“It is so, Don Luis,” said Gabriel; “for nearly a century the monarchy has been dead in Spain; the last loved and popular king was Fernando VII.  Since then the nation has asserted itself, becoming emancipated from the old traditions, but the kings have not progressed; on the contrary, they have gone back, withdrawing themselves daily more and more from the anticlerical and reforming tendencies of the first Bourbons.  If in educating a prince nowadays his masters were to say, ‘We will try and make a Carlos III. of him,’ even the stones of the palace would be scandalised.  The Austrians have revived like those parasitic plants which, having been torn up, reappear after a little while.  If in the life of the kings they seek for examples in the past, they remember the Austrian Caesars, but it is complete oblivion of those first Bourbons who morally killed the Inquisition, expelled the Jesuits, and fostered the material progress of the country; they renounce the memory of those foreign ministers who came to civilise Spain.  Jesuits, friars and clerics order and direct as in the best times of Charles II.  To have had as minister a Count of Aranda, the friend of Voltaire, is a shame of the past and to be passed over in silence.  Yes, Don Luis, you say well, the monarchy is dead.  Between it and the country there is the same relation as between a corpse and a living man.  The secular laziness, the resistance to all change, and the fear of the unknown that all stationary people feel, are the causes of the continuance of this institution, that has not like other countries the military outlet or the aggrandisement of its territory as a justification of its existence.”

With this the conversation ended that evening in the Chapel-master’s little room.

Gabriel found himself drawn afresh by the affection of his admirers in the Claverias.  They coaxed him and followed him, lamenting his absence.  They could not live without him, so declared the shoemaker.  They had become accustomed to listen to him, they felt the desire of being enlightened, and they begged the master not to desert them.

“We meet in the tower now,” said the bell-ringer; “Silver Stick looks on our meetings with an evil eye, and he has gone so far as to threaten the shoemaker to turn him out of the Claverias if the meetings continue to be held in his house.  He will not interfere with me; he knows my character.  Besides, if he rules in the upper cloister, I rule in my tower.  I am quite capable, if he comes to disturb us with his spying, of throwing him down the stairs, the miserly devil!”

And he added with an affectionate expression, a great contrast to his usual rough and taciturn character: 

“Come, Gabriel, we expect you in my house.  When you are tired of keeping your niece and that crazy Don Luis company, come up for a little while.  We cannot get on without your words.  Don Martin has been quite enthusiastic since he heard you the other evening; he wants to see you; he says he would go from one end of Toledo to the other to hear you.  He wishes me to let him know if you decide on rejoining your friends, because Don Antolin in speaking to him sets you down as a madman and a heretic who does not know what to be after.  But he is an ignoramus who, after studying for his profession, can do no better than sell tickets and squeeze the poor.”