st Ramon de la
Cruz based most of his _sainetes_--farcical pieces in one act--upon the
customs and rivalries of these women. The dress invented by the _maja_,
consisting of a short skirt partly covered by a net with berry-shaped
tassels, white _mantilla_ and high shell-comb, is considered all over
the world as the national costume of Spanish women.

When the novel first appeared in Spain some years ago, a certain part of
the Madrid public, unduly evil-minded, thought that it had discovered
the identity of the real persons whom I had taken as models to draw my
characters. This claim provoked a scandalous sensation and gave my book
an unwholesome notoriety. It was thought that the protagonists of _La
maja desnuda_ were an illustrious Spanish painter of world-wide fame,
who is my friend, and an aristocratic lady very celebrated at the time
but now forgotten. I protested against this unwarranted and fantastic
interpretation. Although I draw my characters from life, I do so only in
a very fragmentary way (like all the great creative novelists whom I
admire as masters in the field of fiction), using the materials gathered
in my observations to form completely new types which are the direct and
legitimate offspring of my own imagination. To use a figure: as a
novelist I am a painter, not a photographer. Although I seek my
inspiration in reality, I copy it in accordance with my own way of
seeing it; I do not reproduce it with the mechanical servility of the
photographic camera.

It is possible that my imaginary heroes are vaguely reminiscent of
beings who actually exist. Subconsciousness is the novelist's principal
instrument, and this subconsciousness frequently mocks us, leading us to
mistake for our own creation the things which we have unwittingly
observed in Nature. But despite this, it is unfair, as well as risky,
for the reader to assign the names of real persons to the characters of
fiction, saying, "This is So-and-so."

It would be equally unfair to consider this novel as audacious or of
doubtful morality. The artistic world which I describe in _La maja
desnuda_ cannot be expected to have the same conception of life as the
conventional world. Far from believing it immoral, I consider this one
of the most moral novels I have ever written. And it is for this reason
that, with a full realization of the standards demanded by the
English-reading public, I have not hesitated to authorize the present
translation without pa