Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/40

 xxx Algiers deposed to all the facts above stated (except of course the intended seizure of the city, which was too compromising a matter to be referred to), and to a great deal more besides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, and gratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language of the notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds of Cervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up their drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent, and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."

On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march for Portugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly penniless now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and Sigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, an infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with great circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whose name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit to mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainly was living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who is described in an official document as his natural daughter, and then twenty years of age. This is all we know about her, unless she is to be identified with the sister Isabel who in 1614 took the veil in the convent in which he himself was afterwards buried.

With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, and for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he had already a certain reputation as a poet; Luis Galvez de Montalvo had mentioned him as a distinguished one in the "Pastor de Filida" in 1582, and we know from Doctor de Sosa, one of the witnesses examined at Algiers, that he used to beguile his imprisonment with poetry; he made up his mind, therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture committed his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salvá y Mallen shows conclusively, at Alcalá, his own birthplace, in 1585,