Diego and Julia's romantic relationship

Diego and Julia’s romance is a love relationship nearly undone by suspicion and separation, then restored when a letter makes each understand the other’s suffering. Julia’s doubts about Diego’s nose provoke a command that he stay away; Diego takes that message literally and leaves, while Julia quickly regrets it. Her brother Fernandez carries her appeal across France, and when it reaches Diego, he turns at once toward her. Their reunion in Valladolid gives the embedded tale a happy resolution, even as the narrator’s comic detours keep that resolution entangled with the spectacle of a city consumed by curiosity.

Love Interrupted by Suspicion

The separation begins with Julia’s suspicion concerning Diego’s nose. In the letter she sends after the lovers have been parted, Julia does not claim that her suspicion was justified; she says that she lacked the firmness to test it further. She remembers sending her duenna to forbid Diego from coming beneath her lattice, and reproaches herself for having understood so little of either her own feelings or his. In her view, he should have stayed in Valladolid long enough to relieve her doubts rather than take her instruction as a final rejection.

The lovers’ responses to the same message are sharply opposed. Julia’s command is rash and quickly regretted; Diego’s departure appears to her as abandonment at the very moment she most needs reassurance. Her letter insists that being deceived, even if she was mistaken, should not have made her unworthy of his care. The relationship’s crisis thus rests not on a confirmed betrayal but on an untested suspicion and the different meanings each gives to a single act of refusal.

Separation and the Search

After Diego leaves, Julia rushes to her lattice and waits for him on the familiar way he used to come. When she hears that he has departed, her spirits fail, her heart sickens, and she mourns for him. These details appear in her letter as a retrospective account, but they also explain why the separation becomes a physical ordeal: she cannot continue the journey beyond Lyons and takes to her bed.

Fernandez, Julia’s brother, accompanies her from Valladolid across the Pyrenees and through France in search of Diego. Julia charges him not to see her again until he has found Diego and placed her letter in his hands. Fernandez carries out that commission despite the complicated turns of the pursuit. Julia writes that pity has led her brother to guide her along the route after Diego, while desire has carried her beyond her strength; she has repeatedly fainted into Fernandez’s arms, able only to call out for Diego. The search therefore becomes both a literal journey through France and the visible measure of Julia’s longing, which exceeds what her weakened body can sustain.

The Letter and Diego’s Response

Fernandez finds Diego at an inn after the stranger has left Strasburg for Frankfort. The encounter is tied to the tale’s running concern with the nose: the host explains that the best bed is a camp-bed, too cramped for the traveller’s nose, and the maid Jacinta calls it a glorious nose. At the recognition of Diego, the traveller falls to his knees in gratitude, declaring that his pilgrimage has reached its end. The traveller is Fernandez, who has come on Julia’s behalf to find the man she loves.

Fernandez delivers Julia’s letter the next morning. It recounts her regret, her waiting at the lattice, her grief after Diego’s departure, and her exhausting pursuit. Julia’s final plea is also a warning: if Diego’s gentleness has not misrepresented his heart, he will hurry to her, but may arrive only to see her die. The sentence breaks off before she can finish it. Slawkenbergius supposes that she meant to write that she would die unconvinced, but the unfinished line leaves her appeal suspended between love and the unresolved doubt that began the separation.

Diego’s response is immediate. His heart overflows as he reads, and he orders his mule and Fernandez’s horse to be saddled so that they can set out for Julia. While they wait, he tries to relieve his feelings by composing an ode on a piece of charcoal against the wall. Its praise of Julia’s hand as the touch that can govern his heart is sincere in its emotional impulse, though Slawkenbergius jokes that the lines are entirely beside the point. The impatient preparations overtake the poem: the animals are ready before Diego can begin its second stanza, and he leaves without finishing it.

Reunion and Comic Resolution

Diego and Fernandez ride toward Lyons, pass the Rhine, cross Alsace, and continue toward Spain. Their return is compressed into a brisk series of movements: before the people of Strasburg 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 journey reverses the earlier pursuit. Fernandez had followed Diego’s route to deliver a message; after receiving it, Diego hastens back to the woman whose message has disclosed the cost of his departure.

The lovers’ reunion closes their personal crisis, but it arrives amid the larger comic machinery of the nose tale. Strasburg’s inhabitants have become so absorbed in the stranger’s nose that they miss the Compline bells and chase reports of whether anyone has seen it. Diego, meanwhile, rides toward Frankfort speaking in broken sentences to his mule, himself, and Julia, lamenting his exile from her and wondering why his route leads where it does. His monologue and the city’s uproar run alongside the lovers’ separation without matching its true cause: the crowd pursues an extraordinary appearance, while Julia and Diego need a message that can correct a mistaken interpretation.

Narrative Significance

The romance makes the nose more than a comic bodily feature: it is the occasion for Julia’s suspicion, but the tale never confirms that her doubts were right. What determines the lovers’ separation is instead the passage from suspicion to command, from command to literal departure, and from departure to a letter that arrives only after considerable delay. Julia’s appeal does not settle the original question about Diego’s nose; it changes the lovers’ understanding of what their actions have meant to one another.

The episode also plays the urgency of feeling against the disorder of the narrative. Julia’s failing strength and Diego’s immediate departure supply genuine peril, while the unfinished ode, the host’s cramped camp-bed, and the Strasburgers’ fruitless chase lend the story its comic pace. The outcome is nevertheless clear: Diego responds to Julia’s letter, and the three travelers return safely to Valladolid. Their reconciliation is achieved through action and belated communication rather than through a final verdict on the suspicion that separated them.