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Updated: April 30, 2025
Already goaded to fury by the play of the picadors and banderilleros, he must be watched, studied, excited, baffled; not one of his movements must be lost, or even regarded as trifling; wariness, quickness, magnificent daring, the subtlest forethought, all were needed. What play it was! what a match between brute cunning, power, and ferocity, and human courage, adroitness, and calculation!
It promises two picadors, with three others in reserve, and warns the public that if all five become inutilized in the combat, no more will be issued. With so fair a preliminary statement, what crowd, however inflammable, could mob the management? Some industrious and ascetic statistician has visited Spain and interested himself in the bullring. Here are some of the results of his researches.
There are no picadors, armed with lances to prick the bull to madness; no banderilleros, with barbed darts; no heroic matador, ready with shining blade to give a mad and weary bull the coup de grace. Here all is fun and frolic.
By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the last espada dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other toreros, the banderilleros with their darts and the picadors with their disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena.
It advances a little, a splendid beast conscious of its strength, and suddenly stops dead, looking round. The toreros wave their capes and the picadors flourish their lances, long wooden spikes with an iron point. The bull catches sight of a horse, and lowering his head, bears down swiftly upon it.
Insults and invectives were showered on the picadors, until at last one of them, stung by the filthy abuse of the mob, drove his spurs so deep into his horse that the animal reared a little; the picador then, with spur and knee, almost lifted him on to the long pointed horns of the bull, who, forced back against the hoarding, had lowered his head in anger as the blood streamed from the lance wounds in his neck.
A vague uneasiness had infected his adversaries; the picadors held aloof, the banderilleros skirmished at a safe distance. The audience resented only the indecision of the bull. Galling epithets were flung at him, followed by cries of "ESPADA!" and, curving his elbow under his short cloak, the matador, with his flashing blade in hand, advanced and stopped. The bull remained motionless.
The next scene introduces us to a masquerade where are choruses of quasi-gypsies, matadors, and picadors, sufficiently characteristic. The scene after the card-playing, which is so fine in the play, is inefficient in music. A sweet air, minor and major by turns, with some hautboy wailing, paints the sufferer's sorrows.
Arjona killed a bull in the same year, which tossed and ruptured him after receiving his death-blow. Pepe Illo died in harness, on the sand. Every year picadors, chulos, and such small deer are killed, without gossip. I must copy the inscription on the sword which Tato presented to Lagartijo, as a specimen of tauromachian literature:
He had seen with fascination and some surprise the risks run by the footmen in the arena; he had beheld with mingled anger and disgust the action of the picadors, who allowed their poor horses to be gored to death by the infuriated bulls; and he had watched with thrilling anxiety, not unmingled with admiration, the cool courage of the matadors, as they calmly stood up to the maddened and charging bulls and received them on the points of their swords, stepping lightly aside at the same moment so as to avoid the dangerous horns.
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