Chapter XLVII. Of the strange manner in which Don Quixote of La Mancha was enchanted, with other famous events
When Don Quixote found himself caged in that fashion and set on top of the cart, he said:
“Many and most grave histories of knights-errant have I read, but never have I read, or seen, or heard of enchanted knights being carried off in this fashion, and at the pace these lazy, sluggish animals promise; for they are always carried through the air with wondrous swiftness, shut up in some dark and dusky cloud, or in some chariot of fire, or else upon some hippogriff or other such beast; but that they should carry me off now on an ox-cart, by the living God, it fills me with confusion! But perhaps the chivalry and the enchantments of these times of ours must follow another road than the ancients followed. And it might also be that, since I am a new knight in the world, and the first who has revived the long-forgotten exercise of adventuring chivalry, other kinds of enchantment and other ways of carrying the enchanted have been newly invented as well. What do you think of this, Sancho, my son?”
“I don’t know what I think,” answered Sancho, “not being as well read as your grace in the errant scriptures; but, for all that, I’d dare to state and swear that these visions going about here are not altogether Catholic.”
“Catholic? By my father!” answered Don Quixote. “How can they be Catholic if they are all demons who have taken on phantom bodies to come and do this and put me in this state? And if you wish to see the truth of it, touch them and feel them, and you will see that they have no bodies but of air, and that there is nothing to them but the appearance.”
“By God, sir,” replied Sancho, “I’ve touched them already; and this devil going about here so busily is plump and well fleshed, and he has another property very different from the one I’ve heard demons are supposed to have; because, from what people say, they all smell of brimstone and other foul smells; but this one smells of ambergris half a league off.”
Sancho said this of Don Fernando, who, being so great a lord, must have smelled as Sancho said.
“Do not marvel at that, Sancho, my friend,” answered Don Quixote, “for I would have you know that devils know a great deal, and, although they carry smells about with them, they themselves smell nothing, because they are spirits; and if they do smell, they cannot smell good things, only bad and stinking ones. And the reason is that, since wherever they are they carry hell with them, and can receive no kind of relief in their torments, and a good smell is a thing that delights and pleases, it is not possible for them to smell anything good. And if you think that this demon you speak of smells of ambergris, either you are deceiving yourself or he wants to deceive you by making you think he is not a demon.”
All these colloquies passed between master and man; and Don Fernando and Cardenio, fearing that Sancho might see through their scheme altogether, for he was already hard on its heels, decided to hasten the departure; and, calling the innkeeper aside, they told him to saddle Rocinante and put the packsaddle on Sancho’s donkey; which he did with great speed.
By this time the priest had come to terms with the troopers for them to go with him as far as his village, for so much a day. Cardenio hung the shield from one side of the saddlebow of Rocinante’s saddle and the basin from the other, and by signs ordered Sancho to mount his ass and take Rocinante by the reins, and he posted the two troopers with their firelocks on either side of the cart. But before the cart moved off, the innkeeper’s wife, her daughter, and Maritornes came out to say goodbye to Don Quixote, making a show of tears over his misfortune; and Don Quixote said to them:
“Weep not, my good ladies, for all these misfortunes go with the calling of those who profess what I profess; and if these calamities did not befall me, I would not count myself a famous knight-errant; for to knights of small name and fame such things never happen, since there is no one in the world who remembers them. To the valiant, yes, for they have many princes and many other knights who envy their virtue and valor and seek by foul means to destroy the good. But for all that, virtue is so mighty that, by itself alone, in spite of all the necromancy known to its first inventor, Zoroastes, it will come out the victor in every trial and shed its light upon the world as the sun sheds it in the heavens. Forgive me, fair ladies, if through any carelessness of mine I have done you any foul wrong, for willingly and knowingly I never did one to anyone; and pray to God to deliver me from these bonds, in which some ill-intentioned enchanter has placed me; for if I see myself free of them, the favors you have done me in this castle shall not fall from my memory, that I may repay, requite, and reward them as they deserve.”
While the ladies of the castle were taking their leave of Don Quixote, the priest and the barber said goodbye to Don Fernando and his companions, and to the captain and his brother, and to all those happy ladies, especially Dorotea and Luscinda. They all embraced and promised to send one another news of how things went, Don Fernando telling the priest where he was to write to let him know what became of Don Quixote, assuring him that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to know it; and he, for his part, would let the priest know of everything he thought might please him, about his marriage, Zoraida’s baptism, how things turned out for Don Luis, and Luscinda’s return to her home. The priest promised to do all that was asked of him, to the letter. They embraced once more, and once more made fresh offers of service.
The innkeeper came up to the priest and gave him some papers, telling him that he had found them sewn into a lining of the same trunk that had held the Novel of the Ill-Advised Curiosity, and that, since its owner had never come back that way, the priest should take them all; for, since he himself could not read, he did not want them. The priest thanked him, and, opening them at once, saw that at the head of the writing it said: Novel of Rinconete and Cortadillo,1 from which he gathered that it was some novel, and concluded that, since the one of the Ill-Advised Curiosity had been good, this one would be good too, for they might well be all by the same author; and so he kept it, intending to read it when he had the leisure.
He mounted his horse, and so did his friend the barber, with their masks on, so that Don Quixote would not recognize them at once, and they set off after the cart. And the order they kept was this: first went the cart, led by its owner; on either side went the troopers, as has been said, with their firelocks; then came Sancho Panza on his ass, leading Rocinante by the rein. Behind all this went the priest and the barber on their mighty mules, their faces covered, as has been said, with a grave and sober bearing, going no faster than the slow pace of the oxen allowed. Don Quixote rode seated in the cage, his hands tied, his feet stretched out, leaning against the bars, with as much silence and as much patience as if he were not a man of flesh but a statue of stone.
And so, at that slow and silent pace, they traveled some two leagues, until they came to a valley, which seemed to the ox-driver a convenient place to rest and to graze the oxen; and when he spoke of it to the priest, the barber was of the opinion that they should go on a little farther, because he knew that behind a slope that could be seen not far off there was a valley with more grass and much better than the one where they wanted to stop. The barber’s advice was taken, and so they went on their way again.
At this point the priest turned his head and saw that some six or seven men on horseback were coming up behind them, well mounted and well turned out, who soon overtook them, for they were traveling not with the phlegm and leisure of oxen but like men riding canons’ mules and eager to get quickly to the inn, which could be seen less than a league away, for their midday rest. The diligent came up with the sluggish and they greeted one another courteously; and one of the newcomers, who, as it turned out, was a canon of Toledo and master of the others who were with him, seeing the orderly procession of the cart, the troopers, Sancho, Rocinante, the priest and the barber, and above all Don Quixote caged and imprisoned, could not help asking what it meant to carry that man in that way; though he had already concluded, seeing the troopers’ badges, that he must be some desperate highwayman or other criminal whose punishment belonged to the Holy Brotherhood. One of the troopers, to whom the question was put, answered thus:
“Sir, what it means for this gentleman to go along this way, let him tell you himself, for we don’t know.”
Don Quixote heard the conversation and said:
“Are your graces, sir knights, by any chance versed and expert in matters of knight-errantry? Because if you are, I shall share my misfortunes with you; and if not, there is no reason for me to weary myself telling them.”
And by this time the priest and the barber had come up, seeing that the travelers were in conversation with Don Quixote of La Mancha, in order to answer in such a way that their trick would not be found out.
To what Don Quixote had said the canon replied:
“In truth, brother, I know more about books of chivalry than about Villalpando’s Summulae of logic. So, if that is all it takes, you may safely share with me whatever you wish.”
“In God’s hands, then,” replied Don Quixote. “That being so, sir knight, I would have you know that I am carried in this cage under enchantment, through the envy and fraud of wicked enchanters; for the wicked persecute virtue more than the good love it. A knight-errant am I, and not one of those whose names Fame never remembered so as to make them eternal in her memory, but one of those who, in spite and despite of envy itself, and of all the magi Persia ever bred, the Brahmins of India, and the gymnosophists of Ethiopia, shall set his name in the temple of immortality, to serve as an example and pattern in ages to come, wherein knights-errant may see the steps they must follow if they would reach the summit and honorable height of arms.”
“Señor Don Quixote of La Mancha speaks the truth,” said the priest at this point, “for he goes enchanted in this cart, not for his faults and sins, but through the ill will of those whom virtue vexes and valor angers. This, sir, is the Knight of the Sorry Figure, if you have ever heard him named, whose valiant exploits and great deeds shall be written on hard bronze and eternal marble, however much envy may weary itself trying to darken them and malice to hide them.”
When the canon heard the prisoner and the free man talking in this style, he was ready to cross himself in amazement, and could not make out what had happened to the man; and all those who had come with him fell into the same amazement. At this point Sancho Panza, who had come closer to hear the conversation, said, to season the whole dish:
“Now, gentlemen, whether you like me or dislike me for what I’m going to say, the fact of the matter is that my master Don Quixote is as much enchanted as my mother; he has his wits whole, he eats and drinks and does his business like other men, and as he did yesterday, before they caged him. This being so, how do they want to make me believe he’s enchanted? Because I’ve heard plenty of people say that the enchanted neither eat nor sleep nor talk, and my master, if nobody stops him, will talk more than thirty attorneys.”
And, turning to look at the priest, he went on:
“Ah, Señor Priest, Señor Priest! Did your grace think I don’t know you, and will you go on thinking I don’t see through these new enchantments and guess where they’re headed? Well, let me tell you I know you, however much you hide your face, and let me tell you I understand you, however much you disguise your tricks. In short, where envy reigns virtue can’t live, nor liberality where there’s stinginess. Devil take it! If it weren’t for your reverence, by this time my master would be married to Princess Micomicona, and I’d be a count at the very least, for nothing else could be expected, both from the goodness of my master, him of the Sorry Figure, and from the greatness of my services. But now I see that what they say around here is true: that Fortune’s wheel turns faster than a mill wheel, and those who were up on the pinnacle yesterday are on the ground today. It’s my children and my wife I’m sorry for, because when they could and should have expected to see their father come in at their door made governor or viceroy of some isle or kingdom, they’ll see him come in made a stable boy. All I’ve said, Señor Priest, is only to urge your paternity to have a conscience about the bad treatment my master is getting, and to take care that God doesn’t call you to account in the next life for this imprisonment of my master, and charge you with all the help and good my master Don Quixote is leaving undone all the time he’s locked up.”
“Well, here’s a pretty thing!” said the barber at this point. “So you, too, Sancho, are of your master’s brotherhood? As the Lord lives, I begin to see that you’ll have to keep him company in the cage, and be left as enchanted as he is, for the share you have of his humor and his chivalry! It was an evil hour when you got yourself big with his promises, and an evil hour when that isle you long for so much got into your head.”
“I’m not big with child by anybody,” answered Sancho, “and I’m not a man to let myself be got with child, not by the king himself; and, poor though I am, I’m an Old Christian, and I don’t owe anybody anything; and if I long for isles, others long for worse things; and every man is the son of his own deeds; and, being a man, I could come to be pope, let alone governor of an isle, especially when my master can win so many that he’ll be short of people to give them to. Your grace had better watch how you talk, Señor Barber; for it isn’t all shaving beards, and there’s a difference between Pedro and Pedro. I say this because we all know each other, and nobody’s going to throw loaded dice on me. And as for this enchantment of my master’s, God knows the truth; and let it rest there, because stirring it only makes it worse.”
The barber chose not to answer Sancho, lest with his simplicity he should give away what he and the priest were taking such pains to hide; and, for this same fear, the priest had asked the canon to ride on a little ahead, saying he would tell him the mystery of the caged man, along with other things that would amuse him. The canon did so, and went on ahead with his servants and with the priest, and listened closely to everything the priest chose to tell him of Don Quixote’s character, life, madness, and habits, as he briefly related the beginning and cause of his derangement and the whole course of his adventures, until he had been put in that cage, and the plan they had of taking him home to see whether by some means they might find a cure for his madness. The servants and the canon marveled anew at hearing the strange story of Don Quixote, and, when he had heard it out, the canon said:
“Truly, Señor Priest, I find for my part that these things called books of chivalry are harmful to the commonwealth; and, although I have read, led by an idle and false taste, the beginning of nearly all of them that are in print, I have never been able to bring myself to read any of them from beginning to end, because it seems to me that, some more, some less, they are all one and the same thing, and this one has no more in it than that one, nor the next than the other. And, as it seems to me, this kind of writing and composition falls under the heading of those fables called Milesian, which are nonsensical tales that aim only to delight and not to teach: the contrary of what is done by the moral fables called apologues, which delight and teach at once. And, granted that the chief aim of such books is to delight, I do not know how they can achieve it, full as they are of so many monstrous absurdities; for the delight conceived in the soul must come from the beauty and harmony it sees or contemplates in the things that the eyes or the imagination set before it; and nothing that has ugliness and disorder in it can give us any pleasure. Then what beauty can there be, or what proportion of the parts to the whole and of the whole to the parts, in a book or fable in which a lad of sixteen deals a giant as tall as a tower one stroke of the sword and splits him in two halves as if he were made of sugar paste? And when they mean to paint us a battle, after telling us that on the enemy’s side there are a million combatants, provided the hero of the book is against them, we must needs understand, like it or not, that the said knight won the victory by the sole valor of his mighty arm. And what shall we say of the ease with which a queen or an empress, heiress to a throne, delivers herself into the arms of a wandering and unknown knight? What wit, unless it is wholly barbarous and uncultivated, can be satisfied by reading that a great tower full of knights sails out over the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and tonight sees nightfall in Lombardy and tomorrow sees daybreak in the lands of Prester John of the Indies, or in others that Ptolemy never discovered nor Marco Polo ever saw? And if I were answered that those who compose such books write them as things of falsehood, and so are not bound to attend to niceties or truths, I would answer them that falsehood is the better the more it looks like truth, and the more it pleases the more it has of the doubtful and the possible. Lying fables must be married to the understanding of those who read them, and written in such a way that, by making the impossible easy, smoothing over the extravagant, and holding the mind in suspense, they astonish, hold, excite, and entertain, so that wonder and delight go along together at one pace; and none of these things can be done by one who shuns verisimilitude and imitation, in which lies the perfection of what is written. I have never seen a book of chivalry that makes a whole body of fable with all its members, so that the middle answers to the beginning, and the end to the beginning and the middle; instead they compose them of so many members that they seem to aim rather at forming a chimera or a monster than at making a well-proportioned figure. Besides this, they are harsh in style, incredible in their exploits, lascivious in their loves, ill-mannered in their courtesies, long in their battles, foolish in their speeches, absurd in their journeys, and, in short, devoid of all intelligent art, and for that reason deserving to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a useless people.”
The priest listened to him with great attention, and he seemed to him a man of good understanding who was right in everything he said; and so he told him that, being of the same opinion himself and bearing a grudge against books of chivalry, he had burned all of Don Quixote’s, which were many. And he told him of the inquisition he had held over them, and which he had condemned to the fire and which he had spared, at which the canon laughed not a little, and said that, for all the ill he had spoken of such books, he found one good thing in them: the subject they offered for a good mind to show itself in, for they gave a broad and spacious field where the pen could run without any hindrance, describing shipwrecks, tempests, skirmishes, and battles; painting a valiant captain with all the qualities required to be one, showing himself prudent in foreseeing the wiles of his enemies, and an eloquent orator in persuading or dissuading his soldiers, ripe in counsel, quick in what he has resolved, as brave in waiting as in attacking; painting now a lamentable and tragic event, now a joyful and unlooked-for happening; there a most beautiful lady, chaste, sensible, and modest; here a Christian knight, valiant and courteous; yonder a monstrous, boastful barbarian; over here a prince, courteous, valiant, and considerate; portraying the goodness and loyalty of vassals, the greatness and generosity of lords. The writer may show himself now an astrologer, now an excellent cosmographer, now a musician, now one versed in matters of state, and perhaps the occasion will come for him to show himself a necromancer, if he likes. He can show the cunning of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treacheries of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency and truthfulness of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the prudence of Cato; and, in short, all those actions that can make an illustrious man perfect, now placing them all in one man, now dividing them among many.
“And if this is done with a pleasing style and ingenious invention that aims as far as possible at the truth, he will without doubt weave a web of many beautiful strands, which, once finished, will show such perfection and beauty that it will attain the best end that writing aims at, which is to teach and delight at once, as I have already said. For the loose and unbound writing of these books allows the author to show himself epic, lyric, tragic, comic, with all those qualities contained in the most sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and oratory; for the epic may be written in prose as well as in verse.”
Notes
1. A novella by Cervantes himself, later published among his Exemplary Novels (1613).