Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/57

 Rh very unhappy life. He who could take Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring them would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life is concerned.

It is pleasant, however, to think that the sunset was brighter than the day had been, and that at the close of his life he was not left dependent on his own high courage for comfort and support. He had failed in the object of his heart, but he had the consolation of knowing that if Spain had refused his dramas the world had welcomed his novel. He was still a poor man; "a soldier, a hidalgo, old and poor," was the description given to strangers asking who and what the author of "Don Quixote" was. But he was no longer friendless, and he no longer felt the pressure of poverty as he had felt it in the days of his obscurity. His good friends, the Conde de Lemos and the Archbishop of Toledo, as he himself tells us, had charged themselves with his welfare, and the booksellers did not look askance at his books now. If Juan de Villaroel paid him "reasonably," as he admits, for so unpromising a venture as the volume of comedies, we may presume that Robles gave him something substantial for the novels and for the Second Part of "Don Quixote." He was able to live, too, in what was then a fashionable quarter of Madrid, the maze of dull streets lying between the Carrera de San Geronimo and the Calle de Atocha. The house in which he died is in the Calle del Leon, but the doorway, marked by a medallion, is in the Calle de Francos, now the Calle de Cervantes, in which, a few doors farther down, the great Lope lived and died, while Quevedo lived a few paces off in the Calle del Niño.

Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in accordance with his will, in the neighboring convent of Trinitarian nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clew to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against his memory, or at