The end of Norma

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón wrote his first novel, El final de Norma, at the age of eighteen and published it in 1855. It is a romantic work, a love story in which a passionate young man pursues the object of his desire across half of Europe. It is a youthful, imaginative and fantastic work, with folkloric features.
From his retirement in Segovia, Alarcón remade his novel El final de Norma. The first version was finished in Guadix and appeared in the newspaper El Occidente, in 1855.

On April 15 of one of these last years advanced by the Guadalquivir, in the direction of Seville, El Rápido, a steam package that had left Cádiz at six in the morning.
At that time it was six o’clock in the afternoon.
Nature flaunted that lethargic tranquility that follows serene and splendid days, as the happiness of our life always happens to sleep, younger brother of infallible death.
The sun fell to the west with its eternal majesty.
That there are also eternal majesties.
The wind slept I do not know where, as a child tired of running and doing mischief sleeps on his mother’s lap, if he has her.
Anyway; the privileged sky of that region constantly inhabited by Flora, seemed to reflect in its infinite vault all the smiles of the new spring, which played through the fields …
Beautiful afternoon to be loved and have a lot of money!
The Rapido quickly crossed the grandiose solitude of that landscape, disturbing the gentle waves of the venerable Betis and leaving only two fugitive traces in pursuit of itself…: a plume of smoke in the wind, and a trail of foam in the river.

Fragment of the work

Madrid, Establecimiento Tipográfico Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1903.