>Marc
 Departement d'Etudes Anglophones (FORELL-AIT),
 
Your comment and those of the others who have responded have convinced not
to use "must" in the past. Maybe I got the impression that thisis was
acceptable from reading older texts, or British English--I don't know.
 
Anyway, Wendell suggested that "debía" might be the subjunctive. Actually,
it's the imperfect. I see that you work with French, which has the same
tense and, like Spanish, has basically two past tenses that roughly
correspond the one tense in English. Also, there is a nearly exact
correspondence in meaning and use between "devoir" and "deber."
 
Just for fun, could you tell me how, in a literary/academic text, you would
translate "devait"? "Les femmes aztecs devaient respecter les
traditions"--or whatever, and assuming I haven't botched up that French
sentence too badly.
 
You're going to say "had to," right?
 
Alan