Alejandro Sawa

After a brief flirtation with the priesthood and a stint at the seminary of Málaga, he underwent a sudden conversion to vehement anticlericalism and thereafter studied law in Granada.

On the same winter day that Pi y Margall anointed me with his reverend right hand, ordaining me into the intellectual hierarchy, I had to sleep in a stairwell on account of having found no place cozier than that in which to take shelter.

For a time he worked on the staff of the Garnier publishing house, editing an encyclopedic dictionary, and had ample opportunity to strike up friendships with many of the luminaries of Parnassian and Symbolist literature, though he himself preferred the Romanticism of Victor Hugo.

Ironically, it was this period that yielded his only artistic success, a stage adaptation of Alphonse Daudet's Kings in Exile, in the winter of 1899.

Dying and going to wherever villainy isn't the prevailing custom, where affirmations and negations at least carry the philosophical sense that lexicons assign to them, where honor starts at the soul instead of the lips.

I still feel like the healthy one in the middle of this leper colony!Sawa's personality was an inspiration to the novelists of the Generation of '98, notably Pío Baroja in The Tree of Knowledge and Valle-Inclán in Bohemian Lights.

The failure of every attempt he made to get it published, and a letter from El Liberal rescinding an assignment worth seventy pesetas, were what drove him mad in his final days.