Prologue to the Reader

God save us, and how eagerly you must be waiting for this prologue now, illustrious reader, or plebeian, as the case may be, expecting to find in it revenge, quarrels, and abuse of the author of the second Don Quixote; I mean of the one who, they say, was begotten in Tordesillas and born in Tarragona!¹ Well, in truth I am not going to give you that satisfaction; for though injuries rouse anger in the humblest breasts, in mine this rule must suffer an exception. You would like me to call him an ass, a fool, and an insolent upstart, but such a thing does not even cross my mind: let his sin be his punishment, let him eat it with his own bread, and that is his business. What I could not help resenting is that he taxes me with being old and maimed, as if it had been in my power to hold back time and keep it from passing over me, or as if my maimed hand had come to me in some tavern, and not on the loftiest occasion that past centuries have seen, or present ones, or that those to come can hope to see. If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of whoever looks at them, they are esteemed, at least, in the esteem of those who know where they were won; for a soldier looks better dead in battle than safe in flight; and I feel this so strongly that if someone now proposed an impossible thing to me and made it possible, I would rather have been present in that prodigious action than be whole of my wounds today without having been there. The wounds a soldier shows on his face and breast are stars that guide others to the heaven of honor and to the desire of just praise; and it should be noted that one does not write with gray hairs but with the understanding, which usually grows better with the years.

I have also resented his calling me envious and explaining to me, as to an ignorant man, what envy is; when, in all truth, of the two kinds there are, I know only the holy kind, the noble and well-meaning one; and, this being so, as it is, I have no cause to persecute any priest, all the more if he has, besides, the standing of a familiar of the Holy Office;² and if he said it on behalf of the man for whom he seems to have said it, he was entirely mistaken: for I adore that man’s genius and admire his works and his constant and virtuous occupation. But in effect I am grateful to this gentleman author for saying that my novels, though more satirical than exemplary, are good ones; and good they could not be if they did not have a bit of everything.

You seem to be telling me that I am holding myself in very tightly and keeping too much within the bounds of my modesty, since I know that affliction should not be added to the afflicted, and the affliction this gentleman must suffer is no doubt great, since he does not dare come out in the open field and under the clear sky, but hides his name and feigns his homeland, as if he had committed some treason against the king’s majesty. If by chance you should come to know him, tell him from me that I do not consider myself injured: for I know well how the devil tempts us, and that among his greatest temptations is to put it into a man’s head that he can compose and print a book that will bring him fame and money in equal measure, as much money as fame; and, in confirmation of this, I want you, with your good wit and grace, to tell him this tale:

“There was in Seville a madman who took up the most amusing piece of nonsense and the oddest mania that ever a madman in the world took up. It was this: he made a tube of cane sharpened at one end, and whenever he caught a dog in the street, or anywhere else, he would pin one of its hind legs under his foot and lift the other with his hand, and fit the tube as best he could into the place where, by blowing hard, he swelled the dog up round as a ball; and, having it in this state, he would give it two little pats on the belly and let it go, saying to the bystanders, who were always many: ‘Do your graces suppose now that it is little work to blow up a dog?’”

Does your grace suppose now that it is little work to make a book?

And if this tale does not suit him, you shall tell him this one, friendly reader, which is also about a madman and a dog:

“There was in Córdoba another madman, who had the habit of carrying on top of his head a piece of marble slab, or a stone that was none too light, and, when he came upon some unwary dog, he would place himself right beside it and let the weight drop plumb on top of it. The dog would take offense, and, barking and howling, would not stop for three streets. It happened, then, that among the dogs he dropped his load on was a dog belonging to a capmaker, whose master loved it dearly. Down came the stone, struck it on the head, the battered dog raised a howl, its master saw it and felt it, seized a measuring rod, went out at the madman, and left him not a bone unbroken; and with every blow he gave him he said: ‘Thieving dog, my hound? Did you not see, you cruel brute, that my dog was a hound?’ And, repeating the word hound to him many times, he sent the madman off ground as fine as henna. The madman learned his lesson and withdrew, and for more than a month he did not show himself in the square; at the end of that time he came back with his invention and with a heavier load. He would go up to where the dog was, and, looking it over very carefully, staring hard at it, and neither willing nor daring to drop the stone, he would say: ‘This one is a hound: watch out!’ In effect, every dog he came upon, even if they were mastiffs or curs, he said were hounds; and so he never let the stone drop again.”

Perhaps the same thing may befall this historian: that he will not dare to let loose the load of his wit again in books that, being bad, are harder than rocks.

Tell him also that I do not care a copper about the threat he makes me, that he will take away my profits with his book; for, borrowing from the famous interlude of La Perendenga, I answer him: long live my lord the Twenty-four, the alderman, and Christ be with us all. Long live the great Count of Lemos, whose Christian charity and liberality, well known as they are, keep me on my feet against all the blows of my scant fortune, and long live for me the supreme charity of the most illustrious lord of Toledo, Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, and never mind if there are no printing presses in the world at all, or if more books are printed against me than the Verses of Mingo Revulgo have letters. These two princes, without any flattery of mine or any other kind of applause soliciting them, out of their goodness alone, have taken it upon themselves to do me favor and help me; and in this I count myself happier and richer than if fortune had raised me by the ordinary road to its summit. Honor the poor man can have, but not the vicious one; poverty can cloud nobility, but not darken it altogether; but as virtue gives off some light of its own, even if only through the hindrances and chinks of straitened means, it comes to be esteemed by lofty and noble spirits, and, consequently, favored.

And say no more to him, nor do I wish to say more to you, except to advise you to consider that this second part of Don Quixote that I offer you is cut by the same craftsman and from the same cloth as the first, and that in it I give you Don Quixote at greater length, and, in the end, dead and buried, so that no one may dare to raise new false witness against him, since the old ones are enough, and it is enough, too, that an honest man has given an account of these witty follies, without wishing to get into them all over again: for abundance of things, even of good ones, makes them less esteemed, and scarcity, even of bad ones, makes them valued at something. I forgot to tell you to look out for the Persiles, which I am now finishing, and the second part of the Galatea.

Notes

1. 1. The spurious Second Part of 1614, printed at Tarragona under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a pseudonym never securely identified; its prologue mocked Cervantes as old, maimed, and envious.

2. 2. Lope de Vega, the most famous playwright of the day, who had taken holy orders and was a familiar (lay officer) of the Inquisition.