Madrid is named as one destination in a planned Spanish journey, part of a life in which travel had to be fitted around work and carefully saved money. In the account, it is an intended stop rather than the setting of a described episode: the itinerary is clear, but what happened in Madrid is not recounted here.

Place in the Planned Itinerary

The narrator and Hadley were saving to travel to the feria at Pamplona in July, then to Madrid and onward to the feria in Valencia. The passage identifies Madrid as a stop in that sequence without specifying how long they expected to stay or what they planned to do there. It gives no account of the journey’s route through Madrid or of any particular streets, buildings, or encounters in the city.

Travel and Money

The proposed journey belonged to a period of deliberate economy. Hadley was pleased that the narrator would make a trip, although both wished they had enough money to travel by car. Their income came from a two-hundred-dollar advance for a first book of short stories, along with stories sold to publications in Germany and Paris; they kept spending to necessities while saving for Spain. Madrid therefore enters the narrative not as an independent travel portrait but as part of a journey shaped by limited means and competing demands on the narrator’s time.

Narrative Significance

The brief reference places Madrid within the couple’s anticipated travel beyond their everyday life in Paris, alongside the specific draw of the Pamplona and Valencia ferias. The account does not confirm what happened in Madrid, so the city’s significance here rests on its place in the itinerary: it is a destination the couple hoped and planned to reach, not a setting whose experience the memoir develops in this passage.