BLASCO QUIXOTE

However mixed the metaphor, Blasco Ibanez, the Spanish novelist, has taken arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing has not ended them. That royal monstrosity, the Hapsburg chin, apparently terrifies him not a bit: on the contrary, it incites him to retaliate with a jaw all his own. He sits tight in his French villa at Mentone and hurls investive against the border at the Spanish monarch.

This defiance coupled with Ibanez's pamphleteering propaganda has so incensed the Spanish royalists that they issue challenges to duels at the rate of 200 a day. But Ibanez's fire, or rather his lunge, is not so easily drawn. With rolling eyes and teeth champing like castanets, he declares grandiloquently that only King Alphonso or Primo de Rivera may match rapiers with him. What could be more audacious than a novelist laying aside a vitriolic pen to challenge a crowned head of Europe? It is not likely that the pride of a Hapsburg-Bourbon will brook such an affront. Yet, even in this case, Ibanez has the long odds. He has looked over the King's record as a duelist and finds it poor. Besides, and the truth of this charge particularly infuriates the royalists, the King's manner of living in the last few years could not possibly be called training. How simple for the abusive Ibanez to score royal, touch, a triumph greater than any literary success!