Fortunata y Jacinta explores the dialectics between idealism and low-brow literature in late-19th-century Madrid. Hence, the popular folletín constitutes an indispensable intertext in the novel, since, despite Galdós's awareness that Spain had lost its imperial grandeur, many of its inhabitants continued to live according to abstract ideals and outdated values. His rejection of such an anachronistic worldview is perspicuous in the falso Pituso episode, in which the narrative parodies melodramatic imagination and one of its archetypical moments: the recognition scene. Questioning the existence of irrefutable truths in the modern world, the novela pitusiana offers several considerations on narrative typology and the role of Realism, which shed light on Galdós's aesthetic ideal.