C’était en effet un talent, une énergie, une force que ce jeune élève de l’Ateneo Municipal qui, à treize ans, à peine sorti de son pueblo natal de Calamba, composait un mélodrame en vers, Junto al Pasig, qu’applaudissait la société élégante de Manille; que cet adolescent qui, avec une ode, A la Jeunesse Philippine, remportait d’abord le premier prix au concours du «Liceo Artistico-Literario», et triomphait encore dans un tournoi littéraire organisé à l’occasion du centenaire de Cervantes, avec une composition en prose, le Conseil des Dieux, empreinte du plus pur hellénisme.

In the latter part of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Captain Tiago, gave a dinner. Though, contrary to his custom, he had not announced it until the afternoon of the day on which it was to occur, the dinner became at once the absorbing topic of conversation in Binondo, in the other suburbs of Manila, and even in the walled city. Captain Tiago was generally considered a most liberal man, and his house, like his country, shut its doors to no one, whether bent on pleasure or on the development of some new and daring scheme.

Crisóstomo Ibarra, the mestizo son of the recently deceased Don Rafael Ibarra, is returning to San Diego in Laguna after seven years of study in Europe. Kapitán Tiago, a family friend, bids him to spend his first night in Manila where Tiago hosts a reunion party at his riverside home on Anloague Street. Crisóstomo obliges. At dinner he encounters old friends, Manila high society, and Padre Dámaso, San Diego's old curate at the time Ibarra left for Europe. Dámaso treats Crisóstomo with hostility, surprising the young man who always viewed the friar to be a family friend.