Diego and Julia’s romance

Diego and Julia’s romance turns a suspicion about Diego’s nose into a painful separation and then a race to reunite. Julia’s attempt to forbid Diego from coming beneath her window is followed almost immediately by regret, illness, and a letter sent through her brother Fernandez. Diego, who had left rather than stay to answer her doubts, reads the letter and rides back with Fernandez; the lovers are reunited safely in Valladolid. The episode makes the nose—at once a source of uncertainty and the occasion for an extravagant love story—an engine of both comic misunderstanding and genuine distress.

Suspicion and Separation

Julia’s doubts concern Diego’s nose, but the account does not settle whether those suspicions were justified. In the letter delivered by Fernandez, she insists that the question no longer matters: what she cannot forgive herself for is having sent her duenna to forbid Diego from coming beneath her window, and what she cannot understand is how she could have believed so little of his devotion that she expected him not to remain even one day in Valladolid to relieve her doubts. Her appeal places the rupture not simply in suspicion but in the decision to take her message literally and leave.

Julia asks whether she deserved to be abandoned merely because she had been deceived, and whether Diego’s departure was kind when he could not know if her suspicions were right. The letter thus gives the separation two competing meanings. Julia had issued the prohibition; Diego had obeyed it. What she now reproaches is the painful distance between the words she sent and the response she hoped for, a gap the story treats as a lovers’ misunderstanding rather than as proof that either one had ceased to care.

The Cost of Regret

Julia’s brother had accompanied her from Valladolid across the Pyrenees and through France in pursuit of Diego. Their journey follows the difficult, turning course of a lover’s search, but Julia’s strength fails before it can be completed. She can go no farther than Lyons. There, sick with the distress of her heart, she manages to write Diego a letter and charges Fernandez never to see her face again until he has found Diego and put it into his hands. She then takes to her bed.

In the letter, Julia asks her brother to explain what she cannot fully recount herself: how quickly she regretted the rash message, how frantically she hurried to her window, and how for days and nights she leaned upon her elbow watching the road Diego used to take. Once she heard of his departure, she says, her spirits deserted her, her heart sickened, and she mourned. Fernandez’s pity led her, languishing, to trace Diego’s route; desire carried her beyond her strength, and she repeatedly fainted into her brother’s arms with only enough power to cry Diego’s name. The letter makes the journey a bodily measure of grief: the desire to reach the absent lover presses beyond the strength that remains.

Julia’s unfinished final sentence intensifies the uncertainty surrounding her condition. She warns Diego that, even if he hurries to her, he may arrive only to see her die, then breaks off while writing that dying is made more bitter by being “un———”. The narrative does not confirm the intended word. It reports that Slawkenbergius supposes she meant “unconvinced,” but her strength failed before she could finish. Her appeal therefore reaches Diego as both an urgent summons and an incomplete statement of what still troubles her.

Diego’s Return

Fernandez carries out his sister’s commission the morning after reaching the inn. Diego reads the letter, and the courteous stranger’s heart overflows. He orders his mule brought out and Fernandez’s horse saddled, answering Julia’s request that he fly back almost as quickly as he had fled. The response is immediate in its intention, although the narrator makes room for a comic delay: Diego begins composing verses on a piece of charcoal while the hostler prepares the animals, and the mounts are ready before he has finished a second stanza.

Diego and Fernandez leave without waiting for the poem to be completed. They pass the Rhine, cross Alsace, and head toward Lyons; before the Strasburgers and the abbess of Quedlinburg have even set out on their cavalcade, the two men have crossed the Pyrenees with Julia and reached Valladolid safely. The rapid return reverses the earlier pursuit: Fernandez had carried Julia toward Diego, but now Diego hastens back with Fernandez to meet her. The story confirms their safe arrival, not the details of a conversation or the precise terms on which the lovers settle their remaining doubts.

Romance and Comic Form

The episode gives an extravagant emotional weight to an uncertainty about a nose. Julia’s letter does not establish that her suspicion was true; instead, it shows how quickly an uncertain judgment becomes a command, how literally Diego receives that command, and how much suffering follows before either lover can correct the misunderstanding. The nose remains at the edge of the lovers’ private drama as the reason Julia gives for her suspicion, while the decisive crisis becomes the distance between what she said and what she wished Diego would understand.

The narration holds high feeling and comic interruption together rather than choosing between them. Julia’s weakness, fainting, and unfinished farewell make the separation grave; Diego’s unfinished verse, overtaken by the hostler’s speed, punctures the expected heroic flourish without erasing the urgency of his return. The ending gives the romance a clear practical resolution—Diego, Fernandez, and Julia reach Valladolid safely—while leaving Julia’s last broken-off thought unexplained. Reunion closes the journey, but the narrative preserves the gap between a letter’s intended meaning and the words it can actually complete.