THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
with a laurel wreath, if I remember rightly, by the hands of the Queen herself, with whom she remained a great favorite. Her literary renown spread over the country, and she told me how, when she visited her native Estremadura, the peasants, having heard of her laurel crown, would gather in the village taverns in which she stopped on her journey, and insist that she should show them her “habilidades,” that is, recite her poems for them or improvise new ones. Her various mental faculties were unevenly developed. She had no mathematical capacity at all, no sense of numbers. She admitted to me with a laugh that she could not count much beyond ten without getting confused. When she went out shopping, she would take a handful of beans in her pocket with her to aid her in figuring out her change. In spite of all this, she was an exact housekeeper, and always kept her accounts in perfect order. How she did it, I cannot imagine. But the household under her rule actually went like clockwork. We conversed together in French. Her French was very peculiar in its grammatical construction, but always intelligible, fluent, and not seldom elegant in expression. When she could not find the French word for what she wished to say, she promptly took the Spanish equivalent, giving it a French sound in pronunciation. This usually served her purpose, but sometimes it would produce amusing mistakes. With all this, her conversation had a singularly piquant charm. She was full of poetic fancies, which occasionally would bubble up in picturesque imagery. Of human affairs in the larger sense she knew little, and the views she expressed about them were frequently very naïve and crude. But she possessed an instinctive knowledge of men which was amazing. Now and then, when Mr. Perry and I discussed, this or that person in her hearing, she would suddenly break in: “I hear you mention the name of So-and-So. Do you trust him? Do not. He is not a good
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