night after all the study and play and little incidents of the class-room that had filled the day? I would be so tired that I would fall asleep at the formal dinner that was served for my mother and her guests of honour in the evening; and the servants would have to carry me to bed. But I would be awake next morning very early, before any one else in the Palais, in haste to be off again to school.
If we had remained in Spain I should never have been allowed such freedom. They would have brought tutors and governesses to teach us in the palace. I should never have been allowed school companions like those we had in Paris. It was for this that I have to thank the revolution.
I have one recollection of these days that is quaint. My sister had come to school wearing earrings; and a nun, telling her that earrings were forbidden in the convent, attempted to take them off. In freeing one she tore my sister’s ear accidentally, so that it bled, and I was very angry and I wanted to strike the nun. When we spoke of this at home to a lady-in-waiting, she reproved me, saying that it would be “a double sin” to strike a nun. I replied that I would not strike any one except to give back as good as I got. “Well,” she said, “you will never have to strike any one, for no one can strike you.” “Why not?” She answered, because I was “a royalty.” “Then,” I said to myself, “as long as I live I shall never have a good fight!” And this made me so sad that I remember it yet, with a sort of sinking, as one remembers something irreparable that made a great difference to one’s outlook on life.