It seemed more like
traversing a convent than a palace. I ought to have mentioned that in
ascending the grand staircase we found the portal at the head of it,
opening into the royal suite of apartments, still bearing the marks of
the midnight attack upon the palace in October last, when an attempt was
made to get possession of the persons of the little Queen and her sister,
to carry them off . . . . The marble casements of the doors had been
shattered in several places, and the double doors themselves pierced all
over with bullet holes, from the musketry that played upon them from the
staircase during that eventful night. What must have been the feelings
of those poor children, on listening, from their apartment, to the horrid
tumult, the outcries of a furious multitude, and the reports of firearms
echoing and reverberating through the vaulted halls and spacious courts
of this immense edifice, and dubious whether their own lives were not the
object of the assault!
"After passing through various chambers of the palace, now silent and
sombre, but which I had traversed in former days, on grand court
occasions in the time of Ferdinand VII, when they were glittering with
all the splendor of a court, we paused in a great saloon, with
high-vaulted ceiling incrusted with florid devices in porcelain, and hung
with silken tapestry, but all in dim twilight, like the rest of the
palace.
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