Diego

Diego is the courteous stranger whose immense nose transforms an arrival in Strasbourg into a spectacle, while his solemn defense of it conceals the tender purpose of his journey. In Hafen Slawkenbergius’s embedded tale, the nose first appears to be a public marvel and a private vulnerability; it ultimately becomes the sign by which Diego is recognized and the hinge on which his separation from Julia begins to turn toward reunion.

Identity and Introduction

Diego enters Strasbourg on a dark mule at the end of a sultry August day, carrying a small cloak-bag with a few shirts, a pair of shoes, and crimson-satin breeches. At the gate, he tells the sentinel that he has been to the Promontory of Noses, is bound for Frankfort, and expects to return to Strasbourg in a month on his way toward Crim Tartary. The sentinel looks up at him and has never seen such a nose. The tale introduces Diego through the contrast between an oddly matter-of-fact travel itinerary and a feature that instantly defeats ordinary measure.

His clothes and equipment give the entrance a theatrical edge without displacing his composure. After reaching the inn, he takes the crimson-satin breeches from his bag and puts them on, with a silver-fringed appendage that the narrator declines to translate, then walks out toward the grand parade with a short scimitar in his hand. The traveler is conspicuous, but not simply helpless before others’ attention: he carries himself with deliberate ceremony, and the nose that draws the town’s gaze is accompanied by the bearing of a man intent on preserving his own dignity.

The Nose and the Strasbourg Crowd

As his mule proceeds slowly through the streets, Diego overhears the arguments stirred by his appearance. The sentinel, drummer, trumpeter, and the trumpeter’s wife dispute or speculate about him; the wife declares that she will touch the nose before she sleeps. Diego hears the talk but does not answer the crowd. Instead, he drops the reins on the mule’s neck, lays both hands across his breast in a saint-like posture, and vows that his nose shall never be touched while Heaven gives him strength. When a burgomaster’s wife interrupts to ask what he means, he takes no notice of her.

The vow is directed to Saint Nicolas, and Diego carries it out with the same grave formality with which he began it. He uncrosses his arms solemnly, takes the reins in his left hand, places his right hand in his bosom with the scimitar hanging loosely from his wrist, and continues at the mule’s slow pace through Strasbourg’s principal streets. The scene makes the crowd’s curiosity physical and insistent, but Diego answers it not with a fight or an explanation: he turns the encounter into a ritual of refusal. His nose is exposed to every gaze, yet he claims authority over who may touch it.

At the inn, the master and his wife keep their eyes fixed on Diego’s nose. Diego explains that he has traveled more than six hundred leagues and has been to the Promontory of Noses, where he has obtained, as he thanks Heaven, one of the finest noses that ever fell to a single man’s lot. The innkeeper’s wife privately judges it more splendid than any dozen of the largest noses in Strasbourg. Diego’s own account treats the feature as an extraordinary good fortune, sharply contrasting with the strangers’ appetite to inspect it and the suspicion that it might be an inconvenience.

That suspicion emerges when the traveler asks only for a bed. The host explains that Diego could have slept in the inn’s best bed but for his nose: it is a camp-bed, and the maid Jacinta supposed there would not be room to turn such a long nose in it. Diego turns first toward Jacinta and then toward the ground, kneels, and lays a hand on his breast. He asks that his anxiety not be trifled with. Jacinta answers that it is no trifle, but the most glorious nose. Diego falls to his knee again, looks to Heaven, and recognizes the moment as the end of his pilgrimage. The practical obstacle of a narrow bed becomes a moment of recognition because the inn’s acknowledgment of his nose answers a concern that the crowd’s staring and proposed touching had only aggravated.

Separation from Julia

The traveler who recognizes Diego is Fernandez, Julia’s brother, who has come on her behalf to find him. Fernandez has accompanied his sister from Valladolid across the Pyrenees and through France in pursuit of Diego. The search has led through a maze of turns and complications, and Julia has been unable to continue beyond Lyons. There she fell sick, with only enough strength to write Diego a letter. She charged Fernandez not to see her again until he had found Diego and placed the letter in his hands, then took to her bed.

Fernandez himself is exhausted by the journey and cannot sleep even in the inn’s soft camp-bed. At daybreak he rises, learns that Diego is awake, and enters his chamber to carry out his sister’s commission. Their encounter resolves the uncertainty of Diego’s solitary journey: the traveler who had invoked Julia while riding away from Strasbourg is being sought by her, and her brother has crossed countries to reunite them through a letter. The tale makes the long pursuit both geographical and emotional, tracing separation through the Pyrenees, France, and the stopping point at Lyons before the message reaches its destination.

The Letter and Diego’s Response

The letter is unfinished. Julia can proceed no farther, and Slawkenbergius supposes that the word she intended was “unconvinced,” though her strength fails before she can complete it. That interrupted word preserves the pressure of her illness in the message itself: Fernandez arrives not with a finished explanation, but with a communication cut short at the point where Julia can no longer write.

Diego’s heart overflows as he reads. He orders his mule and Fernandez’s horse to be saddled at once, a practical decision that turns feeling into immediate movement toward Julia. Because, the narrator observes, prose cannot give such conflicts adequate vent, Diego seizes on a piece of charcoal that chance has thrown into the window. While the hostler prepares the mule, he relieves his mind by writing an ode against the wall. The sequence closes not with a narrated reunion but with a departure being prepared and emotion finding its outlet in poetry: the enormous nose that provoked the town’s scrutiny has led to recognition, and recognition sets the journey toward Julia in motion.