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"One fine day the troops lined both sides of the plaza, the square also about which lay the government buildings. It was the event of some celebration; I believe the throwing off of the yoke of Spain. The city flocked into the plaza. Strangely enough, those who were disaffected the soldiers under Urquijo faced the loyal troops.
By a preconceived plan, the artillery was under the command of Urquijo. Suddenly this Captain's murderous and traitorous guns swept the plaza, mangling women and children. There was a flaw, however, in the stroke. Urquijo fled, a reward posted for his head mind you, his head; they did not want him alive. "The daughter expiates her foolish love in a convent.
Up to the very last day, Captain Urquijo was the confidential friend of the president whom he was about to ruin. Through the president's beautiful daughter Urquijo picked up his threads and laid his powder train. The woman loved him as women sometimes love rascals. The president was to be assassinated and his rival installed. Captain Urquijo was to be made General of the armies.
He observed to me, that under the administration of an enlightened minister, Don Mariano Luis de Urquijo, I might hope to obtain permission to visit, at my own expense, the interior of Spanish America. After the disappointments I had suffered, I did not hesitate a moment to adopt this idea. I was presented at the court of Aranjuez in March 1799 and the king received me graciously.
I explained to him the motives which led me to undertake a voyage to the new world and the Philippine Islands, and I presented a memoir on the subject to the secretary of state. Senor de Urquijo supported my demand, and overcame every obstacle. I obtained two passports, one from the first secretary of state, the other from the council of the Indies.
"You do not understand heroes," replied Urquijo, bitterly. "You have not read Plutarch. The greatest amongst them have raised their greatness upon heaps of corpses. What did our own Charles V. do in Germany and Italy, and in Spain itself? I do not go back to the most wicked of our princes. Posterity takes no account of means."
Urquijo, one of the oldest and wisest counsellors of King Charles IV., insisted upon the advantages that Napoleon would realize by counterbalancing the claims of the son by those of the father, and by thus placing the peninsula under the laws of the general system of the French Empire.
"My memory seems to be better than yours. I knew you the first time I saw you in Bleiborg. I was waiting only to see how much you had remembered. I am not Colonel Beauvais; I am not Urquijo; I am the last of a noble Austrian house, in exile, but on the eve of recall. Your knowledge would, of course, be disastrous to my ambitions. That is why I wanted to find out how much you know.
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