This article examines the critique of the Latin American exile in Paris in the under-examined early literary work of Manuel Ugarte (1875–1951). Ugarte’s critique is contextualized here within the tradition of the French capital as a locus of production for the tradition of ‘world literature’ and as a point of convergence for the desiring subjects of modernity. Ugarte’s writing highlights the role of women and of aesthetic femininity to critique the social and aesthetic ambition, egotism, and disjunctive social experience of marginal subjects exiled in the metropolis. For theoretical support the article draws on the concepts of nomadism (Noyes) and empire (Hardt and Negri), on discussions of the Hispanic-American modernista tradition in Paris (Colombi, Pera, and Siskind), and on critical responses to Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters.