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I am also sorry that he calls me envious and, as if I were an ignorant man, explains to me what envy is, but the fact is that of the two kinds of envy, I know only the one that is holy, noble, and well-intentioned; and this being so, I do not need to persecute any priest, especially one who is a familiar of the Holy Office;2 if he said this in defense of the person on whose behalf he appears to have said it, he was entirely deceived, for I revere that person’s genius and admire his works and continual and virtuous diligence. But I do thank this worthy author for saying that although my novels are more satiric than exemplary, they are good, which they could not be if they were not good in every respect.

I think you will say that I am showing great restraint and am keeping well within the bounds of modesty, knowing that one must not add afflictions to the afflicted, and the affliction of this gentleman is undoubtedly very great, for he does not dare to appear openly in the light of day but hides his name and conceals his birthplace, as if he had committed some terrible act of treason against the crown. If you ever happen to meet him, tell him for me that I do not consider myself offended, for I know very well what the temptations of the devil are, and one of the greatest is to give a man the idea that he can compose and publish a book and thereby win as much fame as fortune, as much fortune as fame; in confirmation of this, I should like you, using all your wit and charm, to tell him this story:

In Sevilla there was a madman who had the strangest, most comical notion that any madman ever had. What he did was to make a tube out of a reed that he sharpened at one end, and then he would catch a dog on the street, or somewhere else, hold down one of its hind legs with his foot, lift the other with his hand, fit the tube into the right place, and blow until he had made the animal as round as a ball, and then, holding it up, he would give the dog two little pats on the belly and let it go, saying to the onlookers, and there were always a good number of them:

“Now do your graces think it’s an easy job to blow up a dog?” Now does your grace think it’s an easy job to write a book?

And if that story does not please him, my dear reader, you can tell him this one, which is also about a madman and a dog:

In Córdoba there was a madman who was in the habit of carrying on his head a slab of marble, or a stone of no small weight, and when he came across an unwary dog, he would go up to the animal and drop the weight straight down on it. The dog would go into a panic and, barking and howling, run up three streets without stopping. Now, one of the dogs he dropped the weight on happened to belong to a haberdasher and was much loved by its owner. The stone came down, hit the dog on the head, and the battered animal began to yelp and howl; its master saw and heard this, and he seized a measuring stick, came after the madman, and beat him to within an inch of his life, and with each blow he said:

“You miserable thief, you dog, why did you hurt my hound? Didn’t you see, cruel man, that my dog was a hound?”

And repeating the word hound over and over again, he beat and pummeled the madman. Chastised, the madman withdrew and was not seen on the street for more than a month, but at the end of this time he returned with the same mad idea and an even heavier weight. He would go up to a dog, stare at it long and hard, and not wanting or daring to drop the stone, he would say:

“This is a hound: watch out!”

In fact, all the dogs he encountered, even if they were mastiffs or little lapdogs, he called hounds, and so he never dropped a stone on one again. Perhaps something similar may happen to this storyteller, who will not dare ever again to set his great talent loose among books, which, when they are bad, are harder than boulders.

Tell him, too, that his threat to deprive me of profits with his book is something I do not care about at all, for in the words of the