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It was the handkerchief which the Wanderer had worn about his neck the preceding night. That was the last trace of the Wanderer. Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent horror, and returned slowly home. Lazarillo de Tormes Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza's career was hardly of a kind that would be ordinarily associated with a lively romance of vagabondage.
"Ha!" said the major, with a long-drawn sigh, "those were pleasant times; alas, that they should ever come to an end! Well, among the old hidalgos I met there was one Don Emanuel Selvio de Tormes, an awful old miser, rich as Croesus, and suspicious as the arch-fiend himself. Lord, how I melted him down! I quartered two squadrons of horse and a troop of flying artillery upon him.
This was the famous picaresque novel, 'Lazarillo de Tormes, by Hurtado de Mendoza, whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I write it I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had known in the flesh.
This Italian influence extended into the sixteenth century. Diego de Mendoza, during the reign of Charles V wrote a clever satirical prose work called Lazarillo de Tormes, which became the foundation of a class of fiction of which Gil Blas, by Le Sage, is the best known and most celebrated example.
At the end of the fourteenth century was written, most probably in Portuguese by Vasco de Lobeira, the tale of "Amadis de Gaula," which was followed by some forty or fifty similar books telling the adventures of all the brothers, nephews, sons, grandsons sons, and great-grandsons, an infinite succession, of the original Amadis; which, translated into all languages and presently multiplied by the press, seem to have usurped the place of the Arthurian stories in feudal countries until well-nigh the middle of the sixteenth century; and which were succeeded by no more stories of heroes, but by the realistic comic novels of the type of "Lazarillo de Tormes," and the buffoon philosophic extravaganzas of "Gargantua."
"But what news from our own head-quarters?" inquired I. "All imaginable kind of rumors are afloat. Some say that Craddock is retiring; others, that a part of the army is in motion upon Caldas." "Then we are not going to have a very long sojourn here, after all, eh, Major? Donna Maria de Tormes will be inconsolable. By-the-bye, their house is just opposite us.
Here they again lay up during the day and, that evening, obtained two boats at a village near the mouth of the Tormes, and crossed into the Portuguese province of Tras os Nontes. The 500 men joined in a hearty cheer, on finding themselves safe in their own country.
Marmont, after looking at us for several days, did not think it prudent to risk an attack on our present post; and, as the telegraph-rockets from the town told him that his garrison was reduced to extremity, he crossed the Tormes, on the night of the 26th June, in the hopes of being able to relieve them from that side of the river.
General Clausel, who took Marmont's place, showed great ability in the retreat, but the French army could scarcely have escaped destruction had not the Spaniards, who were entrusted with a post on the river Tormes, left the passage open for the flying enemy.
Pay there was little, and leisure there was none, since Marmont's lines came down to the river here, and we had a battalion of infantry quartered about the village sixteen under our roof and all extraordinarily thirsty fellows for Frenchmen; besides a squadron of cavalry, vedettes of which constantly patrolled the farther bank of the Tormes.
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