References to the Inferno and to the classical underworld are not specific, but the intention is nonetheless clear. The «abismo social» of Isidora Rufete has for Jacinta become an «infierno social» with «micos, diablillos o engendros infernales», condemned «luteranos», espectros», and a special resting place for «años muertos». The role of Virgil is, of course, first played by doña Guillermina and then in the lower depths by «la niña de las zancas largas». Again all of this needs the more detailed analysis which in the future I hope to attempt, but for the time being I can only affirm my impression (confirmed by Raimundo Lida) that Quevedo plays as great a part as Dante in this confused and violently colored (the dry goods trade becomes more and more aggressively chromatic as Jacinta descends in her bustle and her «pardessus color de pasa») prose description of poverty and misery.

«Criar» is, naturally enough a key concept of Part I (Barbarita «cría» a Jacinta para nuera; Guillermina «cría» a sus huérfanos; etc.) just as baby talk takes over much of the dialogue. See my «La palabra hablada» cited previously.

If not a source, certainly a stimulus for Fortunata y Jacinta was Zola's novelistic study of the retail drygoods trade published three years before: Au Bonheur des Dames. It is as if -in portraying the Santa Cruz dynasty in Part I- Galdós had asked himself how the same commerce had evolved in Spain. That this particular novel of Zola is not in his library as catalogued by Berkowitz signifies little. Barbarita's «chifladura de las compras», the contrast between old and new forms of retail enterprise, the technique of naming in series the colors and origins of textiles, all are present in exaggerated form in Zola's pages. Galdós' interest in clothes as makers of men was, of course, abiding and extended from the description of doña Ambrosia's drygood store in La Fontana through the Episodios (Hinterhäuser cites Los ayacuchos to the effect that the line between social classes was cut by «las tijeras de los sastres» p. 100) into all parts of the second series of «novelas contemporáneas» (the wardrobe of «la de Bringas», the statement made as late as Halma that «la ropa es la segunda piel» V 1783, etc.). But the fact remains that only in Part I of Fortunata y Jacinta is the whole complex of changing styles, evolving commerce, and acute consciousness of personal appearance studied in depth. As far as I know this aspect of our novel has only been observed -perceptive readers aside- in an obscure article by Kasabal (José Gutiérrez Abascal), «Los trajes de un siglo, 1794-1894», La Correspondencia de España, Jan. 10, 1895, p. 1. Cited in the 1965 Harvard Diss. of L. J. Hoare, Pérez Galdós and his Critics.

In Peñas arriba (1894) chapter XXXIII. The novel in a fashion diametrically opposite to Fortunata y Jacinta deals with the redemption of a «señorito» through a renewed sense of «noblesse oblige». For Galdós such a solution must have seemed futile and hopeless. Redemption was only possible for those passionate enough to create it for themselves.

«La moral del automóvil en España», Obras completas (Madrid, 1947) Vol. IV, p. 86. In profound agreement with Galdós, Ortega goes on to observe: «El señorito es el único ente de nuestra categoría zoológica que no hace nada, sino que toda su vida le es hecha. Incapaz de producir, todas las cosas del mundo, al llegar a él, se convierten en meros dijes y ornamentos, que pone sobre su persona para vanidoso lucimiento.» Thus, our «hombre de trapo»!

«Porque Juan era la inconsecuencia misma. En los tiempos de Prim, manifestóse entusiasta por la candidatura del duque de Montpensier... Vino don Amadeo, y el Delfín se hizo tan republicano que daba miedo de oírle» (p. 85). This inconstancy is an evident reflection of the period and city he represents and extends to all phases of his being. Thus, his love life is compared to a «sucesión de modas» -a situation which results when a person (or a society) has as his highest aspiration the spiritualization of «las cosas materiales». That is, instead of a passionate relation to abiding values, the history of styles reveals a capricious taste for external decoration whether in cloth or veneer.

In a century obsessed with history, Fortunata's notions of and concern for the past are as rudimentary as those of that other child of nature, Huck Finn. Her belief that Columbus was a contemporary general «como O'Donell o Prim» is thus a kind of ironical footnote to a quality that is at once fatal (her inability to discern the decadence of Juanito) and sublime in its immediate true intuition into the nature of life. Both Twain and Galdós have created a figure designed to challenge an age which believed with Comte and Hegel that all understanding is necessarily historical.

In «La palabra escrita y el Quijote», Hacia Cervantes, Madrid, 1960, pp. 277 et seq.

In this quality of potentiality, of course, resides her special enchantment for almost everyone she encounters -even for doña Lupe. As Feijóo puts it, «Es un diamante en bruto esa mujer» (p. 330).

«Der «sinnvolle» oder «bedeutende Zufall» ist dann derjenige «Punkt» der Handlung von dem aus auf einmal die hintergründigen Zusammenhänge und Stosskräfte erhellt werden die zum epischen «Ender führen». Wessen und Form der Erzählkunst, Halle, 1942, p. 150.