ordenes de çisten conlas de sant benjto,
la orden de crus njego con su abat bendjto,
quantas ordenes son nonlas puse en escripto:
‘¡ venite, exultemus!’ cantan en alto grito....
los dela trinjdat conlos frayles del carmen
e los de santa eulalya, por que non se ensanen,
todos manda que digan que canten e que llamen:
‘¡ benedictus qui venjt!’ Responden todos: ‘amen.’
Rejecting the invitations of irreverent monks, priests, knights and nuns, Love lodges with the Archpriest, and sets up his tent close by till next morning, when he leaves for Alcalá. The Archpriest becomes enamoured of a rich young widow, and—later—of a lady whom he saw praying in church on St. Mark’s Day; but his suit is rejected by both, and his baffled agent Trotaconventos recommends him to pay his addresses to a nun. The beldame takes the business in hand, and finds a listener in Doña Garoza who, after much verbal fencing and interchange of fables, asks for a description of her suitor. Thanks to her natural curiosity, we see Juan Ruiz as he presented himself to Trotaconventos’s (that is to say, his own) sharp, unflattering sight, and the portrait is even more precise and realistic than Cervantes’s likeness of himself. Juan Ruiz was tall, long in the trunk, broad-shouldered but spare, with a good-sized head set on a thick neck, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, wide-mouthed with rather coarse ruddy lips, long-nosed, with black eyebrows far apart overhanging small eyes, with a protruding chest, hairy arms, big-boned wrists, and a neat pair of legs ending in small feet: though given to strutting like a peacock with deliberate gait, he was a man of sound sense, deep-voiced, and a skilled musician:—
Es ligero, valiente, byen mançebo de djas,