This was Cervantes’s last attempt to escape. His family were doing what they could to procure his release. They were miserably poor, and poverty often drives honest people into strange courses. To excite pity, and so obtain a concession which would help towards ransoming her son, Cervantes’s mother passed herself off as a widow, though her husband was still alive, a superfluous old man, now grown incurably deaf, and with fewer patients than ever. By means of such dubious expedients some two hundred and fifty ducats were collected and entrusted to Fray Juan Gil and Fray Antón de la Bella, two monks engaged in ransoming the Christian slaves at Algiers. The sum was insufficient. Hassan curtly told Fray Juan Gil that all his slaves were gentlemen, that he should not part with any of them for less than five hundred ducats, and that for Jerónimo de Palafox (apparently an Aragonese of some position) he should ask a ransom of a thousand ducats. Fray Juan Gil was specially anxious to release Palafox, and made an offer of five hundred ducats; but Hassan would not abate his terms. The Dey and the monk haggled from spring till autumn. Hassan then went out of office, and made ready to leave for Constantinople to give an account of his stewardship. His slaves were already embarked on September 19, 1580, when Fray Juan Gil, seeing that there was no hope of obtaining Palafox’s release by payment of five hundred ducats, ransomed Cervantes for that sum. It is disconcerting to think that, if the Trinitarian friar had been able to raise another five hundred ducats, we might never have had _Don Quixote_. Palafox would have been set at liberty, while Cervantes went up the Dardanelles to meet a violent death in a last attempt at flight. He stepped ashore a free man after five years of slavery, but his trials in Algiers were not ended. The enigmatic villain of the drama, Juan Blanco de Paz, had been busy trumping up false charges to be lodged against Cervantes in Spain. It was a base and despicable act duly denounced by the biographers; but we have reason to be grateful to Blanco de Paz, for Cervantes met the charges by summoning eleven witnesses to character who testified before Fray Juan Gil. Their evidence proves that Cervantes was recognised as a man of singular courage, kindliness, piety and virtue; that his authority among his fellow-prisoners had excited the malicious jealousy of Blanco de Paz who endeavoured to corrupt some of the witnesses; and—ludicrous detail!—that the informer had been rewarded for his infamy with a ducat and a jar of butter. This testimony, recorded by a notary, is confirmed by the independent evidence of Fray Juan Gil himself, and by Doctor Antonio de Sosa, a prisoner of considerable importance who answered the twenty-five interrogatories in writing. The enquiry makes us acquainted with all the circumstances of Cervantes’s captivity, and shows that he was universally regarded as an heroic leader by those best able to judge.