This chapter examines illegitimacy in three of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) which explicitly deal with the subject: La fuerza de la sangre, La ilustre fregona, and La senora Cornelia (The Power of Blood, The Illustrious Kitchen-Maid, and Lady Cornelia). In this narrative context, Hazbun explores the connection between illegitimacy and truth, looking closely at fiction and reality, burlas and veras, self-fashioning, and roleplay. This chapter illustrates that in early narrative contexts illegitimacy highlights the inner workings of the production of meaning itself. Hazbun illustrates that illegitimacy is also expressed quantitively in the Novelas and shaped by both excess and deficiency. The illegitimate figure can be an uncanny double, a surfeit, a return of the familiar, but also a lost piece of a whole, adrift, and elsewhere, always gesturing towards an alternative, much like the text itself.