Marcel is the butler and factotum of the house of Alfonso, a tall redhead and veteran of a destroyed regiment who also works in a comrade’s tavern and keeps a wife in Paris.
| Type | Character |
| Employer | Alfonso Nayais |
| Spanish entry | Marcel |
Description
He is tall but stoops. At the house he wears plain, conservative black without decoration, with a briefcase and a cane, carried “partly because someone respectable is expected” to, “and partly to look older”. His leather shoes are “worn with age but kept as well as possible”. He is said to be gallant and handsome.
Traveling, he wears a leather gabardine and a long “hunter style” leather cape, with esoteric symbols hand-sewn inside it. When armed, his plain cuirass bears a cross.
Three homes
- Alfonso’s house: when his master receives, the house and its guests are in Marcel’s care.
- A tavern run by a female friend from his regiment, long since destroyed, whose network of comrades is now his livelihood.
- A rented house “in the heart of Paris”, where he goes at Christmas, “more intending to see his uncle than his wife”.
He is married, childless, and “cannot divorce yet”; his wife, religious and presumably more devout than he, lives in the Paris area.
Absences
A long illness took him away from the company; he rejoined afterward. For a long period he stayed shut “in the basement, working”: seven months, first given as eight and corrected at once.
Conflicting accounts
- Age: one description makes him a young man of 22; an age roster records both “Marcelo is 21” and “Marcelo 28”, possibly two different men; another voice calls him “old and hairy”.
- Name: Marcel, Marcelo, Marcilla and Marcilo all occur; whether the Marcilla of the basement and the tall red-haired Marcilo are the same man is unsettled.
Open questions
- His height is given only as “80 and up”, a truncated figure.
- Why he cannot divorce (law, church, or dependence on Alfonso) is not recorded.
- The sewn symbols, his illness and his regiment are not described; his uncle and the tavern keeper are unnamed.