Seller of Indulgences

The indulgence seller, whom Lázaro de Tormes serves as his fifth master, is a practiced maker of appearances. In a village where his preaching has failed to sell indulgences, he and a constable stage a public quarrel, a supposed demonic affliction, and a healing credited to the indulgence. The crowd takes the performance for proof; sales follow on a scale that preaching alone had not achieved. Lázaro, initially among those who believe, later recognizes the fraud when he sees the two men laughing together. The episode makes the seller not merely a clever rogue but the director of a counterfeit religious spectacle whose audience supplies its own conviction.

Identity and Methods

The seller enters the narrative as Lázaro’s fifth master, described as exceptionally shameless and as a tireless dealer in indulgences. He has an abundance of devices for making people buy them, resorting to artifice when persuasion fails. His methods begin before he reaches the pulpit: where an indulgence is to be presented, he gives local clerics modest gifts—seasonal fruit such as a lettuce, lemons, oranges, a peach, quinces, or a green pear—to win their favor and encourage them to promote the sale.

He also adjusts his speech to his clerical audience. If priests say they know Latin, he avoids using it, lest he expose himself by making mistakes; instead he displays polished, fluent Spanish. If they seem to have taken orders through money and deference rather than study, he performs the opposite role, speaking for a long time in Latin-like language. His authority is thus tailored to the people whose cooperation he needs: gifts cultivate allies, while verbal display creates the impression of learning.

These preliminaries reveal a salesman attentive to the mechanisms of credibility. He does not depend on one fixed show of piety. He gauges his listeners, changes register, and recruits local intermediaries. When ordinary inducements and the familiar devices of preaching fail, he turns to a more elaborate contrivance, using the village’s doubts as the material for a staged demonstration.

The Staged Miracle

In a village in La Sagra de Toledo, the seller preaches for two or three days without selling a single indulgence. The villagers show no sign of changing their minds, and he grows furious. He decides that the next morning he will summon the community for the formal presentation of the indulgence. The setting and timing are calculated: an official requirement to attend the presentation gives the seller a way to gather the very audience that his earlier sermons had not persuaded.

That evening, he and the constable begin playing over a parting drink. Their game develops into an argument: the seller calls the constable a thief, and the constable calls him a swindler. The seller seizes a large spear; the constable reaches for the sword at his belt. Guests and villagers rush in to separate them. Though the crowd prevents them from fighting, the constable continues to accuse the seller of fraud and declares the indulgences false. The accusation is not an interruption of the plan but its opening act: by morning, the village has a vivid public reason to doubt the seller, and therefore a ready-made drama to witness.

The next day the seller goes to the church, has the bells rung, and begins the sermon. The villagers assemble already discussing the previous night’s accusation. In the middle of the preaching, the constable enters, prays, and addresses the congregation. He claims that the seller recruited him to share the proceeds, says he now regrets the harm this would do to his conscience and to the villagers’ purses, and disavows the indulgences. He even throws down the staff that signifies his official authority, presenting his public renunciation as a costly act of truth-telling.

The seller lets him speak without interruption. When the constable finishes, he invites him to continue, and the constable replies that there is more he could say about the seller’s lies but that, for now, he has said enough. The seller then falls to his knees on the pulpit, hands joined and eyes raised, and calls on God to judge between them. He asks that, if the constable’s charge is true, the pulpit sink seven fathoms beneath the earth with them both; if the seller is telling the truth and the constable lies under demonic persuasion, he asks that the constable be punished and his malice exposed.

The constable immediately falls full-length to the ground. He bellows, foams at the mouth, twists his face, kicks, punches, and thrashes about. The congregation sees a body apparently overcome by a force beyond ordinary control. The seller has converted an accusation that the indulgences are false into a spectacle that seems to demonstrate divine judgment against their accuser.

Ritual, Crowd, and Sales

The seller does not leave the apparent miracle to speak for itself. While the crowd cries out and some people fear for the constable, he presents himself as a merciful intercessor. He tells the congregation not to answer evil with evil, then urges them to pray for the man’s recovery and for the expulsion of the demon, if one has entered him. This shift—from public accuser to forgiving spiritual mediator—gives the seller command of both sides of the event: he has staged the crisis, and he now appears to guide its resolution.

The congregation kneels before the altar. Together with the priests, the people sing a quiet litany. Carrying a cross and holy water, the seller approaches the constable and performs the prescribed gestures of an exorcism. With his hands lifted and his eyes turned upward, he delivers a long prayer that moves the people to tears. The scene borrows the signs and emotional force of religious devotion: collective prayer, clerical participation, sacred objects, and a preacher whose apparent compassion supplies a moral interpretation of the disturbance.

After the prayer, the seller orders that an indulgence be brought and places it on the constable’s head. The man gradually recovers his senses, then throws himself at the seller’s feet and asks forgiveness. He confesses that the devil made him speak, first to take revenge for the quarrel and, above all, to prevent the good that would come from the villagers’ purchase of the indulgence. The apparent cure supplies the performance’s decisive confirmation: the crowd has heard the accusation, witnessed the punishment, and now sees the accuser recant.

The seller forgives the constable, and the two men make peace. The village’s response is immediate: a crush forms to obtain the indulgences, and nearly everyone—husbands and wives, sons and daughters, boys and girls—takes one. The story then travels ahead of the seller. In ten or twelve neighboring villages, people come to obtain the indulgence at the inn, as if it were fruit being given away, and he sells thousands without preaching a single sermon. A staged event in one church becomes a portable reputation, doing the work of repeated performances wherever the pair goes next.

The fraud’s effectiveness rests on its careful distribution of roles and evidence. The constable first appears to offer independent testimony against the seller; the seller’s restraint makes him look confident rather than defensive; the collapse turns the accusation into apparent supernatural proof; the ritual healing gives that proof a visible ending; and the constable’s confession closes the story in terms the congregation can accept. The crowd does not merely watch a trick: its prayers, tears, and purchases complete the seller’s production and carry its claim into neighboring towns.

Lázaro as Witness and the Episode’s Meaning

Lázaro admits that, when the seller arranged the deception, he too was astonished and believed it, as many others did. His response places the trick’s power in the scene itself: even the boy who travels with the seller does not initially recognize the fraud. The narrative does not make the truth available through a sudden supernatural explanation. Lázaro understands what happened later, when he sees his master and the constable laughing heartily over the affair. Their laughter reveals that the supposed quarrel, demonic attack, and reconciliation were all part of a planned scheme.

The delayed recognition gives Lázaro a specific change within the episode: he moves from credulous spectator to informed witness. His eventual insight does not come from detecting a hidden device during the church performance but from observing the conspirators afterward. He concludes that the seller was the scheme’s learned inventor and remarks on how much such swindlers must deceive simple people. The child’s amusement at the ingenuity coexists with his recognition of its victims, leaving him both impressed by the craft and alert to its cost.

The episode’s satire grows from the distance between religious forms and their fraudulent use. The seller’s words and actions invoke clerical learning, prayer, forgiveness, exorcism, and the authority of an indulgence; the plot shows him arranging those forms as instruments of sales. The constable’s staff, the pulpit, the cross, the holy water, and the indulgence become parts of a persuasive spectacle, while the congregation’s sincere fear and devotion help to authenticate it. The account exposes the seller’s method without suggesting that the villagers’ belief is itself a performance: they respond to the apparent evidence the two men have manufactured.

As Lázaro’s fifth master, the seller belongs to the succession of masters through whom the boy encounters the practical workings of power and survival. Here the lesson is not simply that a poor servant must be alert. It is that apparent authority can be assembled from gestures, institutional symbols, coordinated testimony, and a story repeated until strangers accept it as fact. Lázaro’s later knowledge changes the meaning of the scene but cannot undo the sales it produced; the deception has already made its way through a dozen surrounding villages.

Narrative Placement

The episode is part of the fifth chapter, which introduces the seller and recounts what happens during Lázaro’s service with him. Its staged controversy and resolution form a compact, self-contained narrative: failed sales lead to a plan; a quarrel supplies the accusation; the church ceremony converts the accusation into a miracle; and the supposed miracle produces both immediate purchases and broader commercial success. The aftermath is essential to the portrait, because the seller’s achievement lies not only in fooling one congregation but in making its response advertise the indulgences elsewhere.

The narration also preserves a distinction between what Lázaro experiences at the time and what he knows afterward. In the church, he shares the crowd’s astonishment; later laughter reveals the conspiracy. Because the scene is related through the servant who first believes and then understands, the reader follows the fraud’s effect before receiving its explanation. The result is a double-edged portrait: the seller’s performance is cunning enough to deceive Lázaro and the congregation, while the older narrator’s disclosure shows how deliberately their belief was engineered. The final measure of the trick is not the constable’s fall but the thousands of indulgences sold in its wake.