To this, as to all galleries and monuments under State control, the public was invited free of charge for the week to come. The response was appreciative, gentility, soldiery, ragamuffins, bevies of schoolgirls with notebooks, and families of foreigners with opera glasses grouping themselves in picturesque variety, day after day, before the art treasures of Madrid, while beggars sat in joyful squads on the steps of the museums, collecting the fees which the doorkeepers refused.
During these seven days, artistic and social festivals in honor of Velázquez abounded, not only in Madrid, but throughout Spain. Palma must needs get up, with photographs and the like, a Velázquez exposition, and Seville, insisting on her mother rights, must arrange a belated funeral, with mass and sermon and a tomb of laurels and flowers, surmounted by brushes, palette, and the cloak and helmet of the Order of Santiago. In the capital the _Circulo de Bellas Artes_ sumptuously breakfasted the artists from abroad. The dainties were spiced with speeches, guitars, ballet, gypsy songs and dances, congratulatory telegrams, and a letter posted from Parnassus by Don Diego himself. Two valuable new books on Velázquez suddenly appeared in the shop windows, and such periodicals as _La Ilustración_, _Blanco y Negro_, _La Vida Literaria_, and _El Nuevo Mundo_ vied with one another in illustrated numbers, while even the one-cent dailies came out with specials devoted to Velázquez biography and criticism. The Academy of San Fernando rendered a musical programme of Velázquez date, the Queen Regent issued five hundred invitations to an orchestral concert in the Royal Palace, and there was talk, which failed to fructify, of a grand masquerade ball, where the costumes should be copied from the Velázquez paintings and the dances should be those stepped by the court of Philip IV.
The closing ceremony of the week was the unveiling of the new statue of Velázquez. Paris owes to Fremiot an equestrian statue of the painter, who, like Shakespeare in his Paris statue, is made to look very like a Frenchman, but the horse is of the most spirited Spanish type. A younger Velázquez may be seen in Seville, at home among the orange trees, and the _Palacio de la Biblioteca y Museos Nacionales_ in Madrid shows a statue from the hand of Garcia. Still another, an arrogant, striding figure, was standing in the studio of Benlliure, ready for its journey to the Paris exposition. The tercentenary statue, by Marinas, is also true to that haughty look of Velázquez. It represents him seated, brush and palette in hand, the winds lifting from his ears those long, clustering falls of hair, as if to let him hear the praises of posterity. Little he cares for praises! That artist's look sees nothing but his task.