Chapter I. Which deals with the condition and way of life of the famous hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha

In a village of La Mancha whose name I would rather not recall, there lived not long ago one of those hidalgos who keep a lance on the rack, an old leather shield, a bony nag, and a greyhound for the chase. A stew with rather more beef than mutton in it, hash most nights, eggs and bacon on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a squab or so as an extra on Sundays used up three quarters of his income. The rest of it went on a coat of fine broadcloth, velvet breeches for feast days with slippers to match, and on weekdays he did himself honor in his best homespun. In his house he had a housekeeper who was past forty, and a niece who was not yet twenty, and a lad for field and market who would saddle the nag as readily as he would take up the pruning hook. Our hidalgo was edging toward fifty; he was of a hardy constitution, lean of flesh, gaunt of face, a great early riser, and fond of hunting. Some will have it that his surname was Quixada, or Quesada, for on this point there is some disagreement among the authors who write of the matter; though from plausible conjectures it may be gathered that he was called Quexana. But this matters little to our tale; it is enough that in the telling of it we do not stray one jot from the truth.

It should be known, then, that in his idle moments, which were most of the year, this aforesaid hidalgo gave himself over to reading books of chivalry with such devotion and delight that he almost entirely forgot the pursuit of hunting, and even the management of his estate. And his eagerness and folly in this went so far that he sold many fanegas of good farmland to buy books of chivalry to read, and so he brought home every one of them he could lay his hands on; and of them all, none pleased him so well as those composed by the famous Feliciano de Silva, for the clarity of his prose and those tangled phrases of his seemed to him pure pearls, especially when he came to read those love speeches and letters of challenge, where in many places he found written: The reason of the unreason done to my reason so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauteousness. And also when he read: …the high heavens that divinely fortify you with the stars in your divinity, and make you deserving of the desert that your greatness deserves.

Over phrases like these the poor gentleman lost his wits, and he lay awake trying to understand them and dig the meaning out of them, which Aristotle himself could not have extracted or understood had he come back to life for that alone. He was not quite easy about the wounds Don Belianís gave and received, because he imagined that, however great the surgeons who had treated him, his face and his whole body could not help being covered with scars and marks. Even so, he praised the author for ending his book with the promise of that endless adventure, and many times he felt the urge to take up his pen and finish it off to the letter, as is promised there; and no doubt he would have done it, and even pulled it off, if other, greater thoughts that never left him had not stood in his way. Many times he argued with the priest of his village—a learned man, a graduate of Sigüenza—over which had been the better knight, Palmerín of England or Amadís of Gaul; but Master Nicolás, the barber of the same village, said that none came up to the Knight of Phoebus, and that if any could be compared with him, it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadís of Gaul, because he had a temper fit for anything; he was no finicky knight, nor such a crybaby as his brother, and in the matter of valor he did not lag one step behind him.

In short, he became so wrapped up in his reading that his nights slipped by as he read from light to light, and his days from dimness to dimness; and so, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dried up, so that he came to lose his mind. His imagination filled up with everything he read in his books, enchantments as well as quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments, and impossible absurdities; and the notion that the whole machinery of those far-famed, fancy-framed inventions he read was true settled so firmly in his imagination that for him there was no truer history in the world. He used to say that the Cid Ruy Díaz had been a very good knight, but that he was nothing beside the Knight of the Burning Sword, who with a single backstroke had cut two fierce and monstrous giants in half. He thought better of Bernardo del Carpio, because at Roncesvalles he had killed Roldán the Enchanted, using the trick of Hercules when he choked Antaeus, the son of Earth, in his arms. He spoke very well of the giant Morgante, because, though he came of that giant breed, who are all arrogant and ill-mannered, he alone was genial and well brought up. But best of all he liked Reinaldos of Montalbán, especially when he saw him ride out of his castle and rob everyone he came across, and when, in lands overseas, he stole that idol of Mohammed made all of gold, as his history says. He would have given his housekeeper, and his niece into the bargain, for the chance to land a round of kicks on the traitor Galalón.

In the end, his wits now quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever a madman in the world hit upon; and it was that it seemed to him fitting and necessary, both for the increase of his honor and for the service of his commonwealth, to become a knight-errant, and to go all over the world with his armor and his horse in search of adventures, and to practice everything he had read that knights-errant practiced, undoing every kind of wrong and putting himself in situations and dangers from which, once he had seen them through, he would win eternal name and fame. The poor man already pictured himself crowned by the might of his arm, at the very least, with the empire of Trebizond; and so, with these most agreeable thoughts, carried away by the strange pleasure he found in them, he hurried to put his wish into effect.

And the first thing he did was to clean some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfathers, which, eaten by rust and furred with mold, had lain for long ages set aside and forgotten in a corner. He cleaned it and repaired it as best he could, but he saw that it had one great defect, which was that it had no closed helmet with a visor, only a plain morion; but his ingenuity made up for this, for out of pasteboard he made a sort of half visor which, fitted to the morion, gave the appearance of a complete helmet. It is true that, to test whether it was strong and could stand up to a slash, he drew his sword and gave it two blows, and with the first, in an instant, he undid what had taken him a week to make; and he could not help disliking the ease with which he had smashed it to pieces, and, to make himself safe from this danger, he made it over again, putting some iron bars inside it, so that he was satisfied with its strength; and, not wanting to put it to a new trial, he declared and held it to be a most excellent visored helmet.

Next he went to look at his nag, and although he had more quarter cracks in his hooves than a real has quarters, and more blemishes than Gonela’s horse, which tantum pellis et ossa fuit (was nothing but skin and bone), it seemed to him that neither Alexander’s Bucephalus nor the Cid’s Babieca could match him. Four days went by while he pondered what name to give him; because, as he told himself, it was not right that the horse of so famous a knight, and a horse so good in himself, should go without a name of note; and so he tried to fit him with one that would declare what he had been before he belonged to a knight-errant, and what he was now; for it stood to reason that, since his master was changing his station, the horse should change his name as well and acquire a famous and resounding one, as befitted the new order and the new calling that his master now professed. And so, after many names that he made up, struck out and discarded, added to, undid, and made over again in his memory and imagination, at last he came to call him Rocinante: a name, to his mind, lofty, sonorous, and significant of what the horse had been when he was a rocín, a common nag, before (antes) he became what he now was, which was the foremost and first of all the nags in the world.

Having given his horse a name, and one so much to his liking, he decided to give himself one, and he spent another eight days on this thought, and at the end of them he came to call himself Don Quixote; from which—as has been said—the authors of this most truthful history have concluded that his name must surely have been Quixada, and not Quesada, as others would have it. But remembering that the valiant Amadís had not been content to call himself plain Amadís, but had added the name of his kingdom and homeland, to make it famous, and called himself Amadís of Gaul, so he, like a good knight, decided to add to his own name the name of his own land and call himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, by which, to his mind, he declared his lineage and homeland very vividly and did it honor by taking his surname from it.

His armor cleaned, then, his morion made into a helmet, his nag named, and himself confirmed, he persuaded himself that nothing else was lacking but to find a lady to fall in love with; for a knight-errant without love was a tree without leaves or fruit, and a body without a soul. He would say to himself:

“If, for my sins or by good luck, I run into some giant hereabouts, as commonly happens to knights-errant, and I overthrow him at one encounter, or split him down the middle, or, in short, defeat him and make him yield, will it not be well to have someone to send him to as a present, so that he may go in and kneel down before my sweet lady and say in a humble and submissive voice: ‘I, lady, am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the isle of Malindrania, whom the never-duly-lauded knight Don Quixote of La Mancha vanquished in single combat, and who commanded me to present myself before your grace, so that your greatness may dispose of me at your pleasure’?”

Oh, how pleased our good knight was when he had made this speech, and more so when he found someone to call his lady! And it was, so it is believed, that in a village near his own there was a very good-looking farm girl with whom he had once been in love, although, as far as is known, she never knew it or took any notice of it. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and it seemed right to him to give her the title of lady of his thoughts; and, looking for a name for her that would not clash too much with her own and would lean and tend toward that of a princess and great lady, he came to call her Dulcinea del Toboso, because she was a native of El Toboso: a name, to his mind, musical and rare and significant, like all the others he had given to himself and his things.