Paris

Paris matters less as a city objectively described than as a place transformed by memory: for Fermina Daza, it remains the most beautiful city in the world because it is bound to her happiest years. Her European journeys also mark a period of renewed closeness with Juvenal Urbino, interrupted by the illness and death of Doña Blanca de Urbino.

Paris in memory

Fermina’s attachment to Paris is explicitly personal rather than a judgment of its conditions. She remembers its perpetual rain, sordid merchants, and vulgar carriage drivers, yet none of these diminishes its beauty for her. The city’s meaning comes from the happiness attached to it, illustrating how memory can remake a place more decisively than its visible features.

A return to Europe

After returning from an earlier, unhappy European trip, Fermina later went back to Europe three times. On one of these journeys, she and Juvenal spent two years in Paris. They were beginning to find what remained of their love amid the ruins of their relationship when a midnight telegram announced that Doña Blanca was gravely ill. A second telegram soon reported her death, and the couple returned without delay.

Homecoming and consequence

Fermina came ashore wearing a black tunic that could not conceal that she was pregnant. Her return from Paris therefore became the occasion for a teasing popular song, whose chorus linked each homecoming from the city with another birth. Juvenal would request the song at Social Club dances for years afterward, treating the joke as proof of his good humor. Paris thus remains both a remembered refuge of happiness and the setting for a journey whose abrupt end brought the couple back to family life.