VOLUME[ VOLUME 1 ]
CHAPTER[ XLVII. OF THE STRANGE MANNER IN WHICH DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA WAS CARRIED AWAY
ENCHANTED, TOGETHER WITH OTHER REMARKABLE INCIDENTS
When Don Quixote saw himself caged and hoisted on the cart in this way,
he said, "Many grave histories of knights-errant have I read; but never
yet have I read, seen, or heard of their carrying off enchanted
knights-errant in this fashion, or at the slow pace that these lazy,
sluggish animals promise; for they always take them away through the air
with marvellous swiftness, enveloped in a dark thick cloud, or on a
chariot of fire, or it may be on some hippogriff or other beast of the
kind; but to carry me off like this on an ox-cart! By God, it puzzles me!
But perhaps the chivalry and enchantments of our day take a different
course from that of those in days gone by; and it may be, too, that as I
am a new knight in the world, and the first to revive the already
forgotten calling of knight-adventurers, they may have newly invented
other kinds of enchantments and other modes of carrying off the
enchanted. What thinkest thou of the matter, Sancho my son?"
"I don't know what to think," answered Sancho, "not being as well read as
your worship in errant writings; but for all that I venture to say and
swear that these apparitions that are about us are not quite catholic."
"Catholic!" said Don Quixote. "Father of me! how can they be Catholic
when they are all devils that have taken fantastic shapes to come and do
this, and bring me to this condition? And if thou wouldst prove it, touch
them, and feel them, and thou wilt find they have only bodies of air, and
no consistency except in appearance."
"By God, master," returned Sancho, "I have touched them already; and that
devil, that goes about there so busily, has firm flesh, and another
property very different from what I have heard say devils have, for by
all accounts they all smell of brimstone and other bad smells; but this
one smells of amber half a league off." Sancho was here speaking of Don
Fernando, who, like a gentleman of his rank, was very likely perfumed as
Sancho said.
"Marvel not at that, Sancho my friend," said Don Quixote; "for let me
tell thee devils are crafty; and even if they do carry odours about with
them, they themselves have no smell, because they are spirits; or, if
they have any smell, they cannot smell of anything sweet, but of
something foul and fetid; and the reason is that as they carry hell with
them wherever they go, and can get no ease whatever from their torments,
and as a sweet smell is a thing that gives pleasure and enjoyment, it is
impossible that they can smell sweet; if, then, this devil thou speakest
of seems to thee to smell of amber, either thou art deceiving thyself, or
he wants to deceive thee by making thee fancy he is not a devil."
Such was the conversation that passed between master and man; and Don
Fernando and Cardenio, apprehensive of Sancho's making a complete
discovery of their scheme, towards which he had already gone some way,
resolved to hasten their departure, and calling the landlord aside, they
directed him to saddle Rocinante and put the pack-saddle on Sancho's ass,
which he did with great alacrity. In the meantime the curate had made an
arrangement with the officers that they should bear them company as far
as his village, he paying them so much a day. Cardenio hung the buckler
on one side of the bow of Rocinante's saddle and the basin on the other,
and by signs commanded Sancho to mount his ass and take Rocinante's
bridle, and at each side of the cart he placed two officers with their
muskets; but before the cart was put in motion, out came the landlady and
her daughter and Maritornes to bid Don Quixote farewell, pretending to
weep with grief at his misfortune; and to them Don Quixote said:
"Weep not, good ladies, for all these mishaps are the lot of those who
follow the profession I profess; and if these reverses did not befall me
I should not esteem myself a famous knight-errant; for such things never
happen to knights of little renown and fame, because nobody in the world
thinks about them; to valiant knights they do, for these are envied for
their virtue and valour by many princes and other knights who compass the
destruction of the worthy by base means. Nevertheless, virtue is of
herself so mighty, that, in spite of all the magic that Zoroaster its
first inventor knew, she will come victorious out of every trial, and
shed her light upon the earth as the sun does upon the heavens. Forgive
me, fair ladies, if, through inadvertence, I have in aught offended you;
for intentionally and wittingly I have never done so to any; and pray to
God that he deliver me from this captivity to which some malevolent
enchanter has consigned me; and should I find myself released therefrom,
the favours that ye have bestowed upon me in this castle shall be held in
memory by me, that I may acknowledge, recognise, and requite them as they
deserve."
While this was passing between the ladies of the castle and Don Quixote,
the curate and the barber bade farewell to Don Fernando and his
companions, to the captain, his brother, and the ladies, now all made
happy, and in particular to Dorothea and Luscinda. They all embraced one
another, and promised to let each other know how things went with them,
and Don Fernando directed the curate where to write to him, to tell him
what became of Don Quixote, assuring him that there was nothing that
could give him more pleasure than to hear of it, and that he too, on his
part, would send him word of everything he thought he would like to know,
about his marriage, Zoraida's baptism, Don Luis's affair, and Luscinda's
return to her home. The curate promised to comply with his request
carefully, and they embraced once more, and renewed their promises.
The landlord approached the curate and handed him some papers, saying he
had discovered them in the lining of the valise in which the novel of
"The Ill-advised Curiosity" had been found, and that he might take them
all away with him as their owner had not since returned; for, as he could
not read, he did not want them himself. The curate thanked him, and
opening them he saw at the beginning of the manuscript the words, "Novel
of Rinconete and Cortadillo," by which he perceived that it was a novel,
and as that of "The Ill-advised Curiosity" had been good he concluded
this would be so too, as they were both probably by the same author; so
he kept it, intending to read it when he had an opportunity. He then
mounted and his friend the barber did the same, both masked, so as not to
be recognised by Don Quixote, and set out following in the rear of the
cart. The order of march was this: first went the cart with the owner
leading it; at each side of it marched the officers of the Brotherhood,
as has been said, with their muskets; then followed Sancho Panza on his
ass, leading Rocinante by the bridle; and behind all came the curate and
the barber on their mighty mules, with faces covered, as aforesaid, and a
grave and serious air, measuring their pace to suit the slow steps of the
oxen. Don Quixote was seated in the cage, with his hands tied and his
feet stretched out, leaning against the bars as silent and as patient as
if he were a stone statue and not a man of flesh. Thus slowly and
silently they made, it might be, two leagues, until they reached a valley
which the carter thought a convenient place for resting and feeding his
oxen, and he said so to the curate, but the barber was of opinion that
they ought to push on a little farther, as at the other side of a hill
which appeared close by he knew there was a valley that had more grass
and much better than the one where they proposed to halt; and his advice
was taken and they continued their journey.
Just at that moment the curate, looking back, saw coming on behind them
six or seven mounted men, well found and equipped, who soon overtook
them, for they were travelling, not at the sluggish, deliberate pace of
oxen, but like men who rode canons' mules, and in haste to take their
noontide rest as soon as possible at the inn which was in sight not a
league off. The quick travellers came up with the slow, and courteous
salutations were exchanged; and one of the new comers, who was, in fact,
a canon of Toledo and master of the others who accompanied him, observing
the regular order of the procession, the cart, the officers, Sancho,
Rocinante, the curate and the barber, and above all Don Quixote caged and
confined, could not help asking what was the meaning of carrying the man
in that fashion; though, from the badges of the officers, he already
concluded that he must be some desperate highwayman or other malefactor
whose punishment fell within the jurisdiction of the Holy Brotherhood.
One of the officers to whom he had put the question, replied, "Let the
gentleman himself tell you the meaning of his going this way, senor, for
we do not know."
Don Quixote overheard the conversation and said, "Haply, gentlemen, you
are versed and learned in matters of errant chivalry? Because if you are
I will tell you my misfortunes; if not, there is no good in my giving
myself the trouble of relating them;" but here the curate and the barber,
seeing that the travellers were engaged in conversation with Don Quixote,
came forward, in order to answer in such a way as to save their stratagem
from being discovered.
The canon, replying to Don Quixote, said, "In truth, brother, I know more
about books of chivalry than I do about Villalpando's elements of logic;
so if that be all, you may safely tell me what you please."
"In God's name, then, senor," replied Don Quixote; "if that be so, I
would have you know that I am held enchanted in this cage by the envy and
fraud of wicked enchanters; for virtue is more persecuted by the wicked
than loved by the good. I am a knight-errant, and not one of those whose
names Fame has never thought of immortalising in her record, but of those
who, in defiance and in spite of envy itself, and all the magicians that
Persia, or Brahmans that India, or Gymnosophists that Ethiopia ever
produced, will place their names in the temple of immortality, to serve
as examples and patterns for ages to come, whereby knights-errant may see
the footsteps in which they must tread if they would attain the summit
and crowning point of honour in arms."
"What Senor Don Quixote of La Mancha says," observed the curate, "is the
truth; for he goes enchanted in this cart, not from any fault or sins of
his, but because of the malevolence of those to whom virtue is odious and
valour hateful. This, senor, is the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, if
you have ever heard him named, whose valiant achievements and mighty
deeds shall be written on lasting brass and imperishable marble,
notwithstanding all the efforts of envy to obscure them and malice to
hide them."
When the canon heard both the prisoner and the man who was at liberty
talk in such a strain he was ready to cross himself in his astonishment,
and could not make out what had befallen him; and all his attendants were
in the same state of amazement.
At this point Sancho Panza, who had drawn near to hear the conversation,
said, in order to make everything plain, "Well, sirs, you may like or
dislike what I am going to say, but the fact of the matter is, my master,
Don Quixote, is just as much enchanted as my mother. He is in his full
senses, he eats and he drinks, and he has his calls like other men and as
he had yesterday, before they caged him. And if that's the case, what do
they mean by wanting me to believe that he is enchanted? For I have heard
many a one say that enchanted people neither eat, nor sleep, nor talk;
and my master, if you don't stop him, will talk more than thirty
lawyers." Then turning to the curate he exclaimed, "Ah, senor curate,
senor curate! do you think I don't know you? Do you think I don't guess
and see the drift of these new enchantments? Well then, I can tell you I
know you, for all your face is covered, and I can tell you I am up to
you, however you may hide your tricks. After all, where envy reigns
virtue cannot live, and where there is niggardliness there can be no
liberality. Ill betide the devil! if it had not been for your worship my
master would be married to the Princess Micomicona this minute, and I
should be a count at least; for no less was to be expected, as well from
the goodness of my master, him of the Rueful Countenance, as from the
greatness of my services. But I see now how true it is what they say in
these parts, that the wheel of fortune turns faster than a mill-wheel,
and that those who were up yesterday are down to-day. I am sorry for my
wife and children, for when they might fairly and reasonably expect to
see their father return to them a governor or viceroy of some island or
kingdom, they will see him come back a horse-boy. I have said all this,
senor curate, only to urge your paternity to lay to your conscience your
ill-treatment of my master; and have a care that God does not call you to
account in another life for making a prisoner of him in this way, and
charge against you all the succours and good deeds that my lord Don
Quixote leaves undone while he is shut up.
"Trim those lamps there!" exclaimed the barber at this; "so you are of
the same fraternity as your master, too, Sancho? By God, I begin to see
that you will have to keep him company in the cage, and be enchanted like
him for having caught some of his humour and chivalry. It was an evil
hour when you let yourself be got with child by his promises, and that
island you long so much for found its way into your head."
"I am not with child by anyone," returned Sancho, "nor am I a man to let
myself be got with child, if it was by the King himself. Though I am poor
I am an old Christian, and I owe nothing to nobody, and if I long for an
island, other people long for worse. Each of us is the son of his own
works; and being a man I may come to be pope, not to say governor of an
island, especially as my master may win so many that he will not know
whom to give them to. Mind how you talk, master barber; for shaving is
not everything, and there is some difference between Peter and Peter. I
say this because we all know one another, and it will not do to throw
false dice with me; and as to the enchantment of my master, God knows the
truth; leave it as it is; it only makes it worse to stir it."
The barber did not care to answer Sancho lest by his plain speaking he
should disclose what the curate and he himself were trying so hard to
conceal; and under the same apprehension the curate had asked the canon
to ride on a little in advance, so that he might tell him the mystery of
this man in the cage, and other things that would amuse him. The canon
agreed, and going on ahead with his servants, listened with attention to
the account of the character, life, madness, and ways of Don Quixote,
given him by the curate, who described to him briefly the beginning and
origin of his craze, and told him the whole story of his adventures up to
his being confined in the cage, together with the plan they had of taking
him home to try if by any means they could discover a cure for his
madness. The canon and his servants were surprised anew when they heard
Don Quixote's strange story, and when it was finished he said, "To tell
the truth, senor curate, I for my part consider what they call books of
chivalry to be mischievous to the State; and though, led by idle and
false taste, I have read the beginnings of almost all that have been
printed, I never could manage to read any one of them from beginning to
end; for it seems to me they are all more or less the same thing; and one
has nothing more in it than another; this no more than that. And in my
opinion this sort of writing and composition is of the same species as
the fables they call the Milesian, nonsensical tales that aim solely at
giving amusement and not instruction, exactly the opposite of the
apologue fables which amuse and instruct at the same time. And though it
may be the chief object of such books to amuse, I do not know how they
can succeed, when they are so full of such monstrous nonsense. For the
enjoyment the mind feels must come from the beauty and harmony which it
perceives or contemplates in the things that the eye or the imagination
brings before it; and nothing that has any ugliness or disproportion
about it can give any pleasure. What beauty, then, or what proportion of
the parts to the whole, or of the whole to the parts, can there be in a
book or fable where a lad of sixteen cuts down a giant as tall as a tower
and makes two halves of him as if he was an almond cake? And when they
want to give us a picture of a battle, after having told us that there
are a million of combatants on the side of the enemy, let the hero of the
book be opposed to them, and we have perforce to believe, whether we like
it or not, that the said knight wins the victory by the single might of
his strong arm. And then, what shall we say of the facility with which a
born queen or empress will give herself over into the arms of some
unknown wandering knight? What mind, that is not wholly barbarous and
uncultured, can find pleasure in reading of how a great tower full of
knights sails away across the sea like a ship with a fair wind, and will
be to-night in Lombardy and to-morrow morning in the land of Prester John
of the Indies, or some other that Ptolemy never described nor Marco Polo
saw? And if, in answer to this, I am told that the authors of books of
the kind write them as fiction, and therefore are not bound to regard
niceties of truth, I would reply that fiction is all the better the more
it looks like truth, and gives the more pleasure the more probability and
possibility there is about it. Plots in fiction should be wedded to the
understanding of the reader, and be constructed in such a way that,
reconciling impossibilities, smoothing over difficulties, keeping the
mind on the alert, they may surprise, interest, divert, and entertain, so
that wonder and delight joined may keep pace one with the other; all
which he will fail to effect who shuns verisimilitude and truth to
nature, wherein lies the perfection of writing. I have never yet seen any
book of chivalry that puts together a connected plot complete in all its
numbers, so that the middle agrees with the beginning, and the end with
the beginning and middle; on the contrary, they construct them with such
a multitude of members that it seems as though they meant to produce a
chimera or monster rather than a well-proportioned figure. And besides
all this they are harsh in their style, incredible in their achievements,
licentious in their amours, uncouth in their courtly speeches, prolix in
their battles, silly in their arguments, absurd in their travels, and, in
short, wanting in everything like intelligent art; for which reason they
deserve to be banished from the Christian commonwealth as a worthless
breed."
The curate listened to him attentively and felt that he was a man of
sound understanding, and that there was good reason in what he said; so
he told him that, being of the same opinion himself, and bearing a grudge
to books of chivalry, he had burned all Don Quixote's, which were many;
and gave him an account of the scrutiny he had made of them, and of those
he had condemned to the flames and those he had spared, with which the
canon was not a little amused, adding that though he had said so much in
condemnation of these books, still he found one good thing in them, and
that was the opportunity they afforded to a gifted intellect for
displaying itself; for they presented a wide and spacious field over
which the pen might range freely, describing shipwrecks, tempests,
combats, battles, portraying a valiant captain with all the
qualifications requisite to make one, showing him sagacious in foreseeing
the wiles of the enemy, eloquent in speech to encourage or restrain his
soldiers, ripe in counsel, rapid in resolve, as bold in biding his time
as in pressing the attack; now picturing some sad tragic incident, now
some joyful and unexpected event; here a beauteous lady, virtuous, wise,
and modest; there a Christian knight, brave and gentle; here a lawless,
barbarous braggart; there a courteous prince, gallant and gracious;
setting forth the devotion and loyalty of vassals, the greatness and
generosity of nobles. "Or again," said he, "the author may show himself
to be an astronomer, or a skilled cosmographer, or musician, or one
versed in affairs of state, and sometimes he will have a chance of coming
forward as a magician if he likes. He can set forth the craftiness of
Ulysses, the piety of AEneas, the valour of Achilles, the misfortunes of
Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the
generosity of Alexander, the boldness of Caesar, the clemency and truth
of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the wisdom of Cato, and in short all
the faculties that serve to make an illustrious man perfect, now uniting
them in one individual, again distributing them among many; and if this
be done with charm of style and ingenious invention, aiming at the truth
as much as possible, he will assuredly weave a web of bright and varied
threads that, when finished, will display such perfection and beauty that
it will attain the worthiest object any writing can seek, which, as I
said before, is to give instruction and pleasure combined; for the
unrestricted range of these books enables the author to show his powers,
epic, lyric, tragic, or comic, and all the moods the sweet and winning
arts of poesy and oratory are capable of; for the epic may be written in
prose just as well as in verse."
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