It seems to us that we are reading an entertaining novel, with a young character, in his twenties, and without a penny in his pocket, who goes with a lily in his hand and doesn't stop walking (especially due to lack of money): what has always been called a coming-of-age novel or apprenticeship novel. In reality, however, it is an ambitious chronicle, with some episodes with a lot of spice, starring this passionate pilgrim (godless) who decided to risk everything on the gamble of becoming a poet-writer. An admirer of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom he draws much inspiration, and of William Shakespeare and François Villon. Born in La Selva del Camp in 1882, a bastard son, repudiated by his father (which will mark him deeply), self-taught, often scorned for his lack of academic culture. Of a timid disposition (“The old timidity of the Ferreters put into the blood”). For this reason, despite loving books madly, the protagonist – the author himself, Puig i Ferreter, with no additions – advocates, convinced, for lived culture before learned culture: “This is how I have always used reality to turn it into art. Not by hunting for documents with a notebook in hand, but by taking advantage of the ‘things’ I have lived or that have impressed me deeply and have remained within me with all their colors, in that depth of human experience which, transposed by imagination and fantasy, is the vital treasure of the artist”.