Section summary
In the sierra, the gentleman invents a despair that has no cause and carries it out by method, and the rest of the people around him answer with fictions of their own: the visit Sancho never made, the princess the priest presents, the prophecy Dorothea composes in the style of the books. Each one lies for a reason the chapter shows, and it is Don Quixote's madness that makes the lie effective. Between one tale and another, the stories of Cardenio and Dorothea stage the treachery of Don Fernando, which no fiction can reach.
Chapter XXV: The Penance of Beltenebros and the Aldonza Dulcinea
Chapter summary
Don Quixote takes leave of the goatherd and enters the roughest part of the sierra, with Sancho Panza behind him, very reluctantly. The squire, whom his master has forbidden to speak, cannot bear so much silence and asks leave to return to his wife and children: to follow his master through wilds, by day and by night, unable to say what he has in his heart, is to bury oneself alive, and to go seeking adventures that yield nothing but kicks, blanketings, stones and punches is not to be borne with patience. The gentleman lifts the prohibition, but only while they are in the sierra. Sancho uses it at once to ask what his master gained by defending Queen Madasima against Cardenio, and the gentleman replies that the knight-errant is bound, against the sane and against the mad, to defend the honor of women, and that the madman, when he spoke of Master Elisabat, was already out of his wits. When Sancho begins to string together proverbs, the master bids him be silent and says why they came: not only to find the madman, but to perform there a feat that will bring him perpetual fame and that depends on the squire's diligence. Only then does he explain it, with the argument that the painter who wants fame imitates the best originals, and that Homer painted Ulysses, and Virgil Aeneas, not as they were, but as they ought to be:
Analysis
Amadís fue el norte, el lucero, el sol de los valientes y enamorados caballeros, a quien debemos de imitar todos aquellos que debajo de la bandera de amor y de la caballería militamos
, Amadis was the north star, the morning star, the sun of valiant and enamored knights, whom all of us who serve under the banner of love and chivalry ought to imitate.
The gentleman treats Amadis as an original to copy, in the same sense that a painter copies his master, and for this reason the imitation does not seem to him folly but method. He chooses the penance of the Poor Rock because it is easier for him than cleaving giants or undoing enchantments, and he says so with the air of one who knows what he is doing.
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Chapter XXVI: Verses in the Sierra and the Message Sancho Does Not Carry
Chapter summary
Alone, Don Quixote climbs a crag and again considers what he has never settled: whether it suits him better to imitate Orlando in his outrageous madnesses or Amadis in his melancholy ones. Orlando was enchanted and could be killed only by a pin in the sole of his foot, and he lost his wits over the signs he found at the fountain and the shepherd's news that Angelica had slept more than two siestas with Medoro. But he has no equal reason:
Analysis
Chapter XXVII: The Priest's Disguises and Cardenio's Complete Story
Chapter summary
The barber approves the priest's invention, and they put it into effect at the inn. The innkeeper lends a skirt and wimples, as surety for a new cassock of the priest's; the barber makes a long beard out of an ox's tail, red or tawny; and the couple, on learning that the madman of the sierra is the guest of the balsam and that the master of the blanketed squire is the same man, tells the priest everything that had happened, without hiding what Sancho had kept concealed. As soon as they leave, the priest notices that it is unbecoming for a priest to dress like that, even for a good cause, and proposes swapping roles: the barber will be the maiden and he the squire, so that his dignity is less profaned; and if the other refuses, he will go no further, even if they carry the devil off with Don Quixote. The barber gives in. On the way, Sancho Panza guides them and tells what happened to him with the madman of the sierra, concealing the discovery of the valise, because the youth, though crazy, was somewhat covetous. They reach the branches he had left as a sign, and Sancho goes ahead to look for his master, carrying Dulcinea's reply, which he says would be enough to bring him out of there, while the other two wait for him in the shade of a ravine.
Analysis
Chapter XXVIII: Dorothea in the Sierra
Chapter summary
The narrator opens the chapter by praising the happy times in which Don Quixote was born, thanks to whom we also enjoy the tales and episodes the history carries. The voice that stopped the priest belongs to a young man dressed as a peasant, who is washing his feet in the stream, with a lament: he has already found a place for the grave of the body he sustains against its will. The three surround him in silence, and when the youth takes off his cap and shakes his head, fair hair falls and covers him all over, and it is seen that this is a woman, of such beauty that Cardenio says to the priest, in a low voice, that if she is not Luscinda, she is not a human person but a divine one. On seeing the men, she flees, but her delicate feet cannot bear the stones and she falls. The priest holds her back, tells her that her dress belies her hair, and offers help for whatever she needs. She, after a sigh, answers that it would be in vain to feign again, and that, so that her honor does not remain in doubt in their opinion, she will tell what she would rather have kept silent. She is Dorothea, daughter of rich farmers, vassals of a duke of Andalusia, pure Old Christians, who raised her as the mirror in which they looked at themselves and made her steward of the whole estate. Don Fernando, the duke's younger son, became attached to her at a single glance; he bribes the household, writes notes full of promises, and her parents tell her that the inequality shows he seeks his own pleasure and not her benefit. On learning that her parents mean to marry her off, he enters her room one night, where she, troubled, has neither voice to cry out nor strength to defend herself, and he takes her in his arms with such arguments that she cannot understand how a lie can seem so true. When the shock has passed, she answers:
Analysis
Chapter XXIX: Princess Micomicona
Chapter summary
Dorothea finishes her story and asks for counsel: where to live without fear of being found, since the shame of showing herself to her parents in any way other than they expected leads her to prefer exile. Cardenio takes the word before the priest, says that she is the only daughter of the rich Clenardo, and reveals himself as the wretch to whom Luscinda said she was a wife. He tells why he went away, not knowing what the swoon and the paper had said, and proposes a hope: since Luscinda cannot marry Don Fernando because she belongs to Cardenio, nor Don Fernando her, because she is another's, heaven may yet restore to each what is his. Then he swears:
Analysis
Chapter XXX: Tinacrio's Prophecy and the Quarrel over Dulcinea
Chapter summary
As soon as the priest finishes telling of the galley slaves' theft, Sancho Panza says it was his master who set them free, and that he had warned him it was a sin to give them liberty, since they all went as great rogues. Don Quixote calls him a dolt and answers that it is not for knights-errant to investigate the guilt of those they find in chains:
Analysis
Chapter XXXI: The Visit Sancho Invents and the Reappearance of Andrés
Chapter summary
Alone with the squire, Don Quixote wants to know everything about the embassy to Dulcinea del Toboso. Sancho Panza carried no letter at all, as he confessed to his master at the end of the previous chapter, and he invents the answers to each question without hesitating. The gentleman takes what he hears and turns it to his own favor:
Analysis
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Analysis