This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper («The Three Sallies of Torquemada in Torquemada en la hoguera») presented at the Galdós Symposium held during the 29th Annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, April 22-24, 1976, at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

I have used the text edited by J. L. Brooks, with introduction and notes, for Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1973. All quotations are followed by the appropriate page number.

«Introducción a Torquemada en la hoguera. Galdós: el hombre y el novelista», Estudios galdosianos (Zaragoza: Librería General, 1953), pp. 126-29 at p. 126.

Michael Nimetz, Humor in Galdós (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 117. See also Robert Ricard, «L'usurier Torquemada: histoire et vicissitudes d'un personnage», Aspects de Galdós (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), pp. 61-85: «Sa qualité littéraire n'est pas douteuse et l'on a vanté avec raison sa concentration dramatique» (62).

Nimetz says: «Whenever he [Torquemada] goes through the motions of charity, it is a lie» (166). B. J. Zeidner Bäuml, «The Mundane Demon: The Bourgeois Grotesque in Galdós' Torquemada en la hoguera», Symposium 24 (1970), 159-65, uses stronger language: «Torquemada represents the modern demon» (161). Ricardo Gullón, Galdós, novelista moderno (Madrid: Taurus, 1966), p. 98, is equally dismissive: «el viejo lobo sigue viviendo, como es natural, bajo la piel de cordero revestida para la circunstancia». On the other hand, Robert Kirsner, «Pérez Galdós' Vision of Spain in Torquemada en la hoguera», Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 26-27 (1949-50), 229-35, is more sympathetic to the moneylender: «During his son's illness he is neither an absolute miser nor an absolute humane individual, but rather a man living in conflict with himself (230). F. Vézinet, Les Maîtres du roman espagnol contemporain (Paris: Hachette, 1907), p. 80, had already made a similar observation: «déjà dans Torquemada en la hoguera, l'auteur avait laissé entendre que son héros n'était pas incapable de progrès».

Op. cit., p. 166.

Op. cit., p. 76.

Op. cit., p. 34.

Op. cit., p. 162.

It is to be noted also that to reach his doorstep, Torquemada, has to climb a staircase. In his anxiety to ascertain whether there has been any improvement in Valentín's condition as a result of his excursions, he rushes up the stairs on his return from both sally I and III (see the quotations given in the text of this article) with great physical exertion. Surely, the staircase can be considered another physical symbol of the sacrifice that Torquemada is consciously making by undertaking these three sallies. J. E. Varey has already shown in «Torquemada and 'la lógica'», Studies in Modern Spanish Literature and Art, Presented to Helen F. Grant, ed. Nigel F. Glendinning (London: Támesis, 1972), pp. 207-21, at p. 211, how Galdós uses the descent of a staircase by Torquemada after his first visit to the del Aguila household in Torquemada en la cruz to symbolize Torquemada's «capture» by Cruz. For the similar use of staircase symbolism in Fortunata y Jacinta, see my article «Fortunata and No. II, Cava de San Miguel», forthcoming in Hispanófila.