Exemplary Tales of Love – Novelas amorosas y ejemplares

Frame story: Friends of Lisis, who is ill with a recurring fever, gather to entertain her at Christmastime by telling two stories each night for five nights. Men and woman alternate as narrators; Lisis loves don Juan, who will tell the next-to-last story. Lisarda, Lisis's cousin and rival for Juan's love, tells the first story, and Lisis's mother, Laura, tells the last. By the end of the volume, Lisis accepts she will not have don Juan and promises another suitor, don Diego, that they will be engaged by the new year.

N. 1. Taking a Chance on Losing – Aventurarse perdiendo

Narrator: Lisarda

Fabio, a young gentleman from Madrid, climbing Montserrat to visit the monastery, encounters Jacinta disguised as a shepherd, lamenting her misfortunes. He realizes she is a woman and entreats her to tell him her story.

When she was a girl of sixteen growing up in Baeza (Andalusia), Jacinta's mother was dead and her father paid attention only to his son. Jacinta dreams of a handsome lover with a cape over his face. When she pulls back the cape, he stabs her in the heart with a dagger. She wakes up in love with this phantom, who later materializes as don Félix, a neighbor who had been long off at war. He courts her secretly at night.

Félix's cousin Adriana also loves him. At first, he humors her mother’s request to court her, but Jacinta demands that he tell Adriana he is already engaged to her. Adriana warns Jacinta's father that his daughter is offending the family honor and kills herself. Jacinta and Félix take refuge in a convent from her enraged father. One night Félix leaves the convent, is attacked by Jacinta's father and brother and kills the brother in self-defense, flees to Naples, then goes to serve in Flanders.

Jacinta's father intercepts all Felix's letters and sends her a forged one that Félix has died. Jacinta takes the nun's habit. Six years later Félix reappears, she breaks her religious vows, and they get a papal dispensation that permits them to marry, but only after a year in which they do not cohabit. During the waiting period, Félix goes off to war in Mamora (Morocco), while Jacinta stays in Madrid with his aunt and the aunt’s daughter, Guiomar.