CHAPTER 1
WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON
QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to
mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in
the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.
An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most nights, scraps on
Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so extra on Sundays, made
away with three-quarters of his income. The rest of it went in a doublet of
fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to match for holidays, while on
week-days he made a brave figure in his best homespun. He had in his
house a housekeeper past forty, a niece under twenty, and a lad for the field
and market-place, who used to saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-
hook. The age of this gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was of a
hardy habit, spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman.
They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is
some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject),
although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called
Quexana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it will be
enough not to stray a hair’s breadth from the truth in the telling of it.
You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was
at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading
books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely ne-
glected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his prop-
erty; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold
many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought
home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked
so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva’s composition, for their
lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, partic-
ularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he
often found passages like “the reason of the unreason with which my reason
is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your
beauty;” or again, “the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify
you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness de-
serves.” Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used
to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of
them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he
come to life again for that special purpose. He was not at all easy about the
wounds which Don Belianis gave and took, because it seemed to him that,
great as were the surgeons who had cured him, he must have had his face
and body covered all over with seams and scars. He commended, however,
the author’s way of ending his book with the promise of that interminable
adventure, and many a time was he tempted to take up his pen and finish it
properly as is there proposed, which no doubt he would have done, and
made a successful piece of work of it too, had not greater and more absorb-
ing thoughts prevented him.
Many an argument did he have with the curate of his village (a learned
man, and a graduate of Siguenza) as to which had been the better knight,
Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. Master Nicholas, the village bar-
ber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to the Knight of
Phoebus, and that if there was any that could compare with him it was Don
Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had a spirit that was
equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight, nor lachrymose like his
brother, while in the matter of valour he was not a whit behind him. In
short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sun-
set to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what
with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.
His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchant-
ments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and
all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole
fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in
the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a
very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of the
Burning Sword who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and mon-
strous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at Ronces-
valles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments, availing himself of the arti-
fice of Hercules when he strangled Antaeus the son of Terra in his arms. He
approved highly of the giant Morgante, because, although of the giant breed
which is always arrogant and ill-conditioned, he alone was affable and well-
bred. But above all he admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he
saw him sallying forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met, and
when beyond the seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history
says, was entirely of gold. To have a bout of kicking at that traitor of a
Ganelon he would have given his housekeeper, and his niece into the
bargain.
In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that
ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was
right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the ser-
vice of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming
the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures, and
putting in practice himself all that he had read of as being the usual prac-
tices of knights-errant; righting every kind of wrong, and exposing himself
to peril and danger from which, in the issue, he was to reap eternal renown
and fame. Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his
arm Emperor of Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoy-
ment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his
scheme into execution.
The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to
his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner eat-
en with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished it as best he
could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it had no closed helmet,
nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency, however, his ingenuity sup-
plied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet of pasteboard which, fitted on
to the morion, looked like a whole one. It is true that, in order to see if it
was strong and fit to stand a cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of
slashes, the first of which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to
do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him
somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars
of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not
caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a
helmet of the most perfect construction.
He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a
real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that “tantum pellis et ossa
fuit,” surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Babieca of
the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because
(as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so
famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some dis-
tinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been
before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only
reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new
name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting
the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having com-
posed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of
names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Roci-
nante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condi-
tion as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of
all the hacks in the world.
Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to
get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this point,
till at last he made up his mind to call himself “Don Quixote,” whence, as
has been already said, the authors of this veracious history have inferred
that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and not Quesada as
others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the valiant Amadis was
not content to call himself curtly Amadis and nothing more, but added the
name of his kingdom and country to make it famous, and called himself
Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight, resolved to add on the name of his,
and to style himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, whereby, he considered, he
described accurately his origin and country, and did honour to it in taking
his surname from it.
So then, his armour being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet, his
hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the conclusion that
nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with;
for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a
body without a soul. As he said to himself, “If, for my sins, or by my good
fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with
knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder
to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to
have some one I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall
on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, ‘I
am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished
in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of
La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace,
that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure’?” Oh, how our good
gentleman enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially when he had
thought of some one to call his Lady! There was, so the story goes, in a vil-
lage near his own a very good-looking farm-girl with whom he had been at
one time in love, though, so far as is known, she never knew it nor gave a
thought to the matter. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he
thought fit to confer the title of Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search
for a name which should not be out of harmony with her own, and should
suggest and indicate that of a princess and great lady, he decided upon call-
ing her Dulcinea del Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his
mind, musical, uncommon, and significant, like all those he had already be-
stowed upon himself and the things belonging to him.
