The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

Part One of his novel a caustic comment on Lope’s work, in particular his famous parody of the flocks of sheep. Lope responded with these rough words: “I will say nothing of poets, for this is a good century for them. But there is none so bad as Cervantes and none so foolish as to praise Don Quixote .” At the time, the novel was considered to be a minor art requiring little intellect and fit only to entertain young ladies; the theater brought money, but poetry brought luster and glory. This is why Lope respected Quevedo, feared Góngora, and despised Cervantes:
    All honor to Lope, and to you only pain,
For he is the sun and, if angered, will rain.
And as for that trivial Don Quixote of yours,
Its only use is for wiping your arse
Or for wrapping up spices and all things nice,
’Til it finds its just rest in the shit with the mice.
    . . . as he wrote in a letter, which, to rub salt in the wound, he sent to his rival without paying the one- real postage. Cervantes would write later: “What bothered me most was having to pay that one real .” And so poor don Miguel was driven out of the theater, ground down by work, poverty, and prison, by a succession of humiliations and by many pointless hours spent waiting in anterooms, quite unaware that immortality was already riding toward him on the back of Rocinante. He, who never sought favors by shamelessly flattering the powerful, as Góngora, Quevedo, and Lope all did, finally accepted the illusion of his own failure, and, as honest as ever, wrote:
    I who always strive and strain
To seem to have poetic grace
Though Heaven denies me again and again.
    But then, that was the nature of the lost world I am describing to you, when the mere name of Spain made the earth tremble. It was all barbed quarrels, arrogance, ill will, cruelty, and poverty. As the empire on which the sun was setting was gradually crumbling, as we were being erased from the face of the earth by our misfortune and our own vile deeds, there, amongst the rubble and the ruins, lies the mark left by those remarkably talented men who, while they could not justify it, could at least explain that age of greatness and glory. They were the children of their time in the evil that they did—and they did a great deal—but they were also the children of the genius of their time in the brilliant works they wrote—and they wrote so much. No nation has given birth to so many men of genius at any one time, nor have the writers of any one nation recorded as faithfully as they did the tiniest details of their age. Fortunately, they live on in libraries, in the pages of their books, within reach of whoever cares to approach and listen, astonished, to the heroic, terrifying roar of our century and our lives. Only thus is it possible to understand what we were and what we are. And then may the devil take us all.
     
     
     
     
    Lope remained at his house, the secretary Prado left, and the rest of us, including Lopito, finished the evening in Juan Lepre’s tavern, on the corner of Calle del Lobo and Calle de las Huertas, sharing a skin of Lucena wine. The talk grew animated. Captain don Alonso de Contreras, an extremely likable fellow, who enjoyed a good fight and good conversation, recounted tales of his life as a soldier and that of my master, including that business in Naples in the fifteenth year of this century, when, after my master had killed a man in a duel over a woman, it was Captain Contreras himself who helped him to elude justice and return to Spain.
    “The lady didn’t escape unscathed, either,” he added, laughing. “Diego left her with a charming scar on her cheek as a souvenir. And by God, the hussy deserved it—and more.”
    “Oh, I know many such women who do,” added Quevedo, ever the misogynist.
    And on this theme, he regaled us with some lines that he had thought up there and then:
    “Fly, thoughts, and tell those eyes
That make my heart so glad:
There’s money to be had.”
    I looked at my