The fifth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of SpainNapoleon at Chamartín by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It returns the protagonist Gabriel to Madrid in the closing weeks of 1808, as the imperial Grande Armée, recovered from its humiliation at Bailén, marches on the capital with the Emperor himself at its head.Gabriel’s Inés has vanished into another world. Discovered to be the lost heiress of one of the greatest houses in Spain, she has been carried off to a palace on the Cuesta de la Vega and groomed for a marriage of fortune to the young Count of Rumblar — the dissolute, easily led Don Diego, who divides his nights between gaming dens, comic masonic lodges, and the salons of the manolería, where the celebrated greengrocer beauty known as the Zaina holds court. Barred from the palace and reduced to flinging pebbles at a lighted window, Gabriel shadows his rival through this doomed demimonde — while behind the marriage scheme moves the afrancesado Santorcaz, who has his own secret plans for Inés.Around this private drama, Madrid braces for the French. The city throws up earthworks and musters a citizen militia, and Galdós fills these chapters with the comic Gran Capitán playing at general, the swaggering bully Mañara, and the whole brawling life of the lower town. Then comes the unthinkable betrayal that Galdós renders into one of the great crowd scenes of European fiction, and the mob, sold out and maddened, falls upon Mañara.Madrid falls. Napoleon installs himself at Chamartín, just north of the city, and from his headquarters dictates the decrees that will remake Spain entirely to his design. Amid the wreckage Gabriel is captured and swept out of the conquered capital in a chained column of deported “patriots,” driven past the Emperor’s own coach on the road by Chamartín, and sent toward a city about to endure the most terrible siege of the entire war.Napoleon at Chamartín is at once a panoramic chronicle of a nation’s capital under siege, a savage comedy of Madrid society, and a love story pursued through a falling city, narrated with the older Gabriel’s characteristic blend of self-deprecating wit and moral seriousness.Available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook on Amazon. The ebooks have already been sent out to the paid subscribers. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.DISCUSS ON SGThe post Napoleon at Chamartín appeared first on Vox Popoli.