The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha

by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote having thus suddenly got up, with his whole frame agitated with indignation, cast an angry look on his indiscreet censor, and thus spake: "This place, the presence of these noble persons, and the respect I have always had for your function, check my just resentment, and tie up my hands from taking the satisfaction of a gentleman. For these reasons, and since every one knows that you gown-men, as well as women, use no other weapons but your tongues, I will fairly engage you upon equal terms, and combat you at your own weapon. I should rather have expected sober admonitions from a man of your cloth, than infamous reproaches. Charitable and wholesome correction ought to be managed at another rate, and with more moderation. The least that can be said of this reproof, which you have given me here so bitterly and in public, is, that it has exceeded the bounds of Christian correction, and a gentle one had been much more becoming. Is it fit that without any insight into the offence which you reprove, you should, without any more ado, call the offender fool, sot, and addlepate? Pray, sir, what foolish action have you seen me do, that should provoke you to give me such ill language, and bid me so magisterially go home to look after my wife and children, before you know whether I have any? Don't you think those deserve as severe a censure who screw themselves into other men's houses, and pretend to rule the master? A fine world it is truly, when a poor pedant, who has seen no more of it than lies within twenty or thirty leagues about him, shall take upon him to prescribe laws to knight-errantry, and judge of those who profess it! You, forsooth, esteem it an idle undertaking, and time lost, to wander through the world, though scorning its pleasures and sharing the hardships and toils of it, by which the virtuous aspire to the high seat of immortality. If persons of honour, knights, lords, gentlemen, or men of any birth, should take me for a fool or a coxcomb, I should think it an irreparable affront. But for mere scholars, that never trode the path of chivalry, to think me mad, I despise and laugh at it. I am a knight, and a knight will I die, if so it please Omnipotence. Some choose the high road of haughty ambition; others the low ways of base servile flattery; a third sort take the crooked path of deceitful hypocrisy; and a few, very few, that of true religion. I, for my own part, follow the narrow track of knight-errantry; and for the exercise of it I despise riches, but not honour. I have redressed grievances, and righted the injured, chastised the insolent, vanquished giants, and trod elves and hobgoblins under my feet. I am in love, but no more than the profession of knight-errantry obliges me to be. My intentions are all directed to virtuous ends, and to do no man wrong, but good to all the world. And now let your graces judge, most excellent duke and duchess, whether a person who makes it his only study to practise all this deserves to be upbraided for a fool."

"Well said, truly," quoth Sancho; "say no more for yourself, my good lord and master; stop when you are well; for there is not the least matter to be added more on your side. Besides, since Mr. Parson has had the face to say, point-blank, as one may say, that there neither are, nor ever were, any knights-errant in the world, no marvel he does not know what he says." "What!" said the clergyman, "I warrant you are that Sancho Panza to whom they say your master has promised an island?" "Ay, marry am I," answered Sancho; "and I am he that deserves it as well as another body; and I am one of those of whom they say, 'Keep with good men and thou shalt be one of them;' and of those of whom it is said again, 'Not with whom thou wert bred, but with whom thou hast fed;' as also, 'Lean against a good tree, and it will shelter thee.' I have leaned and stuck close to my good master, and kept him company this many a month; and now he and I are all one; and I must be as he is; and so he live, and I live, he will not want kingdoms to rule, nor shall I want islands to govern."

"That thou shalt not, honest Sancho," said the duke; "for I, on the great Don Quixote's account, will now give thee the government of an odd one of my own of no small consequence." "Down, down on thy knees, Sancho," cried Don Quixote, "and kiss his grace's feet for this favour." Sancho did accordingly; but when the clergyman saw it, he got up in a great heat. "By the habit which I wear," cried he, "I can scarce forbear telling your grace, that you are as mad as these sinful wretches. Well may they be mad, when such wise men as you humour and authorise their frenzy. You may keep them here, and stay with them yourself, if your grace pleases; but for my part, I will leave you and go home, to save myself the labour of reprehending what I can't mend." With that, leaving the rest of his dinner behind him, away he flung, the duke and the duchess not being able to pacify him; though, indeed, the duke could not say much to him for laughing at his impertinent passion.

When he had done laughing, "Sir Knight of the Lions," said he, "you have answered so well, that you need no farther satisfaction of the angry clergyman; especially if you consider that whatever he might say, it was not in his power to fix an affront on a person of your character, since women and churchmen cannot give an affront." "Very true, my lord," said Don Quixote; "and I ought not to have any resentment for what that good man said, neither, indeed, have I any. I only wish he would have stayed a little longer, that I might have convinced him of his error in believing there were never any knights-errant in the world. Had Amadis, or any one of his innumerable race, but heard him say any thing like this, I can assure his reverence it would have gone hard with him."

"I will answer for it, it would," quoth Sancho; "they would have undone him as you would undo an oyster, and have cleft him from head to foot as one would slice a pomegranate, or a ripe muskmelon. They were a parcel of tough blades, and would not have swallowed such a pill. I verily believe, had Rinaldo of Montalban but heard the poor man talk at this rate, he would have given him such a gag as would have secured him from prating these three years. Ay, ay, if he had fallen into their clutches, see how he would have got out again." The duchess was ready to die with laughing at Sancho, whom she thought a more pleasant fool and a greater madman than his master; and she was not the only person at that time of this opinion.

The duchess now took an opportunity to desire the knight to give a particular description of the Lady Dulcinea del Toboso's beauty and accomplishments, not doubting but that his good memory would enable him to do it well; adding withal, that according to the voice of fame, she must needs be the finest creature in the whole world, and consequently in La Mancha.

With that, Don Quixote, fetching a deep sigh, "Madam," said he, "could I pluck out my heart, and expose it to your grace's view, I might save my tongue the labour of attempting that which it cannot express, and you can scarce believe; for there your grace would see her beauty depainted to the life. But why should I undertake to delineate and copy one by one each several perfection of the peerless Dulcinea? That task were worthy of the pencils of Parrhasius, Timantes, and Apelles, or the graving-tools of Lysippus. The hands of the best painters and statuaries should indeed be employed to give in speaking paint, in marble and Corinthian brass, an exact copy of her beauties; while Ciceronian and Demosthenian eloquence laboured to reach the praise of her endowments." "Pray, sir," asked the duchess, "what do you mean by that word Demosthenian?" "Demosthenian eloquence, madam," said Don Quixote, "is as much as to say, the eloquence of Demosthenes; and the Ciceronian, that of Cicero; the two greatest orators that ever were in the world." "It is true," said the duke; "and you but shewed your ignorance, my dear, in asking such a question. Yet the noble Don Quixote would highly oblige us, if he would but be pleased to attempt her picture now; for even in a rude draught of her lineaments, I question not but she will appear so charming, as to deserve the envy of the brightest of her sex." "Ah, my lord," said Don Quixote, "it would be so indeed, if the misfortune which not long since befell her had not in a manner razed her idea out of the seat of my memory; and as it is, I ought rather to bewail her change than describe her person: for your grace must know that as I lately went to kiss her hands, and obtain her benediction and leave for my intended absence in quest of new adventures, I found her quite another creature than I expected. I found her enchanted—transformed from a princess to a country-wench, from beauty to ugliness, from courtliness to rusticity, from a reserved lady to a jumping Joan; in short, from Dulcinea del Toboso to a peasantess of Sayago." "Bless us!" cried the duke with a loud voice, "what villain has done the world such an injury? Who has robbed it not only of the beauty that was its ornament, but of those charming graces that were its delight, and that virtue which was its living honour?" "Who should it be," replied Don Quixote, "but one of those cursed magicians who have persecuted me, and will continue to do so, till they have sunk me and my lofty deeds of chivalry into the profound abyss of oblivion. Yes, they wound me in that part which they well know is most sensible; aware, that to deprive a knight-errant of his lady, is to rob him of the eyes with which he sees, of the sun that enlightens him, and of the food that sustains him. For, as I have often said, a knight-errant without a lady is like a tree without leaves, a building without mortar, or a shadow without a body that causes it."

"I grant all this," said the duchess; "yet if we may believe the history of your life, which was lately published with universal applause, it seems to imply, to the best of my remembrance, that you never saw the Lady Dulcinea, and that there is no such lady in the world; but rather that she is a mere notional creature, proceeding from your own fancy, and there endowed with all the charms and good qualifications which you are pleased to ascribe to her."

"Much may be said upon this point," said Don Quixote; "Heaven knows whether there be a Dulcinea in the world or not, and whether she be a notional creature or not. These are mysteries not to be so narrowly inquired into. I do indeed make her the object of my contemplations, and, as I ought, look on her as a lady endowed with all those qualifications that may raise the character of a person to universal fame. She is to me beautiful without blemish, reserved without pride, amorous with modesty, agreeable for her courteous temper, and courteous as an effect of her generous education, and, in short, of an illustrious parentage. For beauty displays its lustre to a higher degree of perfection when joined with noble blood than it can in those that are meanly descended."

"The observation is just," said the duke; "but give me leave, sir, to propose to you a doubt, which the reading of that history hath started in my mind. It is, that, allowing there be a Dulcinea at Toboso, or elsewhere, and as beautiful as you describe her, yet I do not find she can any way equal in greatness of birth the Orianas, the Alastrajareas, the Madasimas, and a thousand others, of whom we read in those histories with which you have been so conversant." "To this," said Don Quixote, "I answer, that Dulcinea is the daughter of her own actions, and that virtue ennobles the blood. A virtuous man of mean condition is more to be esteemed than a vicious person of quality. Besides, Dulcinea is possessed of those other endowments that may entitle her to crowns and sceptres, since beauty alone has raised many of her sex to a throne." "I must own, sir," said the duchess, "that in all your discourse, you, as we say, proceed with the plummet of reason, and fathom all the depths of controversy. Therefore I submit; and from this time I am resolved to believe, and will make all my domestics, nay my husband too, if there be occasion, believe and maintain, that there is a Dulcinea del Toboso extant, and living at this day; that she is beautiful and of good extraction; and to sum up all in a word, altogether deserving the services of so great a knight as the noble Don Quixote; which I think is the highest commendation I can bestow on her. But yet I must confess there is still one scruple that makes me uneasy, and causes me to have an ill opinion of Sancho. It is that the history tells us, that when Sancho Panza carried your letter to the Lady Dulcinea, he found her winnowing a sack of corn; by the same token, that it was the worst sort of wheat, which makes me much doubt her quality."