Mr. Molins

Mr. Molins is a former friend of the Fortuny family whose memories help Daniel Sempere trace the history of Sophie Carax and the household into which she married. A minor figure rather than a central actor, he matters as a keeper of secondhand knowledge: his recollections connect the Fortunys’ public respectability to the painful private story Daniel is trying to uncover.

Identity and Background

Molins had known Antoni Fortuny’s father, the founder of the family hat business, and was acquainted with Antoni himself. In later life, he presents himself as an aging man with a taste for flamboyant reminiscence and irreverent sexual boasting. He recalls Antoni as an ascetic, and remembers Sophie as beautiful and decent despite the rumours surrounding her. His judgments are coloured by nostalgia and self-display, but he has also retained details that prove useful to Daniel.

A Source for Daniel’s Investigation

Daniel approaches Molins under a plausible pretext of distant kinship with the Fortunys. After a few minutes of conversation, Molins goes to his filing cabinet and provides the name and address of the lawyer handling matters concerning Sophie, Antoni’s wife and the mother of Julian Carax. He gives Daniel the lawyer’s address, 59 Calle Leon XIII, and explains that correspondence is sent twice a year to post-office box 2321 at the main post office on Via Layetana. The information turns a social encounter into a practical lead, while Molins’s account of business conducted by post underscores how much of the family’s history is mediated through documents and intermediaries.

Molins says he has dealt with the lawyer only through the lawyer’s secretary and by mail. His own secretary, he adds, is away at the hairdresser’s that day. The small logistical details make the trail concrete: Daniel leaves not merely with a name, but with a route by which the lawyer can be reached.

His Recollection of Antoni and Sophie

Molins remembers Antoni as a man who withdrew from him after Sophie left. When Molins learned of the separation, he invited Antoni to go to a brothel with some of his friends, hoping to cheer him up. Antoni thereafter refused to speak to him or even acknowledge him in the street. Molins interprets the rebuff as a personal affront, revealing as much about his own expectations as about Antoni’s grief and reserve.

His account of the family’s beginnings is more consequential. Antoni met Sophie in Barcelona in 1899, when he was over thirty, an established bachelor, and newly in possession of his father’s hat shop. Sophie was a young French music teacher with no family or capital to rely on; her father, a pianist in Nîmes, had died of tuberculosis in 1886. Antoni courted her insistently, and she accepted his proposal after four months. Before the wedding, Molins warned Antoni that Sophie was a stranger and suggested waiting a year. Antoni dismissed the concern, saying that he already knew what he needed to know about his future wife.

Molins was also drawn into the couple’s intimate life, though only as an uncomfortable confidant. The morning before their honeymoon, Antoni asked him to instruct him in the mysteries of the bedroom. Molins sarcastically advised him to ask his wife instead. The newlyweds returned to Barcelona after only two days, and neighbours reportedly saw Sophie crying when she came back. Years later, Vicenteta said Sophie had told her that Antoni had not touched her; when she tried to seduce him, he called her a whore and condemned what she proposed as obscene. Six months after the marriage, Sophie announced that she was pregnant by another man. These details expose the gulf between Antoni’s confident decision to marry and the intimate failure that followed.

A Link in the Book’s Chain of Information

Molins’s significance lies less in his authority than in the way his fragmentary memories feed a wider investigation. He supplies Daniel with a legal contact and with personal recollections that complicate the public image of the Fortuny household. Other parts of the account show how information about the Carax family travels through a similarly fragile network: Fermin reconstructs the rupture between Julian Carax and Jorge Aldaya around Penelope, while Nuria Monfort later recognizes that Daniel and Julian have become linked by the past and fears that Javier Fumero will use Daniel to find Julian.

The novel does not establish Molins as an omniscient or wholly reliable witness. His memories mix observation, gossip, and opinion, and the most intimate account of Sophie’s marriage reaches him indirectly through Vicenteta. That limitation is part of his narrative function: he opens a door onto the past, but what lies beyond it must be assembled from testimony, correspondence, and the consequences visible in later lives.