As Professor Folke Gernert demonstrates, several of Cervantes’s characters were inspired by the descriptions found in La Celestina, a work that parodies sentimental fiction in the same way as Don Quixote parodies chivalric romance. Cervantes also wrote picaresque novels, such as the quixotic episode of the liberation of the galley slaves and the exemplary novels El coloquio de los perros (The Conversation of the Dogs) and El casamiento engañoso (The Deceitful Wedding), where he demonstrates his direct knowledge of Lazarillo de Tormes and of the genre it describes that “deals with the truth”.