Don Vincente

The legend was subsequently cited and reproduced as a true story in France and other countries through the 19th and early 20th centuries, while remaining virtually unknown in Spain.

None were robbed, and there was no consistency in party membership that would point to it being a political dispute: the only thing the victims had in common was that they were "cultured men, dedicated to learning and reading".

[5] Rumors began that Vincente was responsible for the deaths, and local officials searched his house to avoid giving the impression that they were neglecting the case.

In the opinion of Catalan bibliophile Ramon Miquel i Planas, who investigated the origins of the legend in the 1920s:[1] [I]t would be useless to look in the Barcelonese press of the time, or any other documented source, for any mention whatsoever of the supposed process against the monk in question and the subsequent execution of his sentence.

Besides, however great the literary ability of the author of the story, and despite the lavish local color that he may have wanted to enrich it with, the falseness of the document is evident on plain sight to any connoisseur of our country and its customs; not that we may pretend to negate by this that the presumed correspondent had news quite precise and surely ocular of the scenario in which the events that he relates supposedly took place.

But the same excess in picturesqueness betrays the artifice: the whole issue desprends the unmistakeable scent of what the Italians call a pasticcio,that is, a true literary swindle [...].

Either article could have inspired Gustave Flaubert, at the time a fifteen-year-old student in Rouen, to write a novelized version of Don Vincente's story titled Bibliomanie.

The first known Spanish mention of the legend is a letter from philologist Manuel Milà i Fontanals to his friend, the French hispanist Alfred Morel-Fatio, dated August 10, 1874.