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Mare Nostrum
A Novel
By
Vicente Blasco Ibanez
"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,"
"The Shadow of the Cathedral,"
"Blood and Sand,"
"La Bodega," etc.
Authorized translation from the Spanish by Charlotte Brewster Jordan
Translator of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
1919
Mare Nostrum
His first gallantries were with an empress. He was ten years old, andthe empress six hundred.
His father, Don Esteban Ferragut—third quota of the College ofNotaries—had always had a great admiration for the things of the past.He lived near the cathedral, and on Sundays and holy days, instead offollowing the faithful to witness the pompous ceremonials presided overby the cardinal-archbishop, used to betake himself with his wife andson to hear mass in San Juan del Hospital,—a little church sparselyattended the rest of the week.
The notary, who had read Walter Scott in his youth, used to gaze on theold and turreted walls surrounding the church, and feel something ofthe bard's thrills about his own, his native land. The Middle Ages wasthe period in which he would have liked to have lived. And as he trodthe flagging of the Hospitolarios, good Don Esteban, little, chubby,and near-sighted, used to feel within him the soul of a hero born toolate. The other churches, huge and rich, appeared to him with theirblaze of gleaming gold, their alabaster convolutions and their jaspercolumns, mere monuments of insipid vulgarity. This one had been erectedby the Knights of Saint John, who, united with the Templars, had aidedKing James in the conquest of Valencia.
Upon crossing the covered passageway leading from the street to theinner court, he was accustomed to salute the Virgin of the Conquest, animage of rough stone in faded colors and dull gold, seated on a bench,brought thither by the knights of the military order. Some sour orangetrees spread their branching verdure over the walls of the church,—ablackened, rough stone edifice perforated with long, narrow,window-like niches now closed with mud plaster. From the salientbuttresses of its reinforcements jutted forth, in the highest parts,great fabled monsters of weather-beaten, crumbling stone.
In its only nave was now left very little of this romantic exterior.The baroque taste of the seventeenth century had hidden the Gothic arc