Diego and Julia’s reunion

Diego and Julia’s reunion closes the lovers’ separation through a chain of recognition, a letter carried by Julia’s brother Fernandez, and a hurried return to Spain. In Hafen Slawkenbergius’s embedded tale, the celebrated long nose that has made Diego an object of public curiosity becomes the sign by which Fernandez identifies him; the lovers’ reunion is therefore both an emotional resolution and the punchline to the tale’s extravagant nose-centered pursuit.

Identity and Background

The reunion takes place at the end of Fernandez’s search for Diego. Fernandez is Julia’s brother and has been charged by her to find Diego and put a letter into his hands. He has accompanied Julia from Valladolid across the Pyrenees and through France, following what the narrator calls the tangled course of a lover’s pursuit. The journey has worn Julia down: by the time she reaches Lyons, she can go no farther, falls sick, and takes to her bed.

The search turns on Diego’s nose. At the inn, the host explains that the stranger with the famous nose could not be given the best bed because the narrow camp-bed left him no room to turn it. Fernandez hears the description and recoils in anxious disbelief; Jacinta insists the nose is glorious. The recognition breaks through his uncertainty: the traveller has found the man he has been pursuing, and the host’s absurdly practical account of the bed has supplied the decisive clue.

Julia’s Letter and Diego’s Response

Fernandez rises early after a sleepless night and enters Diego’s room to deliver Julia’s commission. Her letter does not settle whether her suspicions about Diego’s nose were justified. Instead, she explains that she has not had the strength to put those suspicions to further trial and asks him, in effect, to understand the distress that has overtaken her. She cannot finish writing. Slawkenbergius suggests that she intended to write that she was unconvinced, but illness leaves the sentence incomplete.

The incomplete letter makes the reunion a response not to a fully resolved argument but to Julia’s vulnerability and need. Diego’s heart overflows as he reads it. He immediately orders his own mule and Fernandez’s horse to be saddled, turning recognition into action: rather than remain at the inn to debate the suspicion, he sets out with Julia’s brother to return to her.

While the animals are being prepared, Diego tries to give his feelings an outlet in verse. Finding a piece of charcoal thrown through the window, he writes an ode on the wall, declaring that love’s music depends on Julia’s touch. The poem is interrupted before it can progress beyond its opening and an address to Julia. Slawkenbergius dryly observes that the verses are natural because they are not to the point; whether Diego composes slowly or the hostler saddles quickly is left uncertain. Either way, the departure overtakes the poem.

The Return to Spain

Diego and Fernandez leave as soon as the mule and horse are ready. They pass the Rhine, traverse Alsace, and head toward Lyons; before the Strasburgers and the abbess of Quedlinburg have even set out on their own cavalcade, Fernandez, Diego, and Julia have crossed the Pyrenees and reached Valladolid safely. The lovers’ reunion is thus conveyed through movement and compressed distance rather than a staged scene of embrace: the narrative’s decisive image is the swift journey that reunites the separated group.

That speed also completes Fernandez’s undertaking. He had crossed the mountains with his sick sister in pursuit of Diego, carried her unfinished message to him, and now accompanies him back to Julia. The brother’s role joins the two halves of the episode: he is first the searcher who brings the lovers’ separation into view, then the companion who helps bring their reunion about.

Comic Resolution and Narrative Contrast

The tale makes a pointed contrast between the lovers’ urgent private business and the public curiosity that has gathered around Diego’s nose. While the three are already safely back in Spain, the Strasburgers remain on the Frankfort road, tossed about for three days and nights by curiosity before they can bring themselves to return home. The lovers’ story reaches its destination before the crowd’s pursuit can even conclude, and the delay sets up the next account of the Strasburgers’ misfortune.

The episode’s form reinforces its comic effect. Julia’s illness, the brother’s mission, the recognition at the inn, the unfinished letter, and Diego’s makeshift ode might each have furnished an extended scene. Instead, the tale rushes from a nose that cannot fit in a camp-bed to a journey across regions and mountains, with the unfinished poem left behind on a wall. Reunion is achieved not by a final explanation of Julia’s suspicions but by Diego’s immediate response and the narrative’s sudden acceleration. The result resolves the lovers’ separation while preserving the larger tale’s comic imbalance: private affection moves decisively, even as collective curiosity continues to wander.