Goya
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Murat got immediate wind that the prince of Asturias was now King Fernando VII. He quickened his pace to Madrid, reaching the capital amid general acclamation on March 23. The very next day, Fernando arrived there from Aranjuez and was welcomed by the whole city, almost hysterical with collective joy at the thwarting of María Luisa and the fall of her detested favorite. People took to the streets cheering. They threw flowers. Some spread their cloaks so that the advancing horses of Fernando’s carriage could trample on them. For the moment, anyone who saw the crowd would have agreed that this was truly the Desired One, the ruler Spain yearned for.
Anyone, that is, except Napoleon, his envoy Murat, and the old king. Murat, on his master’s orders, refused to acknowledge Carlos’s abdication and Fernando’s succession. Carlos had a change of heart and retracted his abdication. In the ensuing confusion, it was decided that only Napoleon could arbitrate who was and was not the rightful king of Spain; otherwise it could turn into acclamation by mob rule. Napoleon was now poised to deliver his estocada (death stab) to the Bourbon dynasty. Courteously, amiably, but in terms that could not be refused, the master of Europe would summon the Spanish royal family to France and meet them halfway. In April, accompanied by his empress Josephine, he traveled south to Bayonne. Fernando was slightly delayed in going north to meet him; he was held up by matters of state, which included sitting for a portrait by Goya—for which, however, he could spare only two sessions of forty-five minutes each, much to the artist’s frustration. (Goya would not see El Deseado again, and had to finish the portrait from memory.) By the end of April, however, all of them were assembled before Napoleon in Bayonne: father, mother, son, and Godoy. Once in the imperial presence, the ground dropped from beneath the Bourbons’ feet, and they had nowhere to stand.
For the next six years—until Napoleon fell, and Fernando VII reclaimed the throne in Madrid—their exile to France was the end of the Bourbons in Spain. They were trapped on French soil, unable to return to Spain. Napoleon bluntly told Fernando that he must now abandon all claims to the crown and return it to his father, which he did. The emperor then informed the father, now (however briefly) Carlos IV again, that he must turn over the regained crown and all rights to it to Napoleon; and this, too, was done. In return, Carlos was sent into a comfortable exile at the Château de Chambord in Compiègne, padded by a pension of 30 million reales—in effect, the price he put on the throne of Spain. He would never see his former kingdom again. That got rid of the old man and his difficult queen, and as for Fernando, he was granted a suitable exile’s pension and the indefinite use of a château belonging to Talleyrand at Valencay in the Touraine. With his usual combination of hauteur and weaselly effrontery, he asked Napoleon to marry him off to one of his nieces; the emperor recoiled from this prospect—despite his hints at such an idea in his earlier correspondence with Carlos IV—but told Talleyrand to supply Fernando with actresses instead of princesses.
Godoy, shorn of all future perquisites and deprived of any possibility of return to Spain, stayed on with Carlos and María Luisa and went with them into a further exile to Rome after Napoleon fell. He remained there under their protection until 1819, when Carlos—viewed by most foreigners as a clown and by the Spanish as a bumbling defrauder whose rule had left behind it debts of some 7.2 billion reales—died. María Luisa had expired shortly before him, on January 2: in that icy winter, shivering in the vast, frigid salons of Palazzo Barberini, she had caught a cold, which rapidly turned into pneumonia. She was buried with pomp, lying in state in the throne room of the palace, where a hundred priests celebrated, one after the other, the missa solemnis at eleven altars. On January 6 her coffin was taken to the sacristy of Santa Maria Maggiore, where no fewer than twenty-one princes of the Church attended her final rites; finally it was moved to the crypt of St. Peter’s, where it remains today, the only body of a woman ever to find interment in that exclusive and quintessentially male club of dead popes.
There is no mistaking the intensity of the bereaved king’s mourning for her, but he was not at her bedside when she died: he had gone to Naples on a shooting party with his brother Don Luis. On hearing the news, he wrote a piteous letter to Godoy, who had been with her: “Friend Manuel—I cannot describe to you how I have survived the terrible blow of the loss of my beloved wife after fifty-three years of happy married life,” it began, and ended, “Come and see me whenever you wish, and … I remain, as always, the same CARLOS.”16 It is hardly the letter of a cuckold to his dead wife’s lover.
Their son Fernando, now king of Spain, acted with his usual petty viciousness. He seized everything his parents had, refused to recognize or execute their wills, and so deprived Godoy of his one security, Carlos’s French pension. Godoy made his way back to Paris, there to lapse into an old age whose miseries he bore with stoic calm. He had not quite reached fifty when his political career collapsed, leaving him with nothing to do. We get a glimpse of him in his last years through the Foreign Reminiscences of Lord Holland. Godoy, he wrote,
is training a miserable existence as a pensioner or almost beggar in Paris, surrounded by relations, acknowledged or unacknowledged children, grandchildren, and what not—Infants, Princesses, Duchesses etc., etc., not one of whom condescends to take the slightest notice of him, or show the least tenderness, regard or even interest about one to whom some owe their station and riches, and all, more or less, their very existence!17
He lived on for more than thirty years, in a small second-floor flat in rue Michaudière; his pleasure was to take the sun in the gardens of the Palais Royal. Hardly anyone in the quartier knew who this harmless old duffer had been. He died, in 1851, at the age of eighty-four, more than four decades after his fall from power, and was buried in the cemetery of Père Lachaise, where his grave is rarely visited. No Spaniard, and few Europeans of his time had risen so high and so fast from such obscure origins, or gone down with such wretched finality. At least he had the satisfaction of outliving his archenemy, the Desired One, by some twenty years.
IN 1808, however, it was evident to Napoleon that the Bourbon line had not quite been rooted out of Madrid: although he had the king, the queen, and the crown prince in his power in France, relatives of theirs were still ensconced in the capital, and they might conceivably have served as a rallying point for the pueblo’s anti-Napoleonic passions. These included the last of Carlos’s sons left on Spanish soil, thirteen-year-old Prince Francisco de Paula. Napoleon ordered them all to be taken across the border to Bayonne. Word of their impending exile leaked out to the people of Madrid, who were already furious at the absence of their sovereigns—although they did not know the full extent of their collapse, and still imagined that Fernando was putting up a brave resistance to Bonaparte. Multiplied by a thousand mouths, the rumors of French duplicity and imperiousness spread. At about eight o’clock on the morning of May 2, 1808, passersby outside the Royal Palace noticed Don Antonio and his family preparing to board coaches. Suddenly a courtier raised a cry of alarm: Murat’s men were abducting the Spanish royals, and they were bound for France. Shouting and jostling, crowds of madrileños coalesced quickly. Long live the king and our royals, death to Napoleon, death to Godoy, Frenchies out, out, out! Because it was early in the morning, most of them were ordinary people at or on their way to work.
They attacked Napoleon’s troops opportunistically, wherever they found them, without leaders and without any kind of a plan. The French were taken by surprise—an occupying army is always afraid of such uprisings and always surprised by them—but they rallied, and of course, they had the advantage of good firearms, whereas the patriots had not prepared for the uprising and so had nothing but sticks, clubs, knives, and a few trabucos (blunderbusses), plus whatever arms they could seize from the French in the street fighting. One must not think of this as a disciplined assault by one mass of men on another, drawn up in ranks and files. Rather, it was a matter of semi-random and bloody engagements that flared and sputtered across the city and then died ju
st as suddenly when the citizen assailants broke away, ran, and were lost in the alleys, leaving their dead and wounded on the ground.
One of the sharpest of these encounters was in the Puerta del Sol, the main square of Madrid, when the insurgents ran into a detachment of the Imperial Guard, a body that had been put together to protect Murat. It included twenty-four Mamelukes—Egyptian mercenaries, whose disregard for the more fastidious French restraints of war, such as not gouging out the eyes or cutting off the genitals of the wounded, made them much feared. This guard was escorting a Captain Rossetti across Madrid toward the Buen Retiro when, at the Puerta del Sol, it ran into a swollen and excited crowd of citizens. The Mamelukes charged to clear the way across the square. The insurgents fought back, with knives, cutlasses, and such firearms as they had. Casualties on both sides were heavy, though in the confusion of the uprising their numbers were disputed and remain uncertain. Throughout Madrid, Murat reported to Napoleon, “several thousand” rebels were killed.
This figure was far too high; more likely there were some two hundred dead and wounded on the Spanish side, many of them in the Puerta del Sol. But there would be more, because for the next day and night the occupation troops were busy rounding up every Spaniard who might possibly have been a rebel. They were herded into captivity, sometimes interrogated, and then brought out to their deaths. The mass executions were held at various sites around the city: in the courtyard of the hospital next to the church of Buen Suceso, in the paseo del Prado (near the site of the present Ritz Hotel, across from the Prado), and at the Mountain of Príncipe Pío, a small hill two hundred yards or so from Palacio Liria, seat of the dukes of Alba, and not far from the apartments where Goya was living.
How much of them Goya actually saw is uncertain. He cannot have been moving around from one site of slaughter to another, as agile as some modern cameraman—he was past sixty. But there is a picture created by those who knew him (though they may not have been there at the time) of Goya with a loaded blunderbuss in one hand and a little sketchbook in the other, sitting down to draw the piles of corpses by lantern light in the darkness and confusion of the Madrid night, and it doesn’t seem wholly implausible. That he saw the actual shootings is most unlikely; the French would not have tolerated the presence of witnesses, especially ones with sketchbooks. If Goya did make drawings at the place of execution, none have survived, although it is quite possible and even probable that the memory of the scene passed into his other work. For although he did not begin his paintings of the May uprising of 1808 until the Peninsular War was over, that war invaded his work and inspired a series of some eighty etchings on which he was to labor, on and off, for about a decade.
IN THE MEANTIME, however, Goya had a living to earn, and his sources of income were twofold: portraiture and small cabinet pictures. Some of the latter were still lifes, most of which remained unsold by the end of his life and passed as a legacy to his son, Javier. Though a minor part of his output, some of these bodegones—the Spanish term for those arrrangements of flowers, vegetables, dead meat or fish, and other nonconscious and inert objects that have always attracted the talents of formal painters—are of great intensity and beauty, and form a parallel to Goya’s human subjects. There was, of course, a long tradition of the bodegón in Spain. Not only had the Hapsburg and Bourbon monarchs avidly collected still lifes by Dutch masters like Jan Davidsz de Heem (1606–83), still life was particularly a Spanish tradition (as paintings of the nude were not) and had been brought to a striking pitch of formal and conceptual perfection by Spanish artists working under the initial influence of Caravaggio in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The greatest of them, to modern tastes, was the Carthusian monk Juan Sánchez Cotán (1560–1627), whose magically pure, rigorous, and intensely spiritual arrangements of a few objects—a quince, a sliced melon, the hyperbolic paraboloid form of a cardoon, or a cabbage suspended on a string against blackness—form exquisite vegetable geometries, as precise in their underpinnings as any Piero della Francesca. Then there was Francisca de Zurbarán (1598–1664) working in a similar near-abstract and monumental vein delineating his Ideal Cities of cruets, vases, and ollas; and a variety of flower painters and depictors of vanitas images, in which images of death (skulls), the decay of objects (fruit and flowers), and their fetishization as value (jewels, goldwork) become tropes for the decay of all worldly life and its contrast to the eternal values of heaven.
Francisco Zurbarán, Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and Tea, 1633. Oil on canvas. Collezione Contini Bonacossi, Firenze. (illustration credit 7.15)
Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Cardoon. Oil on canvas, 63 × 85 cm. Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada. (illustration credit 7.16)
Goya was not interested in the vanitas theme; he probably thought it rather too crude and coercive, and in any case it had dropped out of fashion with the passing of the extreme pietism of the siglo de oro. His still lifes were triumphs of realism, somewhat in the vein of Chardin but without the peaceable character of that master, and with a strong emphasis on death as their content. Probably the Spanish painter to whom Goya was closest, here, was Luis Meléndez (1716–80), who was heavily represented on the walls of the royal palace at Aranjuez—some forty-five still lifes—when Goya was working there in the spring of 1800 on the studies for his huge group portrait of Carlos IV and his family.18 But Meléndez’s dead birds and slightly phosphorescent fruits have an elaborated air that is altogether lacking in Goya’s more realist and straightforward approach. Goya never went in for those fantastically elaborate, virtuoso shows of material description that constitute the chief interest of so many late-seventeenth- to early-eighteenth-century still lifes: the red sheen on the lobster, the gray liquid pond within the oyster, the dewdrops on the bowed tulip. Such works are, above all, an affirmation of human fortune and supremacy: the absent owner of the kitchen has seen to it that it is made into a centralization of all the good things the earth offers, an implausible but reassuring cornucopia of bounty, almost sexual in its repetitious availability. When Goya painted a heap of dead chickens—brown, ginger, black, and white, thrown against a basket in the gloom of a pantry or kitchen—he gave them the look of what they actually were, small corpses unceremoniously dealt with: they are dead (like the larger corpses that will be similarly dumped in the Disasters of War), and this lends them a special pathos without imposing the pathetic fallacy (dead chicken = dead man) on them.
Goya, Aves muertas (Dead Birds), 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 46 × 62 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.17)
Goya, El pavo muerto (The Dead Turkey), 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 45 × 62 cm. Muso Nacional del Prado, Madrid. (illustration credit 7.18)
The power with which Goya could infuse a still life is best seen in his Dead Turkey. It is just that: a bird propped against a coarsely woven wicker basket, in which every protuberance of the weave is rendered by a single stroke of a round brush with a brusque expertness that might have made Manet envious. But the bird itself has an extraordinary vitality, if “vitality” is a word that can be associated with the depiction of something as irrevocably dead as Goya’s turkey. It is not, of course, one of those obese lumps of waddling butterball that Americans eat for Thanksgiving. It is small and wild-looking, the direct descendant of the scruffier birds that Spain introduced to Europe from its American colonies. It is dead. It is stiff. Its feathers convey rigor mortis, with that wing sticking out, above and back, like the empennage of a shot angel. Its edible black-feathered body is enclosed between the legs—thrust out like sticks behind the bird, their claws extended in death—and that wing, which so beautifully shows the mottling of its feather pattern. On the turkey’s face is a twofold grimace of death: the downward circumflex of the bird’s eyelid, and the downward curve of its tightly shut beak. Perhaps the world is full of dead turkeys, but not one of them could be deader than Goya’s. It may not stimulate appetite, but there is no doubt that it promotes as much sympathy as any other corpse in art.
You can imagine Goya writing under it the same declaration of realism, a moral intent, that he scratched on one of the margins of the as yet undrawn Disasters: “I saw that.” Yo lo vi.
THE WAR AGAINST NAPOLEON in Spain—the Peninsular War, as the English called it, or more simply, from the Spanish point of view, the War of Independence—would engulf the entire country. Napoleon did not want it to. He hoped for a peaceful surrender, in which the upper-class and educated Spaniards, the afrancesados, would support and ease the nation’s move away from Spanish absolutism. Meanwhile, he hoped, the country would come to accept the man he proposed to install as the new king in Madrid, his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte. Before this hope entirely died, the emperor promulgated a constitution for Spain, produced at Bayonne early in July of 1808. It was signed by a tame junta of pro-Napoleonic Spanish notables, summoned there by Napoleon himself. Most of them were upper-class afrancesados, and most stood to gain something from Napoleon’s imposition of rule on their country. The group most heavily represented of all in Bayonne were the Spanish aristocrats—an astonishing feat of political blindness, since they were passively voting for the measures of the very man who was determined to curtail and, if possible, abolish the powers of the nobility. The Constitution they signed into being was based on the French Constitution of 1791 and was intended to underwrite the reign of Joseph Bonaparte. It announced guarantees of individual liberty and respect for private property. It abolished all requirements of noble blood for officeholders and the Catholic hierarchy. It canceled the institution of primogeniture, which had been the chief means whereby vast aristocratic estates had been held together. It promised such measures as freedom of the press (though this was not to be granted, the document said, for two years after the Constitution took effect, and it did not apply to criticism of French policies; so this “freedom” was less than it seemed). In sum, it offered enough to liberal afrancesados, especially aristocratic ones, to neutralize them while vesting the real power of the state in Joseph Bonaparte, henceforth known officially as José I and unofficially, due to his generous habits of entertainment, as Pepe Botellas—“Joe Bottles.” The Spanish people, as such, did not believe they stood to benefit from it at all, and when it was unveiled to the public—which did not happen until the spring of 1809—most of them regarded the Bayonne Constitution as an offensively cynical document imposed on them by a predatory foreigner. Better a lost Spanish absolutism, they felt, than a newfound French tyranny; and their rebellion grew. It would not end until 1814, when Napoleon was finally driven out of Spain. It is not hard to see, in hindsight, how mistaken they were in rejecting the Bayonne Constitution, flawed though it was in some respects. It would have accomplished, at a stroke, what no internal reformer—none of whom had Napoleon Bonaparte’s genius—could have done. It was conservative in its loyalty to certain basic traditions of Spain. The Church, for instance, was not to be destabilized, still less abolished; but its secular powers were somewhat clipped, and the Inquisition, that hateful instrument of injustice, was done away with. It would have been an immense boon to a country so ill-handled by its Bourbon rulers. It might have brought Spain into a modern Europe, as Napoleon’s constitution had brought France. It could have spared the nation years of agony and bloodshed, one of the most ghastly civil wars in history, and a legacy of chaos, factionalism, and tyranny that would last for decades more. But none of these things occurred, and Spain slid inexorably toward the rim of the pit.