Section summary
The gentleman who a little while ago cut wineskins as if they were giants makes a speech on war with a judgment the listeners lament, and soon the word passes to a true soldier, who promises to tell a life and not an invention. The inn, which was a stage for jokes, becomes a stage for recognitions: a father and three sons who chose three paths, a Moorish woman who writes to a captive she has never seen, two brothers who find each other, a maiden who recognizes the singer who followed her on foot. Don Quixote listens in silence, takes it all for a chivalric chimera, and that same night he ends up hanging from a trick.
Chapter XXXVIII: The Soldier Poorer Than the Student
Chapter summary
Don Quixote continues at table the speech he began in the previous chapter, on the end of war and the poverty of the student. Now he wants to know whether the soldier is richer, and the answer he gives is that there is no one poorer. He speaks with method, like someone weighing on a scale the labor and the reward of each trade to decide which deserves more, and begins with the soldier's pay:
Analysis
no hay ninguno más pobre en la misma pobreza, porque está atenido a la miseria de su paga, que viene o tarde o nunca, o a lo que garbeare por sus manos, con notable peligro de su vida y de su conciencia
, there is no one poorer in the same poverty, because he is at the mercy of the wretchedness of his pay, which comes late or never, or of whatever he can snatch with his own hands, at notable risk to his life and his conscience.
Don Quixote weighs labor against reward and concedes to his opponent his strongest argument: it is easier to pay two thousand men of letters with offices than thirty thousand soldiers out of the lord's estate. He answers that this impossibility strengthens his reason, and leaves the point, which he calls a labyrinth with a hard exit. He reasons in order, and at the table no one contradicts him.
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Chapter XXXIX: The Captive, the Father, and Lepanto
Chapter summary
With the silence he asked for, the captive begins in the first person. His lineage is born in the Mountains of León, more favored by nature than by fortune, and his father, held rich in the narrowness of those villages, would have been rich in truth if he had known how to keep his estate as well as he knew how to spend it. His prodigality came from having been a soldier in his youth, a school where the miser becomes generous and the generous become prodigal. He had three sons, all of an age to choose a state, and, since he said he could not go against his own nature, he wanted to deprive himself of the instrument of his spending, the estate, without which Alexander himself would seem narrow. He calls the three alone and proposes: he will divide the goods into four parts, give one to each son, and keep the fourth to live on, and each will follow one of the paths of a Spanish proverb, which he praises because proverbs are short sentences drawn from long and discreet experience:
Analysis
Chapter XL: The Reed Window and Zoraida's Letter
Chapter summary
The gentleman, brother of Aguilar, recites the two sonnets, the one on La Goleta and the one on the fort, which give to the dead the fame the world grants and the glory heaven gives. The captive resumes his tale. The Turks dismantle La Goleta and the fleet returns to Constantinople; months later the master, Uchali, dies, and his captives, some three thousand, are divided by will between the Grand Seignior and the renegades. The captive falls to a Venetian renegade, Azán Agá, the cruelest man ever seen, who becomes king of Algiers and takes him along. He goes somewhat content, because he is nearer to Spain, and because the hope of liberty never left him: when one attempt failed, he feigned and sought another, though a weak one. He is held in the bagnio, the house where the Turks lock up Christian captives, among those held for ransom: however much he said he had little property, it became known that he was a captain, and they put a chain on him more as a sign of ransom than to guard him. Hunger and nakedness were tiresome, but nothing so much as seeing and hearing the cruelties of the master, who each day hanged one, impaled another, cut off the ears of another, for such slight reasons, and so without any reason, that the Turks saw he did it only to do it, for it was his natural condition to be a murderer of the whole human race. Only one soldier got along with him:
Analysis
Chapter XLI: Zoraida's Escape and the Return to Spain
Chapter summary
In less than fifteen days the renegade buys a good boat, for more than thirty people, and to give color to the business he makes two or three trips to Sargel with the Tagarene partner, always anchoring in a cove two crossbow shots from Zoraida's garden, where he rehearses in play what he intends to do in earnest. He cannot speak with her, because the Moorish women do not let themselves be seen by a Moor or a Turk, unless the husband or father sends for him, and they allow themselves to be dealt with only by Christian captives. The captive, for his part, chooses twelve valiant Spanish rowers and tells them only that on the first Friday afternoon they should go out one by one to Agi Morato's garden.
There remains the need to inform Zoraida of how things stand, and he goes to the garden under the pretext of gathering herbs for a salad. First he meets the father, who speaks to him in the language found everywhere in Barbary, a mixture of all tongues, and then the beautiful Zoraida comes out, so adorned that more pearls hung from her neck, her ears, and her hair than hair grew on her head. She asks him whether he is a gentleman and why he does not ransom himself, and answers that, if he were of her father's people, her father would not release him even for double, because Christians always lie and make themselves poor to deceive the Moors. He tells her that he leaves the next day and that, not being married, he has promised to marry upon arrival, and that the lady is so beautiful that, to tell the truth, she seems very much so to him; the father, who serves as interpreter, laughs heartily.
Analysis
Chapter XLII: The Magistrate Who Is the Brother
Chapter summary
The Captive falls silent, and Don Fernando says that the manner of his telling matches the strangeness of the case, and that, even if the next day found them still in the same tale, they would want him to begin again. Everyone offers to serve him, and Don Fernando proposes that the marquis, his brother, be godfather at Zoraida's baptism, and that he will arrange things so that he enters his land with the authority and comfort his person deserves. The captive thanks them courteously and accepts none of the offers. At nightfall a coach arrives at the inn, with men on horseback; one of them asks for lodging, the innkeeper answers that there is not a hand's breadth free, and the man retorts that for the magistrate there must be no lack. The woman is disturbed by the title and offers the room she shares with her husband. The magistrate, who shows his office in his dress, with a long gown and gathered sleeves, leads by the hand a maiden of some sixteen years, dressed for travel, so gallant and beautiful that everyone marvels. Don Quixote, seeing them come in, greets them:
Analysis
Chapter XLIII: The Muleteer and the Bound Hand
Chapter summary
The voice sings that it is a sailor of love and sails without hope of reaching port, following a star that it sees from afar, and which the clouds of modesty and honesty hide from it just when it searches hardest to see it. Dorothea thinks Doña Clara should not miss the finest voice she may ever have heard, and wakes her; Clara, as soon as she hears two verses, is seized by a tremor as strange as a quartan fever, clings to her, and asks why she woke her, for the greatest good fortune could have given her was to leave her with her eyes and ears shut, so as not to see or hear that unfortunate musician. Dorothea tells her that, as they say, the one who sings is a mule boy:
Analysis
Reading of the Part
Analysis