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Don Quixote · Part One

The Curious Impertinent

LoveAppearance and RealityLanguage and NarrationHonor and ReputationMadness

Section summary

In the inn where Don Quixote was tossed in a blanket, the priest reads aloud the interpolated novella of a husband who asks his best friend to prove his wife's virtue, and the story ends in three deaths. Meanwhile the gentleman, in the room next door, dreams a battle and bursts wineskins of wine, and soon Don Fernando and Luscinda arrive, and the farce of Princess Micomicona finds itself facing truths that cannot be staged. Chapter XXXVII closes with the arrival of a captive and of a Moorish woman who says she is a Christian, and with the beginning of the discourse on arms.

Chapter XXXII: The Innkeeper's Books

Chapter summary

The company arrives at the inn the next day, and Sancho Panza, for whom it is astonishment and amazement, cannot avoid it. Don Quixote asks for a better bed than the last time, the innkeeper's wife promises one fit for princes if he pays better, and he lies down in the same little cubicle as before, battered and short of wits. As soon as the door closes, she seizes the barber by the beard and demands the ox tail he lent for the disguise, because her husband's comb, which she hung on it, is on the floor. The priest and the barber give up the farce: the priest orders the tail returned, since it is no longer needed, and the barber must tell Don Quixote that, after the galley slaves stripped him, he fled to that place, and that the princess sent him ahead to warn her kingdom that he brings with him the deliverer of all. At table, with the innkeeper, his wife, their daughter, Maritornes, and the travelers, they speak of the strange madness of the gentleman, and the priest explains that the books of chivalry turned his wits. The innkeeper does not see how: he has two or three of these books there, which have given life to him and to many others, because at harvest time the reapers gather, one of them reads, and more than thirty listen with such pleasure that it takes a thousand gray hairs from them. His wife says she has good rats in the house only when he reads, so absorbed that he forgets to quarrel; Maritornes enjoys the lady under the orange tree, embraced by the knight, with a lady-in-waiting keeping watch, dying of envy; their daughter, who does not like the beatings her father likes, weeps with pity at the laments of knights absent from their ladies, and thinks that the cruel ladies who let an honorable man die or go mad should marry him, since he wants nothing else. Her mother tells her to hush, that girls should not talk so much.

Analysis

The priest asks for the books. The innkeeper takes from a room an old valise fastened with a little chain, and finds three large volumes and some handwritten papers: Don Cirongilio of Thrace, Felixmarte of Hyrcania, and the History of the Great Captain Gonzalo Hernández de Córdoba, with the life of Diego García de Paredes. On reading the first two titles, the priest says that the friend's housekeeper and niece are missing from there, and the barber answers that he also knows how to take them to the pen or the hearth, where the fire is good. The innkeeper complains that his books are neither heretical nor phlegmatic (the barber corrects him: schismatic), and that if they must be burned, let the one about the Great Captain and the one about Diego García be burned, because he would rather let a son burn than any other book. The priest answers that the first two are liars and full of nonsense, while the one about the Great Captain is true history, and tells how Diego García stopped a millwheel with one finger in the middle of its fury, and, posted with a broadsword at the entrance of a bridge, held back an entire army. The innkeeper laughs: stop a millwheel! Let the priest read what Felixmarte did, who with one stroke cut five giants at the waist as if they were fava beans, and what Don Cirongilio did, who threw himself upon a fire serpent that came out of the river, and strangled it until it carried him down to the bottom, to a palace and a garden where the serpent turned into an old man who told him so many things that there is nothing more to hear. Dorothea says quietly to Cardenio that the guest is not far from making the second part of Don Quixote, and Cardenio agrees: he is certain that everything the books tell happened to the letter. The priest insists that Felixmarte, Cirongilio, and knights like them never existed, that everything is composition and fiction of idle wits to pass the time, as the reapers are entertained. The innkeeper does not give in:

¡Como si yo no supiese cuántas son cinco y adónde me aprieta el zapato! [...] estando impreso con licencia de los señores del Consejo Real, como si ellos fueran gente que habían de dejar imprimir tanta mentira junta, as if I did not know how many are five and where my shoe pinches! [...] being printed with the license of the gentlemen of the Royal Council, as if they were people who would let so much lying be printed all together.

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Chapter XXXIII: Anselmo's Wager

Love

Chapter summary

The priest reads the novella aloud, and the chapter is all of it. In Florence live Anselmo and Lothario, two wealthy and distinguished gentlemen, unmarried, of the same age and the same habits, so close that everyone calls them "the two friends." Anselmo is more inclined to amorous pastimes, Lothario to those of the hunt, but each gives up his taste for the other's, and their wills move so together that no well-set clock would keep such time. Anselmo falls in love with a noble maiden of the city, Camilla, and asks her parents for her hand with Lothario's approval, without which he does nothing; it is Lothario who carries the embassy and concludes the business to his friend's liking. Once the wedding festivities are over, Lothario begins carefully to neglect his visits: he thinks that between married friends the houses should not be visited as when they were single, because the honor of a married man is so delicate that it can be offended even by his brothers, let alone his friends. Anselmo notices the slackening and complains: had he known that marrying would deprive him of his friend's company, he would never have married, and Lothario should not let the name of the two friends be lost through affected reserve. Lothario answers with such prudence that they agree on two days a week and on feast days. Even so, he shortens them, out of zeal for his friend's honor, which he values more than his own, and so that idle common folk and malicious eyes will not see ill in the visits of a rich young man to the house of a woman so beautiful.

Analysis

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Chapter XXXIV: Camilla's Fall and the Dagger Deceit

LoveHonor and Reputation

Chapter summary

Camilla's note to Anselmo says that an army without a general, a castle without a castellan, and a young married woman without her husband, all look ill, and that if he does not come soon, she will amuse herself at her parents' house, though she leaves his house without a guard, because the one he left there takes more care of her pleasure than of his. Anselmo understands that Lothario has begun and that Camilla has answered as he wished; cheerful, he sends word that she is not to change houses, for he will return soon. Camilla, unable either to stay or to go, stays, so as not to give the servants something to talk about, and resolves to resist in silence, so as not to set her husband at odds. Lothario, who presses harder each day, sees her firmness waver, and tightens the siege with praise of her beauty, for nothing surrenders the towers of a beauty's vanity so quickly as vanity itself placed on the tongue of flattery. He weeps, pleads, offers, flatters, persists, and pretends, and triumphs.

Analysis

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Chapter XXXV: The Wineskins and the End of the Novella

Language and NarrationHonor and Reputation

Chapter summary

Shortly before the end of the novella, Sancho Panza comes out of the cubicle where his master sleeps, alarmed, shouting for help:

Analysis

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Chapter XXXVI: Don Fernando, Luscinda, and Dorothea

Love

Chapter summary

The innkeeper, at the door, announces that a fine troop of guests is coming: four men on horseback, mounted in the Spanish style, with lances and bucklers and black masks, and a woman in white on a sidesaddle, also covered, with two footmen on foot. Dorothea covers her face and Cardenio hides in Don Quixote's room. The four dismount the woman and seat her in a chair at the entrance of that room; no one has removed his mask or said a word, and she only sighs, dejected like someone ill. The priest, curious, asks one of the footmen who they are: he does not know, only that the one who took her in his arms is a man of rank, because the others show him respect and do what he orders; the lady moans without stopping, and the footmen suppose that she is being taken by force, perhaps to a convent, for her dress is that of a nun. Dorothea, moved by compassion, offers to serve her, and the one who answers is the masked gentleman: she should not tire herself, for the lady gives no thanks and lies by habit. The lady says she has never lied, and that it is because she is so truthful that she is in such misfortune, and that he himself can bear witness to it, for his own pure truth makes him false and a liar. Cardenio, who is on the other side of the door, recognizes the voice and cries out. She rises, startled, to go into the room, the gentleman holds her back, and the veil covering her face falls away, and an incomparable beauty appears; busy holding her, the gentleman also lets his hood fall, and Dorothea, who was embracing the lady, sees that the one holding her captive is her husband Don Fernando, and falls in a faint into the barber's arms. The priest pulls the hood from his face to throw water on her, and Don Fernando recognizes her and stands as if dead, without releasing Luscinda, whom he recognized by the sigh; Cardenio, hearing Dorothea's cry and believing it was Luscinda, rushes out in fright and comes upon Don Fernando embracing her. All fall silent and look at one another: Dorothea at Don Fernando, Don Fernando at Cardenio, Cardenio at Luscinda, and Luscinda at Cardenio. It is Luscinda who breaks the silence:

Analysis

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Chapter XXXVII: Micomicona Maintained and the Arrival of the Captive

Love

Chapter summary

Sancho Panza hears all of it with pain in his spirit: the hope of the title goes up in smoke, the Princess Micomicona has turned into Dorothea, the giant has turned into Don Fernando, and his master sleeps soundly, careless of everything. Dorothea, Cardenio, and Luscinda hardly believe the good they have, Don Fernando thanks heaven for having pulled him out of the labyrinth in which he nearly lost his good name and his soul, and the innkeeper's wife rejoices at the promise of Cardenio and the priest to pay her for the damage. The squire enters, with a gloomy face, the room of his master, who has just woken, and tells him that he may sleep as long as he likes, with no worry about killing giants or restoring the kingdom to the princess, for it is all done. The gentleman replies that he believes it, because he fought the most monstrous battle of his life with the giant, and with one blow knocked off his head, and the blood ran like water. Sancho corrects him: the dead giant is a punctured wineskin, and the blood six arrobas of red wine; and the princess has turned into a private lady called Dorothea. Don Quixote is not astonished, for he has already said that everything in that inn is enchantment. Sancho answers:

Analysis

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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