>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