The Spendthrifts

Although Spain is a country which has always had a great attraction for English-speaking people, Spanish novelists are very little known to them. Yet Pérez Galdós is not only the most popular of writers in Spain, whose books are a household word among his countrymen, but he is a major European novelist who ranks with Balzac Dostoevsky and Dickens.

In THE SPENDTHRIFTS (LA DE BRINGAS) the scene is laid in the Royal Palace at Madrid, where Bringas and his wife hold minor posts at the court of Queen Isabella. Rosalía Bringas is a woman whose passion for dress leads her steadily deeper into debt and who is obliged to resort to more and more ludicrous and precarious devices to conceal her extravagance from a model bureaucrat of a husband. Her friend the Marquesa de Tellería is in a similar plight, while Doña Cándida, a superb parasite and bore, has already reached the end of the same downward path. The rottenness of the whole regime becomes apparent and when, at the close of a sweltering summer, the Army, the Navy and the entire country rise with one accord and the Queen flees to France, the curtain falls on this phantasmagoric society, so brilliant when viewed from the outside but built on poverty and debt and emptiness.

Thus THE SPENDTHRIFTS is both an allegory of the ending classes of Spain and a sermon on the classic Spanish theme, made familiar to us in DON QUIXOTE, of illusions and reality.