Rejecting the invitations of irreverent monks, priests, knights and nuns, Love lodges with the Archpriest, and sets up his tent close by till next morning, when he leaves for Alcalá. The Archpriest becomes enamoured of a rich young widow, and—later—of a lady whom he saw praying in church on St. Mark’s Day; but his suit is rejected by both, and his baffled agent Trotaconventos recommends him to pay his addresses to a nun. The beldame takes the business in hand, and finds a listener in Doña Garoza who, after much verbal fencing and interchange of fables, asks for a description of her suitor. Thanks to her natural curiosity, we see Juan Ruiz as he presented himself to Trotaconventos’s (that is to say, his own) sharp, unflattering sight, and the portrait is even more precise and realistic than Cervantes’s likeness of himself. Juan Ruiz was tall, long in the trunk, broad-shouldered but spare, with a good-sized head set on a thick neck, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, wide-mouthed with rather coarse ruddy lips, long-nosed, with black eyebrows far apart overhanging small eyes, with a protruding chest, hairy arms, big-boned wrists, and a neat pair of legs ending in small feet: though given to strutting like a peacock with deliberate gait, he was a man of sound sense, deep-voiced, and a skilled musician:— Es ligero, valiente, byen mançebo de djas, sabe los instrumentos e todas juglerias, doñeador alegre para las çapatas mjas, tal ome como este, non es en todas crias. Doña Garoza allows the Archpriest to visit her, makes him acquainted with the charm of Platonic love—_lynpio amor_—prays for his spiritual welfare, and might have persuaded him to renounce all carnal affections, had she not died within two months of meeting him. Forgetting her virtuous teaching, the Archpriest tries to set afoot an intrigue with a Moorish girl, to whom he sends Trotaconventos with poems; but his luck is out. The Moorish girl is deaf to his entreaties, and Trotaconventos is taken from him by death. Saddened by this loss, and by the thought that many a door which her ingratiating arts had forced open for him will now be closed, he utters a long lament over the transitoriness of mortal life, moralises at large, denounces the inexorable cruelty of death, and at last resigns himself with the reflection that the old wanton, who so nobly did such dirty work, is honourably placed in heaven between two martyrs:— !ay! mj trota conventos, mj leal verdadera! muchos te sigujan biua, muerta yazes señera; ¿ado te me han leuado? non cosa çertera; nunca torna con nueuas quien anda esta carrera. Cyerto, en parayso estas tu assentada, con dos martyres deues estar aconpañada, sienpre en este mundo fuste per dos maridada; ¿quien te me rrebato, vieja par mj sienpre lasrada?