Chapter XLIII. Of the second counsels Don Quixote gave Sancho Panza

Who could have heard Don Quixote’s discourse just set down and not taken him for a person of great good sense and better intentions? But, as has been said many times in the course of this great history, he went astray only when chivalry was touched on, and in every other subject he showed a clear and unclouded understanding, so that at every step his deeds discredited his judgment, and his judgment his deeds; but in this one, in these second instructions he gave Sancho, he showed great wit, and raised both his good sense and his madness to a lofty pitch.

Sancho listened to him with the closest attention and tried to keep his counsels in his memory, like a man who meant to hold to them and, by their help, come safely to a good delivery from the pregnancy of his government. Don Quixote went on, then, and said:

“As regards how you are to govern your person and your house, Sancho, the first thing I charge you with is to be clean, and to cut your nails and not let them grow, as some do whose ignorance has given them to understand that long nails make their hands handsome, as if that excrement and outgrowth they leave uncut were a nail, when it is rather the claws of a lizard-hunting kestrel: a filthy and outlandish abuse. Do not go about, Sancho, ungirt and slack, for disordered dress is a sign of a slovenly spirit, unless the disorder and slackness come under the head of slyness, as was judged to be the case with Julius Caesar. Take the pulse, with good sense, of what your office may be worth, and if it allows you to give livery to your servants, give them one that is decent and serviceable rather than showy and splendid, and share it out between your servants and the poor: I mean that if you are to clothe six pages, clothe three and three poor men, and in that way you will have pages for heaven and for earth; and this new way of giving livery is beyond the reach of the vainglorious. Do not eat garlic or onions, lest the smell give away your peasant breeding. Walk slowly; speak calmly, but not so that it seems you are listening to yourself, for all affectation is bad. Eat little at dinner and less at supper, for it is in the stomach’s workshop that the whole body’s health is forged. Drink in moderation, and remember that too much wine neither keeps a secret nor keeps its word. Take care, Sancho, not to chew with both cheeks full, nor to eructate in front of anyone.”

“That eructate I don’t understand,” said Sancho.

And Don Quixote said to him:

“To eructate, Sancho, means to belch, and that is one of the ugliest words the Castilian tongue has, though it is very expressive; and so careful speakers have taken refuge in Latin, and for belching they say eructating, and for belches, eructations; and if some people do not understand these terms, it matters little, for use will bring them in over time, so that they are easily understood; and this is how a language is enriched, over which the common people and usage hold power.”

“Truly, sir,” said Sancho, “one of the counsels and warnings I mean to carry in my memory has to be the one about not belching, because I do it very often.”

“Eructating, Sancho, not belching,” said Don Quixote.

“Eructating I’ll say from now on,” answered Sancho, “and on my faith I won’t forget it.”

“Also, Sancho, you are not to mix into your talk the throng of proverbs you usually do; for although proverbs are short maxims, you very often drag them in so much by the hair that they seem more like nonsense than maxims.”

“God alone can remedy that,” answered Sancho, “because I know more proverbs than a book, and so many of them come into my mouth together when I talk that they fight one another to get out, but my tongue keeps throwing out the first ones it finds, even if they don’t fit. But from now on I’ll take care to say the ones that suit the gravity of my office, for in a full house supper is soon cooked, and he who sets the terms doesn’t squabble after, and the man ringing the bells is safe and sound, and giving and keeping both take brains.”

“That’s it, Sancho!” said Don Quixote. “Cram them in, string them on, thread them up, your proverbs; nobody is stopping you! My mother punishes me, and I go on spinning my tops! Here I am telling you to avoid proverbs, and in a moment you have reeled off a whole litany of them, which have as much to do with what we are discussing as the hills of Úbeda. Look, Sancho, I am not saying that a proverb brought in to the purpose is out of place; but to pile up and string together proverbs helter-skelter makes talk feeble and low. When you mount a horse, do not go throwing your body back against the cantle, nor carry your legs stiff and stretched out and away from the horse’s belly, nor yet ride so slack that it seems you are on the gray: for riding a horse makes knights of some men and stable boys of others. Let your sleep be moderate, for he who does not rise with the sun does not enjoy the day; and bear in mind, O Sancho, that diligence is the mother of good luck, and sloth, its opposite, never reached the goal that a good wish asks for. This last counsel that I wish to give you now, though it does not serve to adorn the body, I want you to carry well in your memory, for I believe it will be of no less profit to you than the ones I have given you so far; and it is that you never set about arguing over lineages, at least not comparing them with one another, since among those compared one must of necessity be the best, and the one you put down will hate you, and the one you raise up will in no way reward you. Your dress shall be full hose, a long doublet, and a cape a little longer; wide breeches, not even in thought, for they do not become either gentlemen or governors. For now, this is what has occurred to me, Sancho, by way of counsel; time will go on, and as occasions arise, so will my instructions, provided you take care to let me know the state you find yourself in.”

“Sir,” answered Sancho, “I can see very well that everything your grace has told me is good, holy, and profitable, but what use will it be if I don’t remember any of it? True, that business about not letting my nails grow and marrying again, if the chance comes, won’t slip out of my noggin, but those other odds and ends and tangles and jumbles, I don’t remember them and won’t remember them any more than last year’s clouds; and so they’ll have to be given me in writing, for though I can’t read or write, I’ll give them to my confessor so he can drive them into me and remind me when it’s needed.”

“Ah, sinner that I am,” answered Don Quixote, “and what an ill look it has in a governor, not knowing how to read or write! For you must know, O Sancho, that a man’s not knowing how to read, or being left-handed, is a sign of one of two things: either he was born of parents too humble and low, or he himself was so mischievous and wicked that good habits and good teaching could not get into him. It is a great lack you carry with you, and so I should like you at least to learn to sign your name.”

“I know how to sign my name, all right,” answered Sancho, “for when I was steward of the confraternity in my village, I learned to make some letters like the marks on a bale, which they said spelled my name; besides, I’ll pretend my right hand is crippled and have someone else sign for me; for there’s a remedy for everything except death; and with the command and the stick in my hands, I’ll do what I like; besides, he who has the mayor for a father… And me being governor, which is more than being mayor, come on, let them all come and look! No, let them just sneer at me and slander me, for they’ll come for wool and go back shorn; and when God loves a man, his house knows it; and the rich man’s follies pass for wise sayings in the world; and since I’ll be rich, being a governor and liberal besides, as I mean to be, no fault will show on me. No, make yourself honey and the flies will eat you up; you’re worth as much as you have, a grandmother of mine used to say; and on a man with deep roots you’ll never get your revenge.”

“Oh, God curse you, Sancho!” said Don Quixote at this point. “Sixty thousand Satans take you and your proverbs! For an hour now you have been stringing them together and giving me a draught of torment with every one. I assure you these proverbs will bring you to the gallows one day; because of them your vassals will take your government away from you, or there will be risings among them. Tell me, where do you find them, you ignoramus, or how do you apply them, you fool, when for me to say one and apply it properly I sweat and labor as if I were digging?”

“By God, sir, our master,” replied Sancho, “your grace complains about very small things. Why the devil does it eat away at you that I make use of my own property, when I have no other, nor any other wealth at all, except proverbs and more proverbs? And just now four come to me that would fit here to a hair, or like pears in a basket, but I won’t say them, because good keeping quiet goes by the name of Sancho.”

“That Sancho is not you,” said Don Quixote, “for not only are you no good keeping quiet, you are bad talking and bad wrangling; and for all that, I should like to know what four proverbs came to your memory just now that fitted here to the purpose, for I keep running through mine, which is a good one, and not one occurs to me.”

“What better ones,” said Sancho, “than ‘never put your thumbs between two wisdom teeth,’ and ‘to “get out of my house” and “what do you want with my wife?” there’s no answer,’ and ‘whether the pitcher hits the stone or the stone hits the pitcher, it will go ill with the pitcher,’ all of which fit to a hair? That is, nobody should take on his governor or the man who gives him orders, because he’ll come out of it hurt, like the man who puts his finger between two wisdom teeth, and even if they aren’t wisdom teeth, so long as they’re molars, it doesn’t matter; and to whatever the governor says there’s no answering back, any more than to ‘get out of my house and what do you want with my wife?’ As for the stone and the pitcher, a blind man could see it. So the man who sees the speck in someone else’s eye had better see the beam in his own, so that nobody says of him, ‘the dead woman took fright at the one with her throat cut’; and your grace knows very well that the fool in his own house knows more than the sage in another man’s.”

“Not so, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “for the fool knows nothing, in his own house or in another’s, because on a growth of folly no sensible building ever stands. And let us leave this here, Sancho, for if you govern badly, yours will be the fault and mine the shame; but I console myself that I have done what I ought in counseling you as earnestly and as wisely as I could: with this I am released from my obligation and my promise. God guide you, Sancho, and govern you in your government, and free me from the misgiving I still have that you will turn the whole isle upside down, a thing I could prevent by revealing to the duke who you are and telling him that all that fatness and that little person of yours is nothing but a sack full of proverbs and sly tricks.”

“Sir,” replied Sancho, “if it seems to your grace that I’m not fit for this government, I let go of it right here, for I care more for a single black speck of my soul’s fingernail than for my whole body; and I’ll keep myself going just as well as plain Sancho on bread and onion as I would as governor on partridges and capons; and what’s more, while we sleep we’re all equal, the great and the small, the poor and the rich; and if your grace looks into it, you’ll see that it was only your grace who put me up to this business of governing, for I know no more about governing isles than a vulture does; and if your grace imagines that because I’m a governor the devil is going to carry me off, I’d rather go to heaven as Sancho than to hell as a governor.”

“By God, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “for these last words you have spoken alone, I judge that you deserve to be governor of a thousand isles: you have a good nature, without which no learning is worth anything; commend yourself to God, and try not to go wrong in your first intention; I mean that you should always have the purpose and firm resolve to get right every matter that comes before you, for heaven always favors good desires. And let us go and eat, for I believe these lords and ladies are already waiting for us.”