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“Señor, your grace is right: so that I can swear with a clear conscience that I saw you do crazy things, it would be a good idea for me to see at least one, even though I’ve already seen a pretty big one in your grace’s staying here.”

“Did I not tell you so?” said Don Quixote. “Wait, Sancho, and I shall do them before you can say a Credo.”

And hastily he pulled off his breeches and was left wearing only his skin and shirttails, and then, without further ado, he kicked his heels twice, turned two cartwheels with his head down and his feet in the air, and revealed certain things; Sancho, in order not to see them again, pulled on Rocinante’s reins and turned him around, satisfied and convinced that he could swear his master had lost his mind. And so we shall let him go on his way until his return, which did not take long.

CHAPTER XXVI

In which the elegant deeds performed by an enamored Don Quixote in the Sierra Morena continue

Returning to the account of what the Knight of the Sorrowful Face did after he found himself alone, the history relates that when Don Quixote, with his upper parts clothed and his bottom parts naked, finished his leaps and turns and saw that Sancho, not wishing to see more mad acts, had departed, he climbed to the top of a high crag, and there he pondered what he had so often pondered without ever reaching a decision, which was whether it would be better and more appropriate for him to imitate Roland in his excessive madness or Amadís in his melancholy, and talking to himself, he said:

“If Roland was as good and valiant a knight as everyone says, why should anyone be surprised? After all, he was enchanted, and no one could kill him except by placing a pin in the bottom of his foot, and he always wore shoes with seven metal soles, although such stratagems did him little good against Bernardo del Carpio, who understood them, and crushed him in his arms at Roncesvalles. But, his valor aside, we come to the matter of his losing his mind, and it is certain that he lost it because of the signs to which fortune led him and the news the shepherd gave him that Angelica had taken more than two siestas with Medoro, a little curly-haired Moor who was Agramante’s page; and if he understood this to be true, and his lady had committed so great a wrong against him, he did not do much by going mad; but I, how can I imitate him in his madness if I do not imitate him in its cause? Because I shall go so far as to swear that my Dulcinea of Toboso has not in all her days seen a single Moor just as he is, in his own clothing, and that she is today as she was on the day she was born; and it would be a grievous affront if I, imagining anything else about her, were to go mad with the type of madness that afflicted Roland in his fury. On the other hand, I see that Amadís of Gaul, without losing his mind and without performing mad acts, achieved as much fame as a lover as anyone else; because what he did, according to his history, was simply that finding himself scorned by his lady Oriana, who had ordered him not to appear in her presence until she so willed it, he withdrew to the Peña Pobre, in the company of a hermit, and there he had his fill of weeping and commending himself to God, until heaven hearkened to his pleas in the midst of his greatest travail and need. And if that is true, as it most certainly is, why should I now go to the trouble of tearing off all my clothes or causing grief to these trees, which have never done me any harm whatsoever? Nor do I have reason to muddy the clear waters of these streams, where I may drink whenever I wish. Long live the memory of Amadís, and let him be imitated in every way possible by Don Quixote of La Mancha, about whom it will be said, as it was said of the other, that if he did not achieve great things, he died in the effort to perform them, and if I am not scorned and disdained by Dulcinea of Toboso, it is enough, as I have said, to be absent from her. Well, then, to work: