Diego and Julia’s reunion brings a long, painful separation to a hurried close: after a dispute over Diego’s nose and his departure from Valladolid, Julia sends her brother Fernandez to find him and deliver a letter of regret. Diego learns that Julia has fallen ill and may be near death, then rides with Fernandez back across France and the Pyrenees. Their arrival in Valladolid restores the lovers to one another, even as the narrator’s comic handling of the journey refuses to let romance proceed in a straight line.

Causes of the separation

Julia’s suspicions had centered on Diego’s nose, but she later acknowledges that the truth of those suspicions is no longer the point. She had sent her duenna to forbid him from coming beneath her lattice, then realized almost at once that she had acted rashly. Her letter asks how she could have known so little of herself as to send that message, or so little of Diego as to think he would not remain in Valladolid long enough to relieve her doubts.

Diego, however, had taken Julia at her word and left. In her account, his departure did not answer whether her suspicions were justified; it left her alone with uncertainty and sorrow. The lovers’ rupture thus turns on a gap between what Julia meant in a moment of suspicion and what Diego understood from the command she sent. The nose sets the dispute in motion, but the decisive injury is the failure to interpret each other correctly.

Fernandez’s mission and Julia’s letter

Julia’s brother Fernandez had accompanied her from Valladolid across the Pyrenean mountains and through France in pursuit of Diego. Julia’s strength failed at Lyons. Sick and unable to travel farther, she took to her bed, but managed to write to Diego and make Fernandez promise not to see her again until he had found him and put the letter in his hands. Her search has therefore become a mission entrusted to her brother: he must carry both the explanation and the urgency she can no longer convey in person.

In the letter, Julia recalls how quickly she regretted her message. She describes rushing back to her lattice and leaning there, immovable, for days and nights as she watched the road Diego used to take. When news came of his departure, her spirits deserted her; she mourned, grew weak, and repeatedly fainted during the journey with Fernandez, able only to cry out Diego’s name. The letter makes the cost of the separation physical as well as emotional: Julia’s desire to find Diego repeatedly exceeds the strength of her body.

Julia urges Diego to hurry, yet fears that he will arrive only to see her die. Her letter breaks off before its final thought is complete. Slawkenbergius supposes that the missing word was “unconvinced,” but the text presents that completion as his conjecture, not as a word Julia managed to write. The unfinished sentence leaves her appeal suspended between the hope of reunion and the possibility that she will die before Diego can answer it.

Recognition and the decision to return

The decisive message reaches Diego through Fernandez. When he reads Julia’s letter, Diego’s heart overflows; he orders his own mule and Fernandez’s horse saddled at once. The text gives no intervening debate or delay: the letter changes the direction of the story immediately, turning Diego from an absent lover into a man riding back toward the woman whose appeal he has just received.

Before the animals are ready, Diego tries to release his feelings in verse. Chance has placed a piece of charcoal at the window, and he uses it to write an ode on the wall, invoking Julia as the hand that can strike the key of love and govern him by sympathy. The narrator reports that the lines were natural because they were entirely beside the point, and notes that the hostler had the mule and horse ready before Diego could finish a second stanza. The comic interruption does not undo the urgency of his response; it makes the movement toward reunion faster than the lover’s attempt to give his feelings poetic form.

The journey and its ending

Without finishing the ode, Diego and Fernandez mount and set out. They cross the Rhine, traverse Alsace, and shape their course toward Lyons, where Julia has been left ill. The narrative then compresses their journey: before the Strasburgers and the abbess of Quedlinburg have even set out on their cavalcade, Fernandez, Diego, and Julia have crossed the Pyrenees and reached Valladolid safely. The ending confirms their reunion and return, but does not describe Julia’s recovery or what follows once they arrive.

The speed is part of the episode’s comic design. Earlier, Julia’s pursuit had strained her body and carried her only as far as Lyons; Diego’s return, by contrast, races through named rivers, regions, and mountains. The lovers’ separation is repaired through action, but the narration leaps over much of the physical journey, allowing the itinerary to register both real distance and the story’s delight in abrupt turns. Once Diego is in Spain, the narrator adds, he could not have met the courteous stranger on the road to Frankfort—a geographical aside that closes off one line of curiosity even as the reunion concludes the lovers’ tale.