"Spain Did It"

Don Miguel Primo de Rivera y Orbaneja, Marqués de Estella, pale and paunchy exiled Dictator of Spain, sat in his bedroom in the Hotel du Pont Royal in Paris last week writing letters. On their way to church, his two daughters Carmen and Pilar knocked on his bedroom door.

"Hurry back," said Don Primo, "be sure not to return too late."

Three-quarters of an hour later the frantic jangling of a bell sent green-aproned porters, and rosy chambermaids scurrying to the room. Livid, rigid, gasping, Don Primo lay sprawled in his chair.

"Spain did this," he whispered through half paralyzed lips. "It is Spain that has killed me." Almost instantly he died. Despite their father's warning, Carmen and Pilar returned too late. Cause of death: an embolism, a sudden blood clot on the brain, brought on by diabetes.

As an ex-Prime Minister, a Marques, a Lieutenant-General in the Spanish Army, Don Primo is entitled to a military funeral in Madrid, with the entire garrison brigade in the line of march. Such a funeral was planned for him; a host of grandees, churchmen, royal representatives and public dignitaries made ready to march slowly behind the flag-draped coffin along the route, lined with soldiers, to San Isidro Cemetery, where relatives of Don Primo are already buried.

Meanwhile in Paris, diplomats, businessmen, soldiers and lovely ladies hastened to the Hotel du Pont Royal to pay their last respects. There Primo de Rivera lay in state in a brown homespun gown, coarse sandals on his large pale feet, a huge rosary of polished granite beads in his lifeless fingers. The Marquesa de Arguilles and Senorita Mercedes de Castellanos, two ladies whose intimacy with Don Primo had caused many a scurrilous press clipping, came early in the afternoon, gazed sadly at their friend in one costume they had never seen him wear, the habit of a lay brother of the Carmelite monks.