Don Quixote (Cervantes/Ormsby)/Volume 1/Chapter 1

by Miguel de Cervantes

DON QUIXOTE.

PART I.

---

CHAPTER I.

WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind,^[1] there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on Saturdays,^[2] lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty, he was of a hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman. They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quixana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be enough not to stray a hair's breadth from the truth in the telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardor and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillage-land to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves."^[3] Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose. He was not at all easy about the wounds which Don Belianis^[4] gave and took, because it seemed to him that, great as were the surgeons who had cured him, he must have had his face and body covered all over with seams and scars. He commended, however, the author's way of ending his book with the promise of that interminable adventure, and many a time was he tempted to take up his pen and finish it properly as is there proposed, which no doubt he would have done, and made a successful piece of work of it too, had not greater and more absorbing thoughts prevented him.

Many an argument did he have with the curate of his village (a learned man, and a graduate of Siguenza^[5]) as to which had been the better knight, Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. Master Nicholas, the village barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to the Knight of Phœbus, and that if there was any that could compare with him it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had a spirit that was equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight, nor lachrymose like his brother, while in the matter of valor he was not a whit behind him. In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and monstrous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments,^[6] availing himself of the artifice of Hercules when he strangled Antæus the son of Terra in his arms. He approved highly of the giant Morgante, because, although of the giant breed which is always arrogant and ill-conditioned, he alone was affable and well-bred. But above all he admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he saw him sallying forth from his castle and robbing every one he met, and when beyond the seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history says, was entirely of gold. And to have a bout of kicking at that traitor of a Ganelon he would have given his housekeeper, and his niece into the bargain.^[7]

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honor as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armor and on horseback in quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond^[8] at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion.^[9] This deficiency, however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a real^[10] and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.^[11]

Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself Don Quixote,^[12] whence, as has been already said, the authors of this veracious history have inferred that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and not Quesada as others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the valiant Amadis was not content to call himself curtly Amadis and nothing more, but added the name of his kingdom and country to make it famous, and called himself Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight, resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his origin and country, and did honor to it in taking his surname from it.

So then, his armor being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul. As he said to himself, "If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to have some one I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure?'" Oh, how our good gentleman enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had thought of some one to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a village near his own a very good-looking farm girl with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it nor gave a thought to the matter. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name which should not be out of harmony with her own, and should suggest and indicate that of a princess and great lady, he decided upon calling her Dulcinea del Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.

1. See Introduction, p. xxxiii.
2. The national dish, the olla, of which the puchero of Central and Northern Spain is a poor relation, is a stew with beef, bacon, sausage, chick-peas, and cabbage for its prime constituents, and for ingredients any other meat or vegetable that may be available. There is nothing exceptional in Don Quixote's olla being more a beef than a mutton one, for mutton is scarce in Spain except in the mountain districts. Salpicon (salad) is meat minced with red peppers, onions, oil, and vinegar, and is in fact a sort of meat salad. Duelos y quebrantos, the title of the Don's Saturday dish, would be a puzzle even to the majority of Spanish readers were it not for Pellicer's explanation. In the cattle-feeding districts of Spain, the carcasses of animals that came to an untimely end were converted into salt meat, and the parts unfit for that purpose were sold cheap under the name of duelos y quebrantos—"sorrows and losses" (literally "breakings") and were held to be sufficiently unlike meat to be eaten on days when flesh was forbidden, among which in Castile Saturday was included in commemoration of the battle of Navas de Tolosa. Any rendering of such a phrase must necessarily be unsatisfactory, and in adopting "scraps" I have, as in the other cases, merely gone on the principle of choosing the least of evils.
3. The first passage quoted is from the Chronicle of Don Florisel de Niqaea, by Feliciano de Silva, the volumes of which appeared in 1532, 1536, and 1551, and from the tenth and eleventh books of the Amadis series. The second is from Olivante de Laura, by Torquemada (1564). Clemencin points out that the first passage had been previously picked out as a sample of the absurdity of the school, by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza.
4. The History of Don Belianis de Grecia, by the Licentiate Jeronimo Fernandez, 1547. It has been by some included in the Amadis series, but it is in reality an independent romance.
5. Siguenza was one of the Universidades menores, the degrees of which were often laughed at by the Spanish humorists.
6. The Spanish tradition of the battle of Roncesvalles is, of course, at variance with the Chanson de Roland, but it is somewhat nearer historical truth, inasmuch as the slaughter of Roland and the rearguard of Charlemagne's army was effected not by Saracens, but by the Basque mountaineers.
7. Ganelon, the arch-traitor of the Charlemagne legend. In Spanish he appears as Galalon, in Italian as Gano; but in this as in the cases of Roland, Baldwin, and others, I have thought it best to give the name in the form in which it is best known, and will be most readily recognized, instead of Roldan, Valdovinos, etc.
8. Like Reinaldos or Rinaldo, who came to be Emperor of Trebizond.
9. That is, a simple head-piece without either visor or beaver.
10. An untranslatable pun on the word "quarto," which means a sand-crack in a horse's hoof, as well as the coin equal to one-eighth of the real. Gonela, or Gonnella, was a jester in the service of Borso, Duke of Ferrara (1450-1470). A book of the jests attributed to him was printed in 1568, the year before Cervantes went to Italy.
11. "Rocin" is a horse employed in labor, as distinguished from one kept for pleasure, the chase, or personal use generally; the word therefore may fairly be translated "hack." " "Ante" is an old form of "Antes" = "before," whether in time or in order.
12. Quixote—or, as it is now written, Quijote—means the piece of armor that protects the thigh (cuissan, cuish). Smollett's "Sir Lancelot Greaves" is a kind of parody on the name. Quixada and Quesada were both distinguished family names. The Governor of the Goletta, who was one of the passengers on board the unfortunate Sol galley, was a Quesada; and the faithful major-domo of Charles V. and guardian of Don John of Austria was a Qixada.