Don Quixote

WHICH TREATS OF THE SHREWD CONVERSATION WHICH SANCHO PANZA HELD WITH
HIS MASTER DON QUIXOTE
“Aha, I have caught you,” said Sancho; “this is what in my heart and
soul I was longing to know. Come now, señor, can you deny what is
commonly said around us, when a person is out of humour, ‘I don’t know
what ails so-and-so, that he neither eats, nor drinks, nor sleeps, nor
gives a proper answer to any question; one would think he was
enchanted’? From which it is to be gathered that those who do not eat,
or drink, or sleep, or do any of the natural acts I am speaking of—that
such persons are enchanted; but not those that have the desire your
worship has, and drink when drink is given them, and eat when there is
anything to eat, and answer every question that is asked them.”

“What thou sayest is true, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote; “but I have
already told thee there are many sorts of enchantments, and it may be
that in the course of time they have been changed one for another, and
that now it may be the way with enchanted people to do all that I do,
though they did not do so before; so it is vain to argue or draw
inferences against the usage of the time. I know and feel that I am
enchanted, and that is enough to ease my conscience; for it would weigh
heavily on it if I thought that I was not enchanted, and that in a
faint-hearted and cowardly way I allowed myself to lie in this cage,
defrauding multitudes of the succour I might afford to those in need
and distress, who at this very moment may be in sore want of my aid and
protection.”

“Still for all that,” replied Sancho, “I say that, for your greater and
fuller satisfaction, it would be well if your worship were to try to
get out of this prison (and I promise to do all in my power to help,
and even to take you out of it), and see if you could once more mount
your good Rocinante, who seems to be enchanted too, he is so melancholy
and dejected; and then we might try our chance in looking for
adventures again; and if we have no luck there will be time enough to
go back to the cage; in which, on the faith of a good and loyal squire,
I promise to shut myself up along with your worship, if so be you are
so unfortunate, or I so stupid, as not to be able to carry out my
plan.”

“I am content to do as thou sayest, brother Sancho,” said Don Quixote,
“and when thou seest an opportunity for effecting my release I will
obey thee absolutely; but thou wilt see, Sancho, how mistaken thou art
in thy conception of my misfortune.”

The knight-errant and the ill-errant squire kept up their conversation
till they reached the place where the curate, the canon, and the
barber, who had already dismounted, were waiting for them. The carter
at once unyoked the oxen and left them to roam at large about the
pleasant green spot, the freshness of which seemed to invite, not
enchanted people like Don Quixote, but wide-awake, sensible folk like
his squire, who begged the curate to allow his master to leave the cage
for a little; for if they did not let him out, the prison might not be
as clean as the propriety of such a gentleman as his master required.
The curate understood him, and said he would very gladly comply with
his request, only that he feared his master, finding himself at
liberty, would take to his old courses and make off where nobody could
ever find him again.

“I will answer for his not running away,” said Sancho.

“And I also,” said the canon, “especially if he gives me his word as a
knight not to leave us without our consent.”

Don Quixote, who was listening to all this, said, “I give it;—moreover
one who is enchanted as I am cannot do as he likes with himself; for he
who had enchanted him could prevent his moving from one place for three
ages, and if he attempted to escape would bring him back flying.”—And
that being so, they might as well release him, particularly as it would
be to the advantage of all; for, if they did not let him out, he
protested he would be unable to avoid offending their nostrils unless
they kept their distance.

The canon took his hand, tied together as they both were, and on his
word and promise they unbound him, and rejoiced beyond measure he was
to find himself out of the cage. The first thing he did was to stretch
himself all over, and then he went to where Rocinante was standing and
giving him a couple of slaps on the haunches said, “I still trust in
God and in his blessed mother, O flower and mirror of steeds, that we
shall soon see ourselves, both of us, as we wish to be, thou with thy
master on thy back, and I mounted upon thee, following the calling for
which God sent me into the world.” And so saying, accompanied by
Sancho, he withdrew to a retired spot, from which he came back much
relieved and more eager than ever to put his squire’s scheme into
execution.

The canon gazed at him, wondering at the extraordinary nature of his
madness, and that in all his remarks and replies he should show such
excellent sense, and only lose his stirrups, as has been already said,
when the subject of chivalry was broached. And so, moved by compassion,
he said to him, as they all sat on the green grass awaiting the arrival
of the provisions:

“Is it possible, gentle sir, that the nauseous and idle reading of
books of chivalry can have had such an effect on your worship as to
upset your reason so that you fancy yourself enchanted, and the like,
all as far from the truth as falsehood itself is? How can there be any
human understanding that can persuade itself there ever was all that
infinity of Amadises in the world, or all that multitude of famous
knights, all those emperors of Trebizond, all those Felixmartes of
Hircania, all those palfreys, and damsels-errant, and serpents, and
monsters, and giants, and marvellous adventures, and enchantments of
every kind, and battles, and prodigious encounters, splendid costumes,
love-sick princesses, squires made counts, droll dwarfs, love letters,
billings and cooings, swashbuckler women, and, in a word, all that
nonsense the books of chivalry contain? For myself, I can only say that
when I read them, so long as I do not stop to think that they are all
lies and frivolity, they give me a certain amount of pleasure; but when
I come to consider what they are, I fling the very best of them at the
wall, and would fling it into the fire if there were one at hand, as
richly deserving such punishment as cheats and impostors out of the
range of ordinary toleration, and as founders of new sects and modes of
life, and teachers that lead the ignorant public to believe and accept
as truth all the folly they contain. And such is their audacity, they
even dare to unsettle the wits of gentlemen of birth and intelligence,
as is shown plainly by the way they have served your worship, when they
have brought you to such a pass that you have to be shut up in a cage
and carried on an ox-cart as one would carry a lion or a tiger from
place to place to make money by showing it. Come, Señor Don Quixote,
have some compassion for yourself, return to the bosom of common sense,
and make use of the liberal share of it that heaven has been pleased to
bestow upon you, employing your abundant gifts of mind in some other
reading that may serve to benefit your conscience and add to your
honour. And if, still led away by your natural bent, you desire to read
books of achievements and of chivalry, read the Book of Judges in the
Holy Scriptures, for there you will find grand reality, and deeds as
true as they are heroic. Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Cæsar,
Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an Alexander, Castile a Count Fernan
Gonzalez, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a Gonzalo Fernandez, Estremadura a
Diego García de Paredes, Jerez a Garci Perez de Vargas, Toledo a
Garcilaso, Seville a Don Manuel de Leon, to read of whose valiant deeds
will entertain and instruct the loftiest minds and fill them with
delight and wonder. Here, Señor Don Quixote, will be reading worthy of
your sound understanding; from which you will rise learned in history,
in love with virtue, strengthened in goodness, improved in manners,
brave without rashness, prudent without cowardice; and all to the
honour of God, your own advantage and the glory of La Mancha, whence, I
am informed, your worship derives your birth.”

Don Quixote listened with the greatest attention to the canon’s words,
and when he found he had finished, after regarding him for some time,
he replied to him:

“It appears to me, gentle sir, that your worship’s discourse is
intended to persuade me that there never were any knights-errant in the
world, and that all the books of chivalry are false, lying, mischievous
and useless to the State, and that I have done wrong in reading them,
and worse in believing them, and still worse in imitating them, when I
undertook to follow the arduous calling of knight-errantry which they
set forth; for you deny that there ever were Amadises of Gaul or of
Greece, or any other of the knights of whom the books are full.”

“It is all exactly as you state it,” said the canon; to which Don
Quixote returned, “You also went on to say that books of this kind had
done me much harm, inasmuch as they had upset my senses, and shut me up
in a cage, and that it would be better for me to reform and change my
studies, and read other truer books which would afford more pleasure
and instruction.”

“Just so,” said the canon.

“Well then,” returned Don Quixote, “to my mind it is you who are the
one that is out of his wits and enchanted, as you have ventured to
utter such blasphemies against a thing so universally acknowledged and
accepted as true that whoever denies it, as you do, deserves the same
punishment which you say you inflict on the books that irritate you
when you read them. For to try to persuade anybody that Amadis, and all
the other knights-adventurers with whom the books are filled, never
existed, would be like trying to persuade him that the sun does not
yield light, or ice cold, or earth nourishment. What wit in the world
can persuade another that the story of the Princess Floripes and Guy of
Burgundy is not true, or that of Fierabras and the bridge of Mantible,
which happened in the time of Charlemagne? For by all that is good it
is as true as that it is daylight now; and if it be a lie, it must be a
lie too that there was a Hector, or Achilles, or Trojan war, or Twelve
Peers of France, or Arthur of England, who still lives changed into a
raven, and is unceasingly looked for in his kingdom. One might just as
well try to make out that the history of Guarino Mezquino, or of the
quest of the Holy Grail, is false, or that the loves of Tristram and
the Queen Yseult are apocryphal, as well as those of Guinevere and
Lancelot, when there are persons who can almost remember having seen
the Dame Quintañona, who was the best cupbearer in Great Britain. And
so true is this, that I recollect a grandmother of mine on the father’s
side, whenever she saw any dame in a venerable hood, used to say to me,
‘Grandson, that one is like Dame Quintañona,’ from which I conclude
that she must have known her, or at least had managed to see some
portrait of her. Then who can deny that the story of Pierres and the
fair Magalona is true, when even to this day may be seen in the king’s
armoury the pin with which the valiant Pierres guided the wooden horse
he rode through the air, and it is a trifle bigger than the pole of a
cart? And alongside of the pin is Babieca’s saddle, and at Roncesvalles
there is Roland’s horn, as large as a large beam; whence we may infer
that there were Twelve Peers, and a Pierres, and a Cid, and other
knights like them, of the sort people commonly call adventurers. Or
perhaps I shall be told, too, that there was no such knight-errant as
the valiant Lusitanian Juan de Merlo, who went to Burgundy and in the
city of Arras fought with the famous lord of Charny, Mosen Pierres by
name, and afterwards in the city of Basle with Mosen Enrique de
Remesten, coming out of both encounters covered with fame and honour;
or adventures and challenges achieved and delivered, also in Burgundy,
by the valiant Spaniards Pedro Barba and Gutierre Quixada (of whose
family I come in the direct male line), when they vanquished the sons
of the Count of San Polo. I shall be told, too, that Don Fernando de
Guevara did not go in quest of adventures to Germany, where he engaged
in combat with Micer George, a knight of the house of the Duke of
Austria. I shall be told that the jousts of Suero de Quiñones, him of
the ‘Paso,’ and the emprise of Mosen Luis de Falces against the
Castilian knight, Don Gonzalo de Guzman, were mere mockeries; as well
as many other achievements of Christian knights of these and foreign
realms, which are so authentic and true, that, I repeat, he who denies
them must be totally wanting in reason and good sense.”

The canon was amazed to hear the medley of truth and fiction Don
Quixote uttered, and to see how well acquainted he was with everything
relating or belonging to the achievements of his knight-errantry; so he
said in reply:

“I cannot deny, Señor Don Quixote, that there is some truth in what you
say, especially as regards the Spanish knights-errant; and I am willing
to grant too that the Twelve Peers of France existed, but I am not
disposed to believe that they did all the things that the Archbishop
Turpin relates of them. For the truth of the matter is they were
knights chosen by the kings of France, and called ‘Peers’ because they
were all equal in worth, rank and prowess (at least if they were not
they ought to have been), and it was a kind of religious order like
those of Santiago and Calatrava in the present day, in which it is
assumed that those who take it are valiant knights of distinction and
good birth; and just as we say now a Knight of St. John, or of
Alcántara, they used to say then a Knight of the Twelve Peers, because
twelve equals were chosen for that military order. That there was a
Cid, as well as a Bernardo del Carpio, there can be no doubt; but that
they did the deeds people say they did, I hold to be very doubtful. In
that other matter of the pin of Count Pierres that you speak of, and
say is near Babieca’s saddle in the Armoury, I confess my sin; for I am
either so stupid or so short-sighted, that, though I have seen the
saddle, I have never been able to see the pin, in spite of it being as
big as your worship says it is.”

“For all that it is there, without any manner of doubt,” said Don
Quixote; “and more by token they say it is inclosed in a sheath of
cowhide to keep it from rusting.”

“All that may be,” replied the canon; “but, by the orders I have
received, I do not remember seeing it. However, granting it is there,
that is no reason why I am bound to believe the stories of all those
Amadises and of all that multitude of knights they tell us about, nor
is it reasonable that a man like your worship, so worthy, and with so
many good qualities, and endowed with such a good understanding, should
allow himself to be persuaded that such wild crazy things as are
written in those absurd books of chivalry are really true.”

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