“Let us cross quickly, while the lion sleeps.”

Ulysses had one friend, the secretary of the city-hall, and the only inhabitant that had any books in his house.  Treated by the rich with a certain contempt, the official used to seek the boy’s company because he was the only creature who would listen to him attentively.

He adored the mare nostrum as much as Doctor Ferragut, but his enthusiasm was not concerned with the Phoenician and Egyptian ships whose keels had first plowed these waves.  He was equally indifferent to Grecian and Carthaginian Triremes, Roman warships, and the monstrous galleys of the Sicilian tyrants,—­palaces moved by oars, with statues, fountains and gardens.  That which most interested him was the Mediterranean of the Middle Ages, that of the kings of Aragon, the Catalunian Sea.  And the poor secretary would give long daily dissertations about them in order to pique the local pride of his juvenile listener.

One day after dilating at length on Roger de Lauria and the Catalan navy, he wound up his tedious history by telling the little fellow how Alfonso V, his brother the King of Navarre, and all his cortege of magnates, had remained prisoners of the Republic of Genoa, which, terrified by the importance of its royal prey, had entrusted the captives to the guard of the Duke of Milan....  But the monarchs easily came to an understanding in order to deceive the democratic governments, and the Milanese sovereign released the King of Aragon with all his suite.  Thereupon he immediately blockaded Genoa with an enormous fleet.  The Provencal navy came promptly to the relief of its neighbors, and the Aragonese King forced the port of Marseilles, bearing away as trophy the chains that closed its entrance.

Ulysses nodded affirmatively.  The sailor king had deposited these chains in the cathedral of Valencia.  His godfather, the poet, had pointed them out to him in a Gothic chapel, forming a garland of iron over the black hewn stones.

The Catalan navy still continued to dominate the Mediterranean commercially, adding to its ancient vessels great galleons, lighter galleys, caravels, cattle boats, and other ships of the period.

“But Christopher Columbus,” concluded the Catalan sadly, “discovered the Indies, thereby giving a death blow to the maritime riches of the Mediterranean.  Besides, Aragon and Castile became united and their life and power were then concentrated in the center of the Peninsula, far from the sea.”

Had Barcelona been the capital of Spain, Catalunia would have preserved the Mediterranean domination.  Had Lisbon been the capital, the Spanish colonial realm would have developed into something organic and solid with a robust life.  But what could you expect of a nation which had stuck its head into a pillow of yellow interior steppes, the furthest possible from the world’s highways, showing only its feet to the waves!...

The Catalan would always end by speaking sadly of the decadence of the Mediterranean marine.  Everything that was pleasing to his tastes made him hark back to the good old time of the domination of the Mediterranean by the Catalan marine.  One day he offered Ulysses a sweet and perfumed wine.