The most notable aspect of Pals Girona and such alienation is related to the theme of hunger, the axis of the novel. Thus, taking a complete turn, we recover the theme started by analyzing the treatment of the war in this Episode. Human alienation by war provokes the implausible threat of anthropophagy from Álvarez de Castro to Nomdedeu (p. 121), and from Nomdedeu to Andrés y Siseta (p. 137).

The obvious inference to be drawn from this is that of man's descent to the level of irrational animals. But we have to see it in a much more general scope, because the threat of anthropophagy in the siege of Girona is an account in the rosary of devouring each other animals of the same species; a link that begins with the donkeys "eating each other's manes" (p. 102), and continues with the cat poking the leg "of his own son" (p. 107), and the rats each other. It is necessary to look at this consequence of war as a general fact that affects the entire order of Nature, of which man is one more element.

According to the Galdós of "Gerona", the disorder created by the war, the unnatural acts, affect all living beings equally, hence the gravity of the war towards Nature.

Pals Girona

With words inspired by the story of the Count of Toreno, but that in Galdós lose their rhetorical and Latin tinge: "Everything was dying, humanity and nature, everything was sterile within Girona, and a terrible war began between the various orders of life, destroying itself from major to minor" (p. 103).

Words that have lost their affected tone because in a detailed way we have gone from the fight between the men of the two armies, to the fight of the two friends, to the eating of the asses, to the cats and, finally, to the rats. Galdós has taken advantage of some tiny internal history data reviewed by all the chroniclers of the Sites, to build on them the novelistic framework and also show in a lively and attractive way for the reader, how the war breaks the ecological system established by Providence.

About the figure of Nomdedeu, conceived as a case of quixotic madness, with the Dulcinea of his daughter, it would be annoying to cite the numerous points of contact with the Cervantine hero, whose story becomes the bedside book of Josefina. Let's limit ourselves to one

pair of melancholic features of the death of Nomdedeu, replica of the death of Alonso Quijano the Good.

Pals Girona History

The first of them is that the doctor on his deathbed regrets what he has been before, the man beside himself, who was not his true self, in imitation of Alonso Quijano, who denies the order of chivalry that he professed. The second feature consists in the similarity of the expressions of mind that Sancho Panza and Andresillo Marijuán address to their respective interlocutors: "Look, don't be lazy, but get up from your bed - says the squire-, and let's go to the field dressed as shepherds, as we have arranged" (end of chapter LXXIV); "Get up from that bed - encourages Andresillo - and we are going there to see the broken walls, the broken forts, the ruined houses, witnesses of so much heroism. Out laziness. That's nothing but laziness, Mr. Pablo"

Of the slight but endearing traces of the novelist's Canary origin, scholars have collected the mention of "the glorious retreat" of the "Canaries of the [army] of Alburquerque" (p. 256); a mention that feels like the author's tribute to his father, Don Sebastián, and his uncle, Don Domingo, officer and chaplain of the Granadero granaderos battalion of General Alburquerque's army.

Pals Girona memories

We find the Canarian memories in language to be deeper, even if they are more intimate and unconscious, such as calling a chest of drawers "gabeta" (p. 154); or the word "nostramo" (p. 33), probably used in Las Palmas at the time of Galdós due to Cuban influence, referring to the agricultural settler, to what is called in Catalan masover; or, in the geographical terrain, the appellation of "ravine" (p. 42) for the Galligans river, which crosses the city of Girona from the north, a river of mountainous regime, of a certain resemblance to the Guiniguada river from Palma, but which no Gerundense would think to call "ravine", with the amount of human lives it has taken in its periodic avenues.

When describing the ruined dwelling of Canon Ferragut, adjacent to that of the protagonists of the Episode, Galdós details: "The deserted house was entered through a small door that connected both courtyards, and that the neighbors used to have open to come and take water in the [well] of ours" (p. 138). In the house of the Girona canon the well served for two families, like the well of the Canarian home of Don Benito, now Pérez Galdós House-Museum from Pals Girona.