Section summary
Whoever takes Don Quixote does so in the style of the books he has read: the prophet's voice, the cage, the cart, the masked faces, and he accepts everything as enchantment, because that is what his reading taught him to expect. On the road, it is a reader of those same books, the canon of Toledo, who debates them with him, and the debate ends in a draw: the canon asks for form, verisimilitude, and instruction, and the gentleman answers with royal license, genealogies, and the Knight of the Lake. Sancho, who recognizes the disguised men, tries to prove to his master that he is not enchanted and cannot, because his master takes each proof into the doctrine of enchanters. The inn dissolves into agreements about money, marriage, and peace, and Part One ends by promising a third sally.
Chapter XLIV: The Runaway Lad and the Recognized Packsaddle
Chapter summary
The cries of Don Quixote, hanging by the wrist, wake the inn. Maritornes, who guesses the cause, climbs to the hayloft and silently unties the halter, and he falls to the ground in front of the innkeeper and the travelers; without answering anyone, he loosens the cord from his wrist, mounts Rocinante, braces his shield, grips his lance and, at a half gallop, challenges anyone who says he was enchanted with just title, if Princess Micomicona gives him leave to do so. The four travelers who arrived at dawn are puzzled, and the innkeeper tells them it is Don Quixote and he is out of his mind. They look for a boy of about fifteen, dressed as a muleteer, who is Doña Clara's lover, and find him sleeping beside a real muleteer. They are servants of his father, who sent them after his son, and they call him Don Luis, puzzled that the dress and the bed do not accord with the luxury in which his mother raised him. The boy, frightened, cannot speak; then he says he will return if heaven so orders. The muleteer who slept beside him hears everything and goes to tell Don Fernando and Cardenio, who, already because of the boy's good voice, had wanted to know who he was and to help him, should they try to force him. Dorothea tells Cardenio the story of the musician and of Clara, and Clara, hearing the news of the servants' arrival, nearly falls from fright. Surrounded, Don Luis says that only a matter in which his life, honor, and soul are at stake prevents him from returning, and that they will take him dead, and in any case without life. The judge, who recognizes the boy as his neighbor's son, embraces him and asks him what childishness this is. While the two speak apart, two guests try to leave without paying and punch the innkeeper, who calls for help, and the innkeeper's daughter runs to ask Don Quixote for help. He answers very leisurely that he is prevented from entering another adventure until he finishes the one his word imposed on him; that the innkeeper should defend himself as best he can, while he asks the princess's leave. Kneeling before Dorothea, in errant language, he obtains the leave, goes to the door and stops: it is not lawful for him to lay hand to sword against persons of a squire's rank, and he sends for Sancho Panza, for whom vengeance is a matter of trade. The innkeeper's wife, the daughter, and Maritornes despair at seeing what they take for cowardice, while the innkeeper gets beaten. Don Quixote, on the spot, pacifies the guests more with good reasons than with threats, and they pay what the man asked.
Analysis
Apart, with the magistrate, Don Luis takes him by the hands and, weeping, confesses what brought him:
desde el punto que quiso el cielo y facilitó nuestra vecindad que yo viese a mi señora doña Clara, hija vuestra y señora mía, desde aquel instante la hice dueño de mi voluntad [...] Por ella dejé la casa de mi padre, y por ella me puse en este traje, para seguirla dondequiera que fuese, como la saeta al blanco, o como el marinero al norte
, from the moment that heaven willed and our neighborhood made it possible that I saw my lady Doña Clara, your daughter and my lady, from that instant I made her mistress of my will [...] For her I left my father's house, and for her I put on this dress, to follow her wherever she went, like the arrow to its mark, or like the sailor to the north.
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Chapter XLV: The Vote on the Helmet and the Warrant of the Holy Brotherhood
Chapter summary
The Priest and the Barber know the humor of Don Quixote, and the village barber resolves to humor the madness and carry the trick through, so that everyone laughs: he tells the other barber, who is also of the trade, that he has held a certificate of examination for more than twenty years and was a soldier in his youth, and he affirms that the piece the gentleman holds in his hands is not a basin, and that, even if it is a helmet, it is not a whole helmet. Don Quixote agrees, because it lacks half, the visor. The priest, who has understood his friend's intention, confirms it, and so do Cardenio, Don Fernando, and their comrades; only the magistrate, preoccupied with Don Luis's affair, does not help. The barber who has been wronged is astonished: if the basin is a helmet, the packsaddle must be a horse's trappings, as the gentleman said. Don Quixote replies that to him the object seems a packsaddle, but that he does not dare pass sentence: on the two occasions he lodged in that castle, the things that befell him were so many and so strange that everything there seems to him to go by way of enchantment, and setting himself to judge would be rash. He suggests that the others, not being armed knights, perhaps have understanding free of the castle's spells and judge things as they are, not as they seemed to him. Don Fernando then takes the votes in secret, from ear to ear, and those who know the gentleman's humor laugh, while those who do not know him, among them Don Luis's servants and three travelers who have just arrived and are constables, take it for the greatest nonsense in the world. When the collecting is finished, Don Fernando announces the result:
Analysis
Chapter XLVI: The Constables Pacified and the Cage
Chapter summary
While Don Quixote was speaking, the priest persuaded the constables that the gentleman lacked judgment, as was seen from his deeds and words, and that, if he were arrested and taken away, they would soon release him as a madman. The one with the warrant replied that it was not for him to judge madness, but to carry out what his superior ordered, and that once arrested, they could release him three hundred times over. The priest knows how to say a great deal, and Don Quixote does so many foolish things, that the constables, who would be more foolish than he if they did not recognize his deficiency, give up and become mediators between the barber and Sancho Panza. As members of the law, they arbitrate: the packsaddles are exchanged, but not the cinches or the headstalls; as for Mambrino's helmet, the priest, secretly and without Don Quixote's notice, pays eight reales for the basin, and the barber writes him a receipt and a declaration that he shall not claim to have been deceived, neither now nor ever, amen. Don Luis's servants are content with what the young man wants, and Doña Clara is so pleased that no one would look at her face without noticing the joy of her soul. Zoraida, who does not fully understand what she has seen, is saddened and gladdened by turns, according to the faces around her, and keeps her eyes on her Spaniard. The innkeeper, who did not let the priest's gift to the barber slip past him, charges Don Quixote for the bill, for the damaged wineskins and the missing wine, and swears that neither Rocinante nor Sancho's donkey will leave without payment; the priest pacifies him, Don Fernando pays, and the magistrate, of his own accord, had also offered to. The inn, which Don Quixote had called the discord of Agramante's camp, is left like the peace and quiet of the age of Octavian, and common opinion attributes the merit to the good intention and eloquence of the priest and to Don Fernando's liberality.
Analysis
Chapter XLVII: The Oxcart and the Canon of Toledo
Chapter summary
Caged on top of the cart, Don Quixote is surprised at what he sees: in so many stories of knights-errant he has never read that the enchanted were carried away like this, slowly, by sluggish and tardy animals, because they usually travel through the air, on a dark cloud, in a chariot of fire, or on a hippogriff. To explain it to himself, he concludes that chivalry and the enchantments of his time must follow a different path from those of the ancients, and that, being a new knight and the first to revive the practice of adventurous chivalry, other kinds of enchantment and other ways of carrying off the enchanted will also have been invented. Sancho Panza says he does not know what to think, not being so well read in the wandering scriptures, but that he would venture to swear those visions are not altogether Catholic. The master replies how can they be so, if they are demons in phantom bodies, and orders him to touch them: he will see they have only bodies of air. Sancho has already touched them, and he replies:
Analysis
Chapter XLVIII: The Theater, the Canon's Temptation, and Sancho's Test
Chapter summary
The priest agrees with the canon and adds that the authors who composed such books are more deserving of censure, for they paid no attention to any good discourse, nor to the art and rules by which they might have been guided and made famous in prose, as the two princes of Greek and Latin poetry are famous in verse. The canon confesses that he had a certain temptation to write a book of chivalry himself:
Analysis
Chapter XLIX: Sancho Questions His Master and the Canon Disputes Chivalry
Chapter summary
Sancho Panza, triumphant, says he has his master in hand: he asks whether he can deny what is said of one who is ill-humored, "I don't know what ails so-and-so, who neither eats nor drinks nor sleeps nor answers to the point, so that it seems he must be enchanted," and he deduces:
Analysis
Chapter L: The Knight of the Lake and the Goatherd
Chapter summary
Don Quixote answers the canon that books printed with the kings' license, approved by those to whom they were referred, and read with pleasure by great and small, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, cannot be lies, and even less so when they carry so much appearance of truth:
Analysis
Chapter LI: What the Goatherd Told
Chapter summary
The goatherd tells the story to all those who attend Don Quixote. Three leagues from the valley there is a small village, but one of the richest in the region, where there lives a farmer so honorable that he was so more by virtue than by wealth, and what made him happiest was having a daughter, Leandra, of such extreme beauty, rare discretion, grace, and virtue that her fame ran through the neighboring villages and the distant cities and reached even the halls of kings, and from every quarter people came to see her as a rare thing, or as an image of miracles. Her father guarded her, and she guarded herself, and the goatherd says what he thinks of all guarding of maidens:
Analysis
Chapter LII: The Penitents, the Return to the Village, and the Epitaphs
Chapter summary
The goatherd's tale pleases everyone, especially the canon, who notes how far from the speech of a rustic goatherd, and how close to that of a discreet courtier, he told it, and says that the priest and the barber were right when the priest said that the mountains breed learned men. Everyone offers themselves to Eugenio, but the most generous is Don Quixote, who tells him that, if he were in a position to begin an adventure, he would at once set out so that the tale might have a good end: he would take Leandra out of the convent, where without doubt she is against her will, despite the abbess and all who would try to prevent it, and would put her in his hands so that he might do with her as he wished, keeping the laws of chivalry, which command that no wrong be done to any maiden. Eugenio looks at the knight with a frightful countenance and asks the barber who that man is, who has such a figure and speaks in such a manner. The barber replies that he is the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, undoer of wrongs, straightener of crooked things, protector of maidens, terror of giants, and winner of battles. The goatherd retorts that this is like what is read in the books of knights-errant, who did all of this, but that, for him, either the barber is joking or that gentleman has empty rooms in his head. Don Quixote calls him a very great scoundrel, and empty and shriveled, and answers with an insult to the goatherd's mother, and throws a loaf of bread in his face with such fury that it squashes his nose. The goatherd, who knew nothing of jokes, seeing that they treat him in earnest, leaps upon him, heedless of the rug, the tablecloths, or those eating, and grabs him by the neck with both hands, and would have choked him if Sancho Panza had not seized him from behind and thrown him over the table, breaking plates, smashing cups, and spilling everything. Freed, Don Quixote climbs on the goatherd, who, with his face full of blood and battered by Sancho's kicks, looks on all fours for a knife on the table for a bloody revenge, and the canon and the priest stop him; but the barber contrives so that the goatherd pins the knight beneath him, and on the gentleman falls such a rain of punches that the blood from his face runs like the goatherd's. The canon and the priest burst out laughing, the constables leap with delight and urge the two on as one urges dogs, and only Sancho despairs, for he cannot free himself from one of the canon's servants, who prevents him from helping his master.
Analysis
Reading of the Part
Analysis