To Be Sure,
His _Don Quixote_ Had Not Yet Appeared, Though He Is Said To Have
Finished The First Part
In that miserable abode in that vile region; but
he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy
Of
"Numancia," and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and
very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that his
literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and
scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his
family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.
They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a
stone terrace dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I
stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain)
and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the
house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there
was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon
before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the
stomach for it afterward.
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