Before setting out from Seville we had had our Foreign Office passports duly viséd. Our profession was given as that of travelling artists, and the visé included the permission to carry arms. More than once the sight of our pistols caused us to be stopped by the carabineros. On one occasion these road-guards disputed the wording of the visé. They protested that ‘armas’ meant ‘escopetas,’ not pistols, which were forbidden. Cayley indignantly retorted, ‘Nothing is forbidden to Englishmen. Besides, it is specified in our passports that we are ‘personas de toda confianza,’ which checkmated them.
We both sketched, and passed ourselves off as ‘retratistas’ (portrait painters), and did a small business in this way—rather in the shape of caricatures, I fear, but which gave much satisfaction. We charged one peseta (seven-pence), or two, a head, according to the means of the sitter. The fiction that we were earning our bread wholesomely tended to moderate the charge for it.
Passing through the land of Don Quixote’s exploits, we reverentially visited any known spot which these had rendered famous. Amongst such was the venta of Quesada, from which, or from Quixada, as some conjecture, the knight derived his surname. It was here, attracted by its castellated style, and by two ‘ladies of pleasure’ at its door—whose virginity he at once offered to defend, that he spent the night of his first sally. It was here that, in his shirt, he kept guard till morning over the armour he had laid by the well. It was here that, with his spear, he broke the head of the carrier whom he took for another knight bent on the rape of the virgin princesses committed to his charge. Here, too, it was that the host of the venta dubbed him with the coveted knighthood which qualified him for his noble deeds.
To Quesada we wended our way. We asked the Señor Huesped whether he knew anything of the history of his venta. Was it not very ancient?
‘Oh no, it was quite modern. But on the site of it had stood a fine venta which was burnt down at the time of the war.’
‘An old building?’
‘Yes, indeed! a cosa de siempre—thing of always. Nothing, was left of it now but that well, and the stone trough.’
These bore marks of antiquity, and were doubtless as the gallant knight had left them. Curiously, too, there were remains of an outhouse with a crenellated parapet, suggestive enough of a castle.
From Quesada we rode to Argamasilla del Alba, where Cervantes was imprisoned, and where the First Part of Don Quixote was written.
In his Life of Cervantes, Don Gregorio Mayano throws some doubt upon this. Speaking of the attacks of his contemporary, the ‘Aragonian,’ Don Gregorio writes (I give Ozell’s translation): ‘As for this scandalous fellow’s saying that Cervantes wrote his First Part of “Don Quixote” in a prison, and that that might make it so dull and incorrect, Cervantes did not think fit to give any answer concerning his being imprisoned, perhaps to avoid giving offence to the ministers of justice; for certainly his imprisonment must not have been ignominious, since Cervantes himself voluntarily mentions it in his Preface to the First Part of “Don Quixote.”’