Cervantes had made for himself a great reputation, but _Don Quixote_ did not apparently enrich him: otherwise he would not have asked his publisher for an advance of 450 _reales_, as we know that he did at some date previous to November 23, 1607. However, we must renounce the pretension to understand Cervantes’s financial affairs. His daughter Isabel, who was unmarried in 1605, reappears in 1608 as the widow of Diego Sanz del Aguila, and as the mother of a daughter: in 1608 she married a certain Luis de Molina, and there are complicated statements respecting a house in the Red de San Luis from which it is impossible to gather whether the house belonged to Isabel, to her daughter, or to her father. We cannot wonder that Cervantes was the despair of the Treasury officials: these officials did, indeed, make a last attempt to extract an explanation from him on November 6 of this very year of 1608, and thenceforward left him in peace.
He settled in Madrid to pass his serene old age. An atmosphere of devotion began to reign in the house in the Calle de la Magdalena where he lived with his wife and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena. In 1609 he was among the first to join the newly founded Confraternity of the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament; in the same year his wife received the habit of the Tertiaries of St. Francis, as also did Andrea who died four months later (October 9); in 1610 his wife and his surviving sister Magdalena both became professed Tertiaries of St. Francis. It would appear that Cervantes had been aided by the generosity of the Conde de Lemos, and he could not hide his deep chagrin at not being invited to join the household when Lemos was nominated to the viceroyalty of Naples in 1610. The new viceroy chose better than he knew. Cervantes applied himself more closely to literature which he had neglected (so far as publication goes) for the last five years, and, after the death of his sister Magdalena in 1611, the results of his renewed activity were visible. In 1612, when he became a member of the Academia Selvaje (where we hear of his lending a wretched pair of spectacles to Lope de Vega), he finished his _Novelas Exemplares_ which appeared next year. He published his serio-comic poem, the _Viage del Parnaso_, in 1614; in 1615 he issued a volume containing eight plays and eight interludes, and also published the Second Part of _Don Quixote_. It is curious that so many things which must have seemed misfortunes to Cervantes have proved to be a gain to us. In 1614 an apocryphal _Don Quixote_ was published at Tarragona by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should not have had the first _Don Quixote_; if he had gone to Naples with Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel. Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_, on a play entitled _El Engaño á los ojos_, the long-promised continuation of the _Galatea_, and two works which he proposed to call _Las Semanas del Jardín_ and _El famoso Bernardo_. All are lost to us except _Persiles y Sigismunda_ which appeared posthumously in 1617.