Chapter XLIX. Which deals with the sensible colloquy Sancho Panza had with his master Don Quixote

“Ah,” said Sancho, “I’ve caught you! This is what I wanted to know, as much as I want my soul and my life. Come here, sir: can you deny what people commonly say around here when somebody is out of sorts: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with So-and-so, he doesn’t eat, or drink, or sleep, or give a sensible answer to anything you ask him; you’d think he was enchanted’? From which it comes to be gathered that the ones who don’t eat, or drink, or sleep, or do the natural doings I’m talking about, those are the enchanted ones; but not those who have the urge your grace has, and drink when they’re given a drink, and eat when they have food, and answer everything they’re asked.”

“You speak the truth, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “but I have already told you that there are many kinds of enchantment, and it may be that in the course of time they have changed from one kind to another, and that now it is the custom for the enchanted to do everything I do, though formerly they did not. So there is no arguing against the custom of the times, nor drawing conclusions from it. I know and hold it for certain that I am enchanted, and this is enough to set my conscience at ease; for it would trouble me greatly if I thought I was not enchanted and let myself stay in this cage, lazy and cowardly, defrauding of the succor I could give them the many needy and distressed who must at this very hour be in urgent and extreme need of my help and protection.”

“Well, for all that,” replied Sancho, “I say that, for greater abundance and satisfaction, it would be a good thing for your grace to try to get out of this jail, and I bind myself with all my might to make it easy, and even to get you out of it, and for you to try once more to mount your good Rocinante, who also looks as if he were enchanted, he goes along so melancholy and sad; and, that done, we could try our luck again at looking for more adventures; and if things didn’t go well for us, there’ll be time enough to go back to the cage, in which I promise, on the word of a good and loyal squire, to shut myself up together with your grace, if your grace should turn out to be so unlucky, or I so simple, that I don’t manage to bring off what I say.”

“I am content to do as you say, brother Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “and when you see the moment to set about my freedom, I shall obey you in everything and for everything; but you will see, Sancho, how mistaken you are in your understanding of my misfortune.”

The knight-errant and his ill-errant squire passed the time in these conversations until they reached the place where the priest, the canon, and the barber, already dismounted, were waiting for them. The ox-driver at once unyoked the oxen from the cart and let them wander at will over that green and pleasant spot, whose freshness invited enjoyment, not from persons as enchanted as Don Quixote, but from those as alert and sensible as his squire; who begged the priest to let his master out of the cage for a while, because, if they did not let him out, that prison would not stay as clean as the decency of such a knight as his master required. The priest understood him, and said that he would very gladly do as he asked, if he were not afraid that, once his master found himself at liberty, he would be up to his old tricks and go off where no one would ever set eyes on him again.

“I’ll stand surety that he won’t run away,” answered Sancho.

“And I as well,” said the canon, “and all the more if he gives me his word, as a knight, not to leave us until it is our pleasure.”

“I do give it,” answered Don Quixote, who was listening to everything, “all the more since one who is enchanted, as I am, has no freedom to do as he will with his person, for the one who enchanted him can make him stay without stirring from one place for three centuries; and if he has fled, he will bring him back flying through the air.” And that, this being so, they might well set him loose, especially as it would be to the advantage of them all; and that, if they did not set him loose, he gave them due notice that he could not help offending their sense of smell, unless they moved away from there.

The canon took his hand, though both hands were tied, and on his good faith and word they uncaged him, at which he rejoiced infinitely and greatly to find himself out of the cage. And the first thing he did was to stretch his whole body, and then he went to where Rocinante was and, giving him two slaps on the haunches, said:

“O flower and mirror of horses, I still have hope in God and in His blessed Mother that before long the two of us shall see ourselves as we desire: you with your master on your back, and I on top of you, exercising the calling for which God sent me into the world.”

And, saying this, Don Quixote went off with Sancho to a remote spot; and when he returned from there he was greatly eased, and keener than before to carry out whatever his squire might arrange.

The canon watched him and marveled to see the strangeness of his great madness, and that in everything he said and answered he showed a very good understanding: he only lost his stirrups, as has been said at other times, when the talk turned to chivalry. And so, moved by compassion, after they had all sat down on the green grass to wait for the canon’s provisions, he said to him:

“Is it possible, Señor Hidalgo, that the bitter, idle reading of books of chivalry has had such power over your grace that it has turned your wits, so that you come to believe you are enchanted, along with other things of the same stamp, as far from being true as falsehood itself is from the truth? And how is it possible that there is a human understanding that can persuade itself that there have been in the world that infinity of Amadíses, and that rabble and rout of so many famous knights, so many emperors of Trebizond, so many Felixmartes of Hircania, so many palfreys, so many wandering damsels, so many serpents, so many dragons, so many giants, so many unheard-of adventures, so many kinds of enchantment, so many battles, so many furious encounters, such splendor of dress, so many princesses in love, so many squires made counts, so many witty dwarfs, so many love letters, so many gallantries, so many valiant women; and, in short, so many and such nonsensical goings-on as books of chivalry contain? For my own part I can say that when I read them, so long as I do not set my imagination to thinking that they are all lies and frivolity, they give me some pleasure; but when I realize what they are, I fling the best of them against the wall, and would even fling it into the fire if I had one near or at hand, as deserving such a penalty for being false and lying and outside the course that common nature requires, and as inventors of new sects and a new way of life, and as giving occasion for the ignorant public to come to believe and hold as true all the follies they contain. And they are so bold that they even dare to unsettle the wits of sensible and well-born hidalgos, as is plainly to be seen from what they have done to your grace, since they have brought you to such a pass that it has been necessary to shut you up in a cage and carry you on an ox-cart, the way someone carries some lion or tiger about from place to place to make money by letting people see it. Come, Señor Don Quixote, take pity on yourself, and return to the bosom of good sense, and learn to use the great share of it that heaven was pleased to give you, employing the most happy talent of your wit in other reading that may redound to the benefit of your conscience and the increase of your honor! And if, still led by your natural inclination, you wish to read books of exploits and chivalry, read in Holy Scripture the Book of Judges; for there you will find grand truths and deeds as true as they are valiant. Lusitania had its Viriatus; Rome its Caesar; Carthage its Hannibal; Greece its Alexander; Castile its Count Fernán González; Valencia its Cid; Andalusia its Gonzalo Fernández; Extremadura its Diego García de Paredes; Jerez its Garci Pérez de Vargas; Toledo its Garcilaso; Seville its Don Manuel de León; and the reading of their valiant deeds can entertain, teach, delight, and astonish the loftiest minds that read them. This, indeed, will be reading worthy of your grace’s good understanding, my dear Señor Don Quixote, from which you will come away learned in history, in love with virtue, schooled in goodness, improved in manners, brave without rashness, bold without cowardice; and all this to the honor of God, your own profit, and the fame of La Mancha, whence, as I have learned, your grace draws your birth and origin.”

Don Quixote listened most attentively to the canon’s words; and when he saw that he had now finished, after gazing at him for a good while, he said to him:

“It seems to me, Señor Hidalgo, that your grace’s discourse has been aimed at giving me to understand that there have never been knights-errant in the world, and that all books of chivalry are false, lying, harmful, and useless to the commonwealth; and that I have done ill in reading them, worse in believing them, and worse still in imitating them, having set myself to follow the most arduous profession of knight-errantry, which they teach; and you deny me that there have ever been in the world any Amadíses, of Gaul or of Greece, or any of the other knights of whom the writings are full.”

“It is all to the letter as your grace has been setting it out,” said the canon at this point.

To which Don Quixote answered:

“Your grace also added that such books had done me great harm, since they had turned my wits and put me in a cage, and that it would be better for me to mend my ways and change my reading, reading other books that are truer and that delight and teach better.”

“That is so,” said the canon.

“Well, I,” replied Don Quixote, “find for my part that the one out of his wits and enchanted is your grace, since you have set yourself to utter so many blasphemies against a thing so accepted in the world and held to be so true that whoever denied it, as your grace denies it, would deserve the same penalty your grace says you give the books when you read them and they annoy you. For to try to make anyone believe that Amadís never existed in the world, nor any of the other adventuring knights the histories are crammed with, would be like trying to persuade him that the sun does not give light, nor ice cool, nor the earth bear us up; for what wit can there be in the world that could persuade another that there is no truth in the tale of Princess Floripes and Guy of Burgundy, or in that of Fierabrás at the bridge of Mantible, which happened in the time of Charlemagne, and which, I swear, is as true as it is now day? And if that is a lie, then it must also be a lie that there was a Hector, or an Achilles, or a Trojan War, or the Twelve Peers of France, or King Arthur of England, who goes about to this day turned into a raven, and is looked for in his kingdom at any moment. And they will also dare to say that the history of Guarino Mezquino is a lie, and that of the Quest of the Holy Grail, and that the loves of Don Tristán and Queen Iseo are apocryphal, like those of Guinevere and Lancelot, when there are people who can almost remember having seen the duenna Quintañona, who was the best pourer of wine Great Britain ever had. And this is so true that I remember a grandmother of mine on my father’s side used to say to me, whenever she saw some duenna in a reverend coif: ‘That one, grandson, looks like the duenna Quintañona’; from which I argue that she must have known her, or at least must have managed to see some portrait of her. Then who can deny that the history of Pierres and the fair Magalona is true, since even to this day there can be seen in the royal armory the peg with which the valiant Pierres steered the wooden horse on which he rode through the air, and it is a little bigger than a cart pole? And next to the peg is Babieca’s saddle, and at Roncesvalles there is Roldán’s horn, as big as a great beam: from which it follows that there were Twelve Peers, that there were Pierreses, that there were Cids, and other such knights, of those of whom the people say / that they ride forth on their adventures. If not, let them tell me also that it is not true that the valiant Portuguese Juan de Merlo was a knight-errant, who went to Burgundy and fought in the city of Arras with the famous lord of Charny, called Mosén Pierres, and afterward, in the city of Basel, with Mosén Enrique de Remestán, coming out of both enterprises the victor and covered with honorable fame; and the adventures and challenges that the valiant Spaniards Pedro Barba and Gutierre Quixada (from whose lineage I descend in the direct male line) also achieved in Burgundy, defeating the sons of the Count of Saint-Pol. Let them deny me, likewise, that Don Fernando de Guevara went in search of adventures to Germany, where he fought with Micer Jorge, a knight of the household of the Duke of Austria; let them say that the jousts of Suero de Quiñones, he of the Pass, were a joke, and the enterprises of Mosén Luis de Falces against Don Gonzalo de Guzmán, a Castilian knight, along with many other exploits performed by Christian knights, of these kingdoms and of foreign ones, so authentic and true that I say again that whoever denied them would be devoid of all reason and good sense.”

The canon was astonished to hear the mixture Don Quixote made of truths and lies, and to see the knowledge he had of all those things touching and concerning the deeds of his knight-errantry; and so he answered him:

“I cannot deny, Señor Don Quixote, that some of what your grace has said is true, especially as regards the Spanish knights-errant; and I am willing, too, to grant that there were Twelve Peers of France, but I am not willing to believe that they did all those things Archbishop Turpin writes of them; for the truth of the matter is that they were knights chosen by the kings of France, who called them peers because they were all peers, all equals, in worth, in rank, and in valor; or at least, if they were not, it was right that they should be; and it was like one of the orders now in use, of Santiago or of Calatrava, whose members are presumed to be, or ought to be, valiant, brave, and well-born knights; and just as people now say a knight of Saint John, or of Alcántara, in those days they said a knight of the Twelve Peers, because those chosen for this military order were twelve equals. That there was a Cid there is no doubt, nor a Bernardo del Carpio either; but that they did the exploits people say, I think there is very great doubt. As for that other matter of Count Pierres’s peg, which your grace says is next to Babieca’s saddle in the royal armory, I confess my sin; for I am so ignorant, or my sight so poor, that I have seen the saddle and yet never noticed the peg, and that, big as your grace says it is.”

“Well, there it is, beyond any doubt,” replied Don Quixote, “and, what is more, they say it is kept in a cowhide case so that it will not get moldy.”

“All things are possible,” answered the canon, “but, by the holy orders I took, I have no memory of seeing it. But even granting that it is there, I am not therefore bound to believe the stories of so many Amadíses, nor those of the whole rabble and rout of knights they tell us about; nor is it right for a man like your grace, so honorable and of such good parts, and endowed with so good an understanding, to persuade himself that so many and such strange follies as are written in the nonsensical books of chivalry are true.”