Note 35 — Chapter I

The ridiculous story, related by entirely untrustworthy French travellers, of the cause of Philip's fatal illness being the Court etiquette, which forbade any attendant but a high noble who happened to be absent to remove a brazier from too close proximity to the King, may be dismissed as a fable. Anything which exaggerated the strangeness, the romance, and the inflation of Spanish manners found ready belief in seventeenth-century France, and has done so ever since. The absurd ideas relative to Spain even at the present time are mainly due to this insistence on the part of French writers in seeing everything Spanish through the coloured medium of the romantic school. Madame D'Aulnoy's overdone "local colour" and evidently invented stories are largely responsible for this, aided by Bassompiere Saint Simon, Mme. Villars, and the later romantic school of French novelists.