Sepulveda, quoted by Navarrete.
[3] And "employed in various agencies and businesses," says
Navarrete, vaguely.
Without the gifts which are in favor at court--unskilled in the arts of
solicitation--we can imagine, with a man of Cervantes' temperament, what
a special hell it must have been--"in suing long to bide." About this
time he seems almost to have dropped out of life. The four years between
1598 and 1602 are the obscurest in his story. We do not know where he
lived or what he did. It was the crisis of the struggle with his
unrelenting evil destiny. The presumption is that he was still in the
South, engaged in his humble occupation of gathering rents, of buying
grain for the use of the fleet, with intervals perhaps of social
enjoyment among such friends as he had made at Seville; among whom is
reckoned the painter Francisco de Pacheco. This was for our hero the
darkest hour before the dawn. For already, according to my calculation,
he must have begun to write _Don Quixote_, being now (1602) in his
fifty-fifth year.[4] He had duly qualified himself, by personal
experience, to tell the story of the adventures of him who sought to
revive the spirit of the ancient chivalry. His own romance was ended. The
pathetic lines of Goethe might seem to be written for his own case:
"Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass,
Wer nicht die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Maechte.
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