Chương Chương 1 · WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA

. WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA

CHAPTER I.

WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON

QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA

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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 neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the

management of his property; 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, particularly 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 deserves_.” 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 absorbing

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 barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to

the Knight of Phœbus, 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 sunset 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, enchantments, 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

monstrous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at

Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments, availing himself

of the artifice of Hercules when he strangled Antæus 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 service 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 practices 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 enjoyment 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 eaten 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 supplied, 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 distinctive 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 composed, struck

out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of

his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to

his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition 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 someone

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 someone to call his Lady! There was, so the

story goes, in a village 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 calling her Dulcinea del

Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon,

and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself

and the things belonging to him.

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