The three-cornered hat

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón’s most important work, El sombrero de tres picos (1873), takes up the popular motif of the corregidor who wants to seduce the miller. Years later he inspired the Andalusian Manuel de Falla his famous ballet.
The three-cornered hat was a huge success since its publication. It is his “work of fullness.” In it, apart from his success in portraying his characters in broad brushstrokes, he presents us more accurately as an action novelist. He narrates the events, concerned above all with the movement, with the development and advancement of history.

This long century began, which is already overdue. The year is not fixedly known: it is only recorded that it was after 4 and before 8.
Thus, Don Carlos IV of Bourbon still reigned in Spain; by the grace of God, according to the coins, and by forgetfulness or special grace of Bonaparte, according to the French bulletins. The other European sovereigns descended from Louis XIV had already lost the crown (and the head of them the head) in the undone storm that ran this aging part of the world since 1789.
Nor did the uniqueness of our homeland stop here at that time. The Soldier of the Revolution, the son of an obscure Corsican lawyer, the victor at Rívoli, at the Pyramids, at Marengo and in a hundred other battles, had just girded himself with the crown of Charlemagne and completely transfigured Europe, creating and suppressing nations, erasing borders, inventing dynasties and changing form, name, place, of customs and even of bringing to the villages where he passed on his war steed like an animated earthquake, or like the “Antechrist”, as the Northern Powers called him…

Fragment of the work

Reference edition: Madrid, Imprenta de A. Pérez Dubrull, 1882.