Chapter VI. Of what happened to Don Quixote with his niece and his housekeeper, and it is one of the important chapters of the whole history

While Sancho Panza and his wife, Teresa Cascajo, were holding the irrelevant conversation recorded above, Don Quixote’s niece and housekeeper were not idle, for by a thousand signs they were gathering that their uncle and master meant to break loose a third time and return to the practice of what was, for them, his ill-errant chivalry: they tried in every way possible to turn him from so bad a notion, but it was all preaching in the desert and hammering cold iron. For all that, among many other words that passed between them and him, the housekeeper said to him:

“In truth, my master, if your grace does not plant your feet firmly and stay quiet in your own house, and give up wandering over hill and dale like a soul in torment, looking for those things they say are called adventures and that I call misfortunes, I shall have to complain at the top of my voice to God and the king to put a stop to it.”

To which Don Quixote answered:

“Housekeeper, what God will answer to your complaints I do not know, nor what His Majesty will answer either; and I know only that if I were king I would excuse myself from answering the endless multitude of impertinent petitions that are handed to him every day; for one of the greatest labors kings have, among many others, is being obliged to listen to everyone and to answer everyone; and so I would not want my affairs to give him any trouble.”

To which the housekeeper said:

“Tell us, sir: at His Majesty’s court, aren’t there knights?”

“Yes,” answered Don Quixote, “and many; and it is right that there should be, to adorn the greatness of princes and to display the royal majesty.”

“Well, then,” she replied, “couldn’t your grace be one of those who serve their king and lord without stirring, staying at court?”

“Look, my friend,” answered Don Quixote, “not all knights can be courtiers, nor can all courtiers be knights-errant, nor should they: there must be all kinds in the world; and although we are all knights, there is a great difference between the one kind and the other; for courtiers, without leaving their rooms or the thresholds of the court, travel all over the world by looking at a map, without its costing them a blanca, or their enduring heat or cold, hunger or thirst; whereas we who are true knights-errant, in the sun, in the cold, in the wind, in the inclemencies of the heavens, by night and by day, on foot and on horseback, measure the whole earth with our own feet; and we know enemies not only in pictures but in their very being, and in every peril and on every occasion we attack them, without looking to trifles or to the laws of the challenge: whether a man carries a shorter lance or sword or not, whether he wears relics on him or some hidden trick, whether the sun is to be divided and cut up in slices or not, with other ceremonies of this sort that are used in single combats between man and man, which you do not know and I do. And you must know more: that the good knight-errant, though he sees ten giants whose heads not only touch the clouds but pass beyond them, and each of whom has two enormous towers for legs, and arms like the masts of great and mighty ships, and each eye like a great millstone and blazing hotter than a glass furnace, must in no way be dismayed by them; rather, with a gallant bearing and a dauntless heart, he must attack and charge them, and, if possible, defeat them and rout them in a brief instant, even if they came armored in the shells of a certain fish said to be harder than diamond, and instead of swords carried keen-edged knives of Damascus steel, or iron-shod clubs with spikes of steel as well, as I have seen more than twice. All this I have said, my good housekeeper, so that you may see the difference there is between one kind of knight and another; and it would be only right that there should be no prince who did not value more highly this second, or, better said, first kind of knights, the knights-errant, for, as we read in their histories, there have been some among them who were the salvation not of one kingdom only, but of many.”

“Ah, my master!” said the niece at this point. “Let your grace take note that all you say about knights-errant is fable and lies, and their histories, if they were not burned, would deserve to have each of them made to wear a penitent’s sackcloth, or some mark by which it would be known as infamous and a corrupter of good morals.”

“By the God who sustains me,” said Don Quixote, “if you were not my niece in the direct line, as the daughter of my own sister, I would inflict such a punishment on you for the blasphemy you have spoken that it would ring through the whole world. How is it possible that a girl who scarcely knows how to work a dozen lace bobbins dares to set her tongue to the histories of knights-errant and censure them? What would Señor Amadís say if he heard such a thing? But he would surely forgive you, for he was the humblest and most courteous knight of his time, and, besides, a great protector of damsels; but someone might have heard you who would not have let it go well with you, for not all are courteous or well behaved: some are caitiffs and churls. Nor are all who call themselves knights wholly so: for some are of gold, others of alchemy, and all look like knights, but not all can stand the test of the touchstone of truth. There are base men who burst themselves to look like knights, and lofty knights who seem to be dying on purpose to look like base men; the first raise themselves either by ambition or by virtue, the second lower themselves either by slackness or by vice; and we must make use of discerning knowledge to tell apart these two kinds of knights, so alike in name and so far apart in their actions.”

“God save us!” said the niece. “That your grace should know so much, uncle, that if need be you could climb into a pulpit and go off preaching in the streets, and that for all that you should fall into so great a blindness and so obvious a folly as to persuade yourself that you are brave, when you are old, that you are strong, when you are sick, and that you right wrongs, when you are bent with age, and, above all, that you are a knight, when you are not; for although hidalgos may be knights, poor ones are not!”

“You are very right, niece, in what you say,” answered Don Quixote, “and I could tell you things about lineages that would amaze you; but, so as not to mix the divine with the human, I do not tell them. Look, my friends, and pay attention to me: all the lineages there are in the world can be reduced to four kinds, which are these: some that had humble beginnings and went on spreading and growing until they reached supreme greatness; others that had great beginnings and have gone on preserving them, and still preserve and maintain them in the state in which they began; others that, although they had great beginnings, ended in a point, like a pyramid, having diminished and wasted away their beginning until it came to nothing, as the point of the pyramid is, which compared with its base or foundation is nothing; and there are others, and these are the most numerous, that had neither a good beginning nor a reasonable middle, and so will have their end, without a name, like the lineage of common and ordinary people. Of the first, which had a humble beginning and rose to the greatness they now keep, let the House of the Ottomans serve you as an example, which, from a humble and lowly shepherd who began it, stands at the summit where we see it. Of the second lineage, which began in greatness and keeps it without increasing it, many princes will be examples who are princes by inheritance and keep themselves in it, without increasing or diminishing it, peacefully keeping within the bounds of their states. As for those that began great and ended in a point, examples run into the thousands, for the Pharaohs and Ptolemies of Egypt, every one of them, and the Caesars of Rome, with the whole troop, if it may be given that name, of countless princes, monarchs, lords, Medes, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and barbarians, every one of these lineages and lordships has come to a point and to nothing, they as well as those who began them, for it will not be possible to find any of their descendants now, and if we did find one, it would be in a low and humble state. Of the plebeian lineage I have nothing to say, except that it serves only to swell the number of the living, without its greatness deserving any other fame or any other praise. From all that has been said, my silly ones, I want you to infer that great is the confusion there is among lineages, and that only those seem great and illustrious which show it in the virtue, and in the wealth and liberality, of their owners. I said virtues, riches, and liberality, because the great man who is vicious will be a great vicious man, and the rich man who is not liberal will be a miserly beggar; for it is not having riches that makes their possessor happy, but spending them, and not spending them anyhow, but knowing how to spend them well. The poor knight has no other road for showing that he is a knight but that of virtue, being affable, well bred, courteous and considerate, and obliging; not proud, not arrogant, not a backbiter, and, above all, charitable; for with two maravedís given cheerfully to the poor he will show himself as liberal as the one who gives alms with the bells ringing, and there will be no one who sees him adorned with the said virtues who, even without knowing him, will not judge and hold him to be of good stock, and it would be a miracle if he were not; and praise was always the reward of virtue, and the virtuous cannot fail to be praised. There are two roads, my daughters, by which men can go and come to be rich and honored: one is that of letters; the other, that of arms. I have more of arms than of letters, and I was born, judging by my inclination to arms, under the influence of the planet Mars; so it is almost forced upon me to follow its road, and by that road I must go in spite of all the world, and it will be vain for you to weary yourselves persuading me not to want what the heavens want, fortune ordains, and reason asks, and, above all, my will desires. For knowing, as I do, the countless labors that belong to knight-errantry, I also know the infinite good things that are won by it; and I know that virtue’s path is a very narrow one, and vice’s road broad and spacious; and I know that their ends and resting places are different, for that of vice, wide and spacious, ends in death, and that of virtue, narrow and toilsome, ends in life, and not in a life that comes to an end, but in one that will have no end; and I know, as our great Castilian poet says, that

“By these harsh ways one travels, rough and steep,
to the high seat of immortality,
which none will reach who turns aside from them.”

“Ay, poor me!” said the niece. “My master is a poet too! He knows everything, he can do everything: I’ll bet that if he wanted to be a mason, he could build a house as easily as a cage.”

“I promise you, niece,” answered Don Quixote, “that if these chivalrous thoughts did not carry all my senses away after them, there would be nothing I could not do, and no curious handiwork that would not come from my hands, especially cages and toothpicks.”

At this point there was a knock at the door, and, when they asked who was knocking, Sancho Panza answered that it was he; and the housekeeper had scarcely recognized him when she ran off to hide so as not to see him: so much did she loathe him. The niece opened to him, his master Don Quixote came out to receive him with open arms, and the two of them shut themselves up in his room, where they held another colloquy that the earlier one does not outdo.