Chapter III. Of the laughable conversation that passed between Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the bachelor Sansón Carrasco

Don Quixote was left deep in thought, waiting for the bachelor Carrasco, from whom he expected to hear the news of himself set down in a book, as Sancho had said; and he could not persuade himself that such a history existed, since the blood of the foes he had killed had not yet dried on his sword’s edge, and already they would have his high deeds of chivalry going about in print. For all that, he imagined that some sage, either friend or enemy, must have had them printed by the art of enchantment: if a friend, to magnify them and raise them above the most notable deeds of any knight-errant; if an enemy, to bring them to nothing and set them below the vilest that have ever been written of any vile squire, though, he said to himself, the deeds of squires were never written; and if it were true that such a history existed, since it was about a knight-errant, it was bound to be grandiloquent, lofty, illustrious, magnificent, and true.

With this he consoled himself somewhat, but it troubled him to think that its author was a Moor, judging by that name of Cide; and no truth could be expected of Moors, because they are all cheats, forgers, and fabulists. He feared that the author might have treated his love with some indecency that would redound to the damage and detriment of the chastity of his lady Dulcinea del Toboso; he hoped that he had made plain his fidelity and the propriety he had always kept toward her, scorning queens, empresses, and damsels of every rank, and holding the impulses of natural desire in check; and so, wrapped up and tumbled about in these and many other imaginings, Sancho and Carrasco found him, and Don Quixote received the bachelor with great courtesy.

The bachelor, though his name was Sansón, was not very big of body, though a very big joker, of a sallow complexion, but of very good understanding; he must have been about twenty-four, round-faced, snub-nosed, and wide-mouthed, all signs of a mischievous nature and of a man fond of jests and pranks, as he showed on seeing Don Quixote, for he went down on his knees before him, saying:

“Let your greatness give me your hands, Señor Don Quixote of La Mancha; for, by the habit of Saint Peter that I wear, though I have taken only the first four orders, your grace is one of the most famous knights-errant there has ever been, or ever will be, on the whole round face of the earth. Blessings on Cide Hamete Benengeli, who left the history of your great deeds written, and blessings twice over on the curious man who took the trouble to have them translated from Arabic into our common Castilian, for the universal entertainment of all people.”

Don Quixote made him get up, and said:

“So it is true, then, that there is a history of me, and that the one who composed it was a Moor and a sage?”

“It is so true, sir,” said Sansón, “that I am convinced there are more than twelve thousand copies of that history in print today; if you doubt it, ask Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed; and the word is that it is being printed in Antwerp too, and I have a feeling that there will not be a nation or a language into which it is not translated.”

“One of the things,” said Don Quixote at this point, “that must give most satisfaction to a virtuous and eminent man is to see himself, while still alive, going about with a good name on people’s tongues, in print and in type. I said with a good name, because, if it were the opposite, no death could equal it.”

“If it is a matter of good fame and good name,” said the bachelor, “your grace alone carries off the palm from all knights-errant; because the Moor in his language and the Christian in his took care to paint for us to the life your grace’s gallantry, your great courage in facing dangers, your patience in adversity and your fortitude, in misfortunes as well as in wounds, and the chastity and continence of the very platonic love between your grace and my lady Doña Dulcinea del Toboso.”

“I’ve never heard my lady Dulcinea called Doña,” said Sancho Panza at this point, “only the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and the history is already wrong on that.”

“That is not an objection of any importance,” answered Carrasco.

“No, certainly not,” answered Don Quixote, “but tell me, Señor Bachelor: which of my deeds are made the most of in that history?”

“On that,” answered the bachelor, “there are different opinions, as there are different tastes: some hold to the adventure of the windmills, which seemed to your grace to be Briareuses and giants; others to the one of the fulling mills; this one to the description of the two armies, which afterward turned out to be two flocks of sheep; that one praises the one of the dead man they were taking to be buried in Segovia; one says that the freeing of the galley slaves outdoes them all; another, that none equals the one of the two Benedictine giants, with the fight with the valiant Biscayan.”

“Tell me, Señor Bachelor,” said Sancho at this point, “does the adventure of the Yangüeses come into it, when our good Rocinante took it into his head to go asking for groundnuts in the open sea?”

“The sage left nothing behind in the inkwell,” answered Sansón. “He tells it all and notes it all, even the capers the good Sancho cut in the blanket.”

“I didn’t cut any capers in the blanket,” answered Sancho. “In the air, yes, and more of them than I would have liked.”

“To my thinking,” said Don Quixote, “there is no human history in the world that does not have its ups and downs, especially those that deal with chivalry, which can never be filled with happy events alone.”

“For all that,” answered the bachelor, “some who have read the history say they would have been glad if its authors had forgotten some of the countless beatings that were given to Señor Don Quixote in various encounters.”

“That’s where the truth of the history comes in,” said Sancho.

“They might also have kept quiet about them out of fairness,” said Don Quixote, “for there is no reason to write down actions that neither change nor alter the truth of the history, if they are going to redound to the discredit of the hero of the history. On my faith, Aeneas was not as pious as Virgil paints him, nor Ulysses as prudent as Homer describes him.”

“That is so,” replied Sansón, “but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can tell or sing things not as they were but as they ought to have been; and the historian must write them not as they ought to have been but as they were, adding nothing to the truth and taking nothing from it.”

“Well, if this Moorish gentleman goes about telling truths,” said Sancho, “you can be sure that my beatings will be found among my master’s; because they never took the measure of his grace’s shoulders without taking it of my whole body; but there’s nothing to wonder at in that, since, as my master himself says, the members must share in the pain of the head.”

“You are a sly one, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote. “On my faith, you do not lack memory when you choose to have it.”

“Even if I wanted to forget the cudgelings they’ve given me,” said Sancho, “the bruises wouldn’t let me, for they’re still fresh on my ribs.”

“Be quiet, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “and do not interrupt Señor Bachelor, whom I beg to go on telling me what is said of me in the said history.”

“And of me,” said Sancho, “because they say that I’m one of the main presonages in it too.”

“Personages, not presonages, Sancho, my friend,” said Sansón.

“Have we got another faultfinder of vocabbles?” said Sancho. “Well, keep on at it like that and we’ll never be done in all our lives.”

“May God give me a bad end, Sancho,” answered the bachelor, “if you are not the second person of the history; and there are those who would rather hear you talk than the finest figure in all of it, although there is also someone who says that you were much too credulous in believing that the government of that isle offered you by Señor Don Quixote, here present, could come true.”

“There is still sun on the wall tops,” said Don Quixote, “and the older Sancho grows, with the experience that years bring, the fitter and abler he will be to be a governor than he is now.”

“By God, sir,” said Sancho, “the island I can’t govern at the age I am now, I won’t govern at the age of Methuselah. The trouble is that the said isle is dawdling somewhere, I don’t know where, and not that I lack the brains to govern it.”

“Commend it to God, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for all will turn out well, and perhaps better than you think; for not a leaf stirs on the tree without the will of God.”

“That is true,” said Sansón, “for if God wills, Sancho will not lack a thousand islands to govern, let alone one.”

“I’ve seen governors around,” said Sancho, “who, to my mind, don’t come up to the sole of my shoe, and for all that they call them your lordship, and they’re served on silver.”

“Those are not governors of isles,” replied Sansón, “but of other governments, easier to handle; for those who govern isles must at least know grammar.”

“With the gram I’d get along fine,” said Sancho, “but the mar I want nothing to do with, because I don’t understand it. But leaving this business of the government in the hands of God, to send me wherever I can best serve Him, I say, Señor Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, that it has pleased me no end that the author of the history has spoken of me in such a way that the things told of me don’t give offense; for, on the faith of a good squire, if he had said things of me that were not very fitting for an Old Christian, which is what I am, the deaf would have heard us.”

“That would be working miracles,” answered Sansón.

“Miracles or no miracles,” said Sancho, “let everyone watch how he speaks or writes of presons, and not set down any old way the first thing that pops into his noddle.”

“One of the faults they find with that history,” said the bachelor, “is that its author put into it a novel entitled The Ill-Advised Curiosity; not because it is bad or badly argued, but because it is out of place there and has nothing to do with the history of his grace Señor Don Quixote.”

“I’ll bet,” replied Sancho, “the son of a dog has mixed up cabbages with baskets.”

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote, “that the author of my history was no sage, but some ignorant babbler who set about writing it by guesswork and without any judgment, let come what may, like Orbaneja, the painter of Úbeda, who, when they asked him what he was painting, answered: ‘Whatever comes out.’ Once he painted a rooster so badly and so little like one that he had to write next to it in Gothic letters: ‘This is a rooster.’ And so it must be with my history, which will need a commentary to be understood.”

“Not that,” answered Sansón, “for it is so clear that there is nothing in it to puzzle anyone: children thumb it, young people read it, grown men understand it, and old men praise it; and in short, it is so well worn and so much read and so well known by all sorts of people that as soon as they see some skinny nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’ And those who have taken most to reading it are the pages: there is no lord’s antechamber where a Don Quixote is not to be found; some pick it up when others put it down; these pounce on it and those ask for it. In short, that history is the most delightful and least harmful entertainment that has been seen up to now, because in the whole of it there is not to be found, not even the semblance of, an indecent word or a thought that is less than Catholic.”

“To write in any other way,” said Don Quixote, “would not be writing truths but lies; and historians who make use of lies deserve the fire, like counterfeiters of coin; and I do not know what moved the author to make use of other people’s novels and tales, when there was so much to write about in mine: no doubt he must have held to the proverb: ‘Of straw and of hay…,’ et cetera. For in truth, by simply setting forth my thoughts, my sighs, my tears, my good desires, and my attempts, he could have made a volume larger than, or as large as, all the works of the Tostado could make. In effect, what I understand, Señor Bachelor, is that to compose histories and books of any kind whatever, great judgment and a ripe understanding are required. To say witty things and write jests is the part of great wits: the cleverest figure in a play is the fool’s, because the man who wants people to think him simple must not be so. History is like a sacred thing, because it must be true, and where truth is, there God is, insofar as truth goes; but in spite of this, there are some who compose books and toss them off as if they were fritters.”

“There is no book so bad,” said the bachelor, “that it has nothing good in it.”

“There is no doubt of that,” replied Don Quixote, “but it often happens that those who had deservedly gained and won great fame by their writings lost it altogether, or lessened it somewhat, once they had them printed.”

“The reason for that,” said Sansón, “is that, since printed works are looked at at leisure, their faults are readily seen, and the more famous their author is, the more closely they are scrutinized. Men famous for their wit, great poets, illustrious historians, are always, or most often, envied by those who make it their pleasure and their special entertainment to judge the writings of others, without having brought any of their own to the light of the world.”

“That is no wonder,” said Don Quixote, “for there are many theologians who are no good in the pulpit and are very good indeed at spotting the faults or excesses of those who preach.”

“All that is so, Señor Don Quixote,” said Carrasco, “but I would wish such censors were more merciful and less scrupulous, and did not cling to the motes in the brilliant sunlight of the work they carp at; for if aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus (sometimes good Homer nods), let them consider how long he stayed awake to give the light of his work with as little shadow as he could; and perhaps what seems bad to them may be moles, which sometimes add to the beauty of the face that has them; and so I say that very great is the risk that a man runs who prints a book, since it is of all impossibilities the most impossible to compose one such that it satisfies and pleases all who read it.”

“The one about me,” said Don Quixote, “will have pleased few.”

“Rather the opposite; for, as stultorum infinitus est numerus (the number of fools is infinite), infinite are those who have enjoyed that history; and some have found fault with the author’s memory and accused it of bad faith, since he forgets to tell who the thief was who stole Sancho’s gray, which is not stated there, and it is only inferred from what is written that it was stolen from him, and a little later we see him riding on the same donkey, without its having turned up. They also say that he forgot to put down what Sancho did with those hundred escudos he found in the valise in the Sierra Morena, for he never mentions them again, and there are many who want to know what he did with them, or what he spent them on, which is one of the substantial points missing from the work.”

Sancho answered:

“I’m in no state just now, Señor Sansón, to go into accounts or into tales; for I’ve been taken by a faintness in the stomach, and if I don’t mend it with a couple of swigs of the old stuff, it will leave me as thin as Saint Lucy’s thorn. I have it at home, my missus is waiting for me; as soon as I’ve eaten, I’ll be back, and I’ll satisfy your grace and the whole world about anything they want to ask, both the loss of the donkey and the spending of the hundred escudos.”

And, without waiting for an answer or saying another word, he went off home.

Don Quixote asked and begged the bachelor to stay and do penance with him. The bachelor took up the bid: he stayed, a pair of squabs was added to the ordinary fare, they talked of chivalry at table, Carrasco humored him, the banquet came to an end, they slept the siesta, Sancho came back, and the former conversation was taken up again.