partie 1 suite
472 Words
body with its free will, as much as the most fashionable; since you live in your house, of which you are lord as much as the king of his tributes, and since you know well the common proverb: "Under my mantle I kill the king," all things which exempt you from obligation and respect towards me, you can say of the story whatever seems good to you, without fear of being punished for the evil, without hope of being rewarded for the good you choose to say about it.
Only, I would have liked to give it to you completely naked, without the ornament of the prologue, without the usual accompaniment of that innumerable catalog of sonnets, epigrams, eulogies, which are usually printed at the head of books.
Since I didn't want to hide it from him, I replied that I was thinking about the prologue that needed to be written for the story of Don Quixote, and that I was so discouraged that I had resolved not to do it, and therefore not to bring to light the exploits of such a noble knight.
"For after all," I said to him, "how could you expect me not to be concerned about what that ancient legislator called the public will say, when they see that after so many years of sleeping in oblivion, I have now come out into the open carrying all the burden of my age," with a caption as dry as a rush, poor in invention and style, devoid of wit and all erudition, without annotations in the margins and without commentaries at the end of the book; while I see other works, even fabulous and profane, so full of sentences from Aristotle, Plato and the whole troop of philosophers, that they are the admiration of readers,
Since I didn't want to hide it from him, I replied that I was thinking about the prologue that needed to be written for the story of Don Quixote, and that I was so discouraged that I had resolved not to do it, and therefore not to bring to light the exploits of such a noble knight.
"For after all," I said to him, "how could you expect me not to be concerned about what that ancient legislator called the public will say, when they see that after so many years of sleeping in oblivion, I have now come out into the open carrying all the burden of my age," with a caption as dry as a rush, poor in invention and style, devoid of wit and all erudition, without annotations in the margins and without commentaries at the end of the book; while I see other works, even fabulous and profane, so full of sentences from Aristotle, Plato and the whole troop of philosophers, that they are the admiration of readers,
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