341
340. Other uses by Galdós of the Carlist War of 1872-76 appear in two novelas contemporáneas which overlap that period. In La desheredada, he discusses many events leading up to the war and ultimately gives a vague account of the liberation of Bilbao (See O.C. IV, ed. 1960, Part II, Chapter I, pp. 1064-1068). In Fortunata y Jacinta, although Galdós makes a relatively detailed analysis of the workings of government at the time, he gives the war itself no particular attention, and skims quickly over the year 1874, passing into 1876, the chronological limit of the novel.
342
This is explained in detail in our article «Dos de Mayo de 1808, Dos de Septiembre de 1870, por Benito Pérez Galdós, un cuento extraviado y el posible prototipo de sus 'Episodios Nacionales'»,Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, LXXXIV, Núms. 250-252 (1970-1971), pp. 312-339.
343
In an example of the probable effect of a gradually accumulative vicarious experience in the preparation of his early works, but especially the episodios, Galdós' anti-French attitude grows stronger throughout the works which cover the hegemony of France over the peninsula during the early part of the nineteenth century. An indication of his antagonism is observed as early as 1870 when the cuento-prototype for the episodios (mentioned in note 341) was written. In its final part (...Dos de Septiembre de 1870) Galdós casts a recriminatory shadow over France in the form of a vengeful comparison between her terrible losses at the hands of Germany at the Battle of Sédan, and those of Spain caused by the French in 1808 and afterwards.
These comparisons have their later parallels in Galdós' statements about the city of Bilbao and its progress since the siege of 1874. In a speech read there for him on May 6, 1916 by Ramón Pérez de Ayala at a meeting of El Sitio -the local organization dedicated to the yearly celebration of that event and the two previous Carlist sieges (See also H. Chonon Berkowitz, Benito Pérez Galdós, Spanish Liberal Crusader, Madison, 1948, p. 235), Galdós praised Bilbao and its citizens for their advancement since those heroic times. He especially recalled having spent an entire summer there in 1870, a visit which we may now be assured was one important inspirational factor for his later impressions of the industrial city and for his descriptions of it in his works which cover the sieges (Cf. «Un día en Bilbao», Nueva España, Núm. 3712, May 7, 1916, p. 2).
344
Galdós' later pro-French volte face just after the turn of the century took the form of complimentary newspaper articles about France and its leaders. In one entitled «Francia» (El Liberal, Núm. 9503, October 24, 1905, p. 1) he praised the nation to the north on the occasion of the visit to Spain of its president, Emile Loubet. In an article in L'Espagne (Paris), also written for a visit to Spain of another French president (Poincaré) in 1913, Galdós exuded diplomatically correct expressions of close ties between Spain and France and added some surprising remarks on the intellectual and cultural inferiority of Spain to its neighbor. We have seen only the Spanish version of this article (in El Globo, Núms. 13, 113, October 14, 1913, p. 2), the French original being unavailable.
After the outbreak of World War I, Galdós' praise of the French again reached dramatic proportions, particularly in the effusive praise which he heaped upon the heroic Marshal Joffre in a printed statement for an album sent to France in honor of the officer. Galdós' contribution appeared at the head of the volume and was also published in the press («Palabras de Galdós», España Nueva, Núm. 3286, March 7, 1915, p. 1).
345
O.C. III, ed. 1963, Chapter XIX, pp. 934-935.
346
Joaquín Casalduero, Vida y obra de Galdós, Madrid, 1951, p. 207.
347
O.C. II, Madrid, 1954-58, p. 225. See also José Schraibman, «Galdós y Unamuno», Spanish Thought and Letters in the Twentieth Century. Nashville (Vanderbilt University) 1965, pp, 454-455, where this relationship is studied in another context.
348
Among the relatively few studies which analyze the relationship between Galdós and Ganivet to any extent are: Robert Ricard, «Deux Romanciers: Ganivet et Galdós», in Galdós et Ses Romans, Paris, 1961, pp. 21-34, and Juan Ventura Agudiez, «Ganivet en las huellas de Galdós y Alarcón», NRFH, XVI (1962), pp. 89-95.
349
Berkowitz, op. cit., p. 433.
350
Here in a change from his usual practice, Galdós employs a small but important detail concerning the dissemination of the news about the Madrid uprising throughout the rest of the country. It was omitted from El 19 de marzo y el dos de mayo but included in a slightly disguised form in the one immediately following it (Bailén), giving the event a bit more appropriate consecutivity. In the latter work, which describes the subsequent actual uprisings elsewhere, Galdós demonstrates the effect of the message from Móstoles upon the rest of the nation; he briefly mentions that forces are being prepared in Valencia and Galicia, etc., but also humanizes this news with a Móstoles-like vignette of two campesinos who declare that their respective unknown pueblos, Valdesogo de Abajo and Navalagamella are also ready and willing to fight. Thus, although the Móstoles incident is not used directly, it is still adaptable to Galdós' special needs in another episodio, later undergoing -in illustration of the disruptive character of this particular creative process- a third phase by means of its precisely accurate portrayal in the article, «El Dos de Mayo».
However, according to other historical sources on the Móstoles incident, Galdós' reportage of its details is slightly contradictory to other more accepted accounts of it. On May 2, 1808, Juan Pérez de Villamil, Crown Solicitor and Secretario del Almirantazgo, was residing at his home in Móstoles, a short distance from Madrid. It was he who wrote the bando announcing the slaughter in Madrid and calling upon the Spanish populace to arise and aid the capital. Two other men who were the real alcaldes of Móstoles, Andrés Torrejón and Simón Hernández, then simply signed it (perhaps the basis for Galdós' remark that what the «alcalde» wrote was brief enough to fit on a cigarrette paper). Villamil's original message was longer in fact, but he reportedly composed a shorter version some time later, which has been the one accepted by historians.
Similarly, the arrieros referred to by Galdós as the messengers, were in reality only one post-boy, Pedro Serrano, who carried Villamil's message first to Talavera de la Reina. Probably later, other couriers, some of them arrieros, spread the news to other parts of Spain. For a detailed account of the Móstoles affair, see Gabriel H. Lovett, Napoleon and The Birth of Modern Spain, I, New York, 1965, pp. 150-152 in which the direct sources for the precise details about Móstoles, Villamil, etc., are all given: José Muñoz Maldonado, Historia política y militar de la guerra de la independencia de España contra Napoleón Bonaparte desde 1808 a 1814, 3 vols., Madrid, 1833; Vol. I, p. 148; and, Antonio Ruméu de Armas, El bando de los alcaldes de Móstoles. Nueva aportación documental, Toledo, 1940, pp. 13-16. While Muñoz Maldonado's work does not appear in Berkowitz' list of the contents of Galdós' library (La biblioteca de Benito Pérez Galdós, Madrid-Las Palmas, 1951), it may have been at one time, or else consulted by Galdós elsewhere. However, there is a later account of the 1808 uprising in Madrid listed in it (Juan Pérez de Guzmán, El Dos de Mayo de 1808 en Madrid, Madrid, 1908, Item. 868, p. 87, in Berkowitz), but the Móstoles events are not referred to in it.