Prado manuscript: ‘Without a doubt they caught a lot of children the previous night. The banquet which is being prepared will be a sumptuous one. Good appetite!’

‘The Ayala text of 1799-1803, as usual more explicit than that of the Prado, reads: ‘Young boys are the object of a thousand obscenities on the part of old and dissipated men.’ In the preceding plate, Number 68, the subject was young women being taught to become prostitutes while here the relationships concern men and boys. In both cases, if we were to follow through an analysis, the real subject of these last two works would concern blatantly bad or mis-directed education, education which brings out the worst, rather than ideally the best in human beings and whose eventual result would be the creation of a world of witches.’

Johnson, R. S., Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, R.S. Johnson Fine Art, Chicago, 1992, p. 164.