Section summary
In the cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote lives three days that, for Sancho Panza and the cousin, lasted one hour, and he recounts a vision which the narrator, Cide Hamete, says he cannot guarantee, and which Master Pedro's monkey declares partly false and partly plausible. The following chapters return the question in other forms: the puppeteer who divines is the galley slave Ginés de Pasamonte, the puppet show is torn to pieces as if the figures were Moors, the braying squadron answers the gentleman's speech with a club blow to Sancho, the enchanted boat is only a boat. The part closes with the Duke and Duchess, who have read the book and receive him as a real knight: for the first time the fiction comes to him from outside.
Chapter XXII: The Descent into the Cave
Chapter summary
After Camacho's wedding, the newlyweds shower Don Quixote with gifts for having defended their cause, and they learn that Basilio's feigned wound had not been arranged with Quiteria, but was his own cunning, and that he had told only a few friends so that they would help him at the moment. The gentleman replies that deceits made for virtuous ends are not deceits:
Analysis
No se pueden ni deben llamar engaños [...] los que ponen la mira en virtuosos fines
, they can neither be called nor should be called deceits [...] those that aim at virtuous ends.
The sentence serves Basilio's trick, but it is a general rule, and the one who states it has just seen a poor man win the rich bride through a wound that did not exist. Two readings: the consistency of someone who judges ends before means; or the first time the book gives him a defense of useful fiction, which he himself will use when he recounts what he saw in the cave.
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Chapter XXIII: What He Claims to Have Seen
Chapter summary
At four in the afternoon, with the sun hidden by clouds, Don Quixote tells his two listeners what he saw. About twelve or fourteen estados down, on the right, there opens a hollow where a cart with mules would fit; he chooses it to rest, tired of hanging from the rope, shouts that they should let out no more, gathers in the rope they send down to him, and sits on top of the coil. There, he says, a very deep sleep seized him, from which he woke in the middle of a meadow so lovely that the most discerning imagination could not invent it:
Analysis
Chapter XXIV: What the Narrator Does Not Guarantee
Chapter summary
The chapter opens with the translator saying that Cide Hamete Benengeli, on reaching the cave, left written in the margin, in his own hand, these reasons, which Cervantes presents as if they came from the Arabic:
Analysis
Chapter XXV: The Braying and the Divining Monkey
Chapter summary
Don Quixote cannot contain his curiosity about the promised marvels and goes after the man with the lances. So that the other will tell him right away, he helps him sift the barley and clean the manger, a humility that obliges him to speak, and they all sit around him like a senate and an audience. The story goes like this. In a village four and a half leagues away, a councilman lost his donkey, through the scheming of a maidservant; fifteen days later another councilman tells him he saw it on the hill, thin and wild, and the two go to look for it. One of them proposes the trick of braying at intervals, so that the donkey will hear and answer; the two bray almost together and, each deceived by the other's bray, they meet without the donkey, and each swears that the other brays so well that the animal itself could not tell them apart. At last they find the donkey dead, eaten by wolves, and they return hoarse and disconsolate, praising each other's braying:
Analysis
Chapter XXVI: Master Pedro's Puppet Show
Chapter summary
To the sound of kettledrums, trumpets, and artillery, the boy interpreter of Master Pedro announces the story of Don Gaiferos, who frees his wife Melisendra from captivity among the Moors of Sansueña, present-day Zaragoza, and he tells it drawn from French chronicles and from the ballads that go from mouth to mouth. Gaiferos is playing a board game and has forgotten his wife; Charlemagne, his father-in-law, comes out to rebuke him; the son-in-law refuses the help Roland offers, and arms himself alone. In the tower, Melisendra sees the road to France; a Moor steals a kiss from her, she spits and wipes her mouth, and King Marsilio orders two hundred lashes for the audacious man, which are applied before any proof. Don Quixote interrupts the boy, who was losing himself in ornaments, so that he will follow the story in a straight line, because to get a truth at its cleanest many proofs and rebuttals are needed; and Master Pedro, from inside, orders the boy to sing in plain chant and leave out the counterpoints, which break down from excessive subtlety. The boy narrates Melisendra's descent from the window, her petticoat caught on the iron of the balcony, the gallop of the two of them on the horse, and that the Moors, alerted by idle eyes, ring the mosque bells. The gentleman corrects him: among Moors there are no bells, but kettledrums and shawms. Master Pedro retorts:
Analysis
Chapter XXVII: Master Pedro Unmasked, and the Braying Squadron
Chapter summary
Cide Hamete Benengeli opens the chapter swearing "as a Christian Catholic," and the translator explains that the Moor meant only that, just as the Christian who swears tells the truth, he tells the truth about who Master Pedro and the monkey were. The reader of Part One will remember Ginés de Pasamonte, the galley slave whom Don Quixote freed in the Sierra Morena, in Part One: The Galley Slaves and the Sierra, a favor ill repaid by that lot. It was he who stole the gray donkey of Sancho Panza, and Cide Hamete says that the how and the when were missing from the first volume through the fault of the printers, and not of the author's memory:
Analysis
Chapter XXVIII: Withdrawing Is Not Fleeing
Chapter summary
The narrator opens with a maxim: that when the brave man flees, the trick is exposed, and it is the mark of prudent men to keep themselves for a better occasion; and he tells how Don Quixote got himself to safety at a gallop, without remembering Sancho Panza or the danger in which he left him. When the squire arrives, draped across the donkey, he falls at Rocinante's feet, anxious, battered, and beaten; the master examines him, finds him sound from head to foot and, with anger, reproaches him for having brayed, which is like mentioning the rope in the house of a man who was hanged: a chorus of brays could only carry the counterpoint of cudgels, and he should thank God that they had consecrated him with a stick and not with a scimitar. Sancho says that he is only speaking from behind, and promises silence about the braying, but not about saying that knights-errant flee and leave their good squires battered in the hands of their enemies:
Analysis
Chapter XXIX: The Enchanted Boat
Chapter summary
Two days later, on reaching the Ebro, Don Quixote delights in the pleasantness of the banks and, among thoughts of love, returns to Montesinos's cave: although Master Pedro's monkey said that part of what he saw was true and part a lie, he holds more to the truths, unlike Sancho Panza, who takes it all as a complete lie. Then he sees a small oarless boat tied to a trunk, dismounts, has Sancho tie the animals together to a willow, and explains that the boat calls to him, because it is the custom of the books of chivalry and of the enchanters in them to carry the knight, by a cloud or by a boat, to rescue another who is in trouble two or three thousand leagues away. Sancho obeys, by the proverb that one does what the master commands, and sits down with him at the table, but he notes, for the record of his conscience, that the boat seems to him a fisherman's, because the river yields the best shad in the world. When the master says that whoever carries them to "distant" regions will take care of feeding the animals, Sancho confesses that he has never heard the word, and the gentleman, instead of getting annoyed, explains that it means apart, and that he is not obliged to know Latin.
Analysis
Chapter XXX: The Beautiful Huntress
Chapter summary
The two return to the melancholy animals, Sancho Panza especially, who grieves over every real taken from his purse, and they move away from the river without exchanging a word: Don Quixote buried in thoughts of love, Sancho in thoughts of his own promotion, which seems to him very far off. Although dim-witted, he realizes that the master's deeds are almost all absurdities, and he looks for an occasion to go home one day, without settling accounts or saying goodbyes. Fortune, however, arranges things the reverse of what he fears. The next day, at sunset, the gentleman sees on a green meadow falconers hunting with hawks and, among them, a noble lady on a snow-white palfrey, dressed in green, with a falcon on her left hand. He sends Sancho to deliver the message that the Knight of the Lions kisses the hands of her beauty and asks leave to go and serve her, with the recommendation not to insert any refrain. Sancho, who boasts of carrying embassies to high ladies, kneels and delivers it with every refinement. The lady replies that the embassy has all the circumstances such embassies require, tells him to rise, because the squire of so great a knight, of whom they already have much news, should not be on his knees, and invites the master to make use of her and of the duke her husband in a pleasure house they have there. Then she asks:
Analysis
Chapter XXXI: The Reception at the Castle
Chapter summary
Sancho Panza goes along cheerfully, believing himself in favor with the duchess and expecting at the castle the good life of the houses of Don Diego and of Basilio. Before they arrive, the duke goes ahead and instructs the servants on how to treat Don Quixote. At the door, two lackeys in crimson silk take him in their arms, without his seeing or hearing them, and tell him to go and help the duchess down; the two yield with many courtesies, and the duchess descends only in the duke's arms, not feeling herself worthy of giving such a useless burden to so great a knight. In the courtyard, two damsels place on the gentleman's shoulders a large scarlet mantle, the corridors fill with servants who shout "welcome the flower and cream of knights-errant," and all of them pour scented waters over him and over the dukes:
Analysis
Reading of the Part
Analysis