Saragossa

Gabriel de Araceli—the orphan of Cádiz who as a boy survived Trafalgar—is a young soldier now, in a beaten army, making his way ragged and half-starved across the mountains toward the one Spanish city still defying the French: Zaragoza, on the Ebro. Once inside the walls he is swept into its defence and into the lives of its people—the young seminarian-turned-soldier Agustín de Montoria, his fierce father Don José, and the gentle Mariquilla, daughter of the city's most hated miser, whom Agustín loves and the siege will not let him keep.

From the winter of 1808 to the city's fall on 21 February 1809, Zaragoza held out against an army many times its strength—not behind great walls, for it had almost none, but house by house and street by street, the defenders fighting from cellars and rooftops while the French mined and blew the buildings down around them. The enemy that finally broke the city was not only the French but famine and the typhus raging through the starving streets; by the end some fifty thousand were dead, and Zaragoza, when it surrendered, was a field of rubble. Galdós gives us all of it from the inside, through the eyes of one young man caught in the middle of it.

Published in 1874, Saragossa is the sixth of the forty-six Episodios Nacionales, Benito Pérez Galdós's vast fictional history of nineteenth-century Spain and one of the great projects of European realism. With an unflinching realism new to Spanish fiction, Galdós honours the defenders' extraordinary courage without ever looking away from its cost—the famine, the plague, the dead in the streets, the lovers destroyed in the ruins. It is heroism and horror held together: the human price of a national legend.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Minna Caroline Smith.