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By Root 888 0

expected nothing less from the goodness of my master, the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, and from the greatness of my services! But now I see that what they say is true: the wheel of fortune turns faster than a water wheel, and those who only yesterday were on top of the world today are down on the ground. I grieve for my children and my wife, for when they could and should have expected to see their father come through the door as a governor or viceroy of some ínsula or kingdom, they’ll see him come in a stableboy. I’ve said all this, Señor Priest, just to urge your fathership to take into account the bad treatment my master is receiving, and to be careful that God doesn’t demand an accounting from you in the next life for my master’s imprisonment, and make you responsible for all the boons and mercies my master, Don Quixote, can’t do while he’s in the cage.”

“I can’t believe it!” said the barber. “You, too, Sancho? In the same guild as your master? By God, you’ve taken in so much of his lunacy and knighthood, it looks like you’ll be keeping him company in the cage and be as enchanted as he is! It was an unlucky day for you when he made you pregnant with his promises, an evil hour when you got that ínsula you want so much into your head.”

“I’m not pregnant by anybody,” responded Sancho, “and I’m not a man who’d let himself get pregnant even by the king, and though I’m poor I’m an Old Christian, and I don’t owe anything to anybody, and if I want ínsulas, other people want things that are worse; each man is the child of his actions, and because I’m a man I could be a pope, let alone the governor of an ínsula, especially since my master could win so many he might not have enough people to give them to. Your grace should be careful what you say, Señor Barber, because there’s more to life than trimming beards, and there’s some difference between one Pedro and the other. I say this because we all know one another, and you can’t throw crooked dice with me. As for the enchantment of my master, only God knows the truth, and let’s leave it at that, because things get worse when you stir them.”

The barber did not want to answer Sancho in case his simplicities uncovered what he and the priest had tried so hard to conceal; because of this same fear, the priest asked the canon to ride ahead with him, and he would explain the mystery of the caged man and tell him other things that he would find amusing. The canon did so, and moving ahead with his servants and with the priest, he listened attentively to everything the priest wished to tell him regarding the condition, life, madness, and customs of Don Quixote, which was a brief account of the origin and cause of his delusions and the series of events that had brought him to that cage, and the scheme they had devised to bring him home to see if they somehow could find a cure for his madness. The canon and his servants were astonished a second time when they heard Don Quixote’s remarkable story, and when it was ended, the canon said:

“Truly, Señor Priest, it seems to me that the books called novels of chivalry are prejudicial to the nation, and though I, moved by a false and idle taste, have read the beginning of almost every one that has ever been published, I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another. In my opinion, this kind of writing and composition belongs to the genre called Milesian tales,5 which are foolish stories meant only to delight and not to teach, unlike moral tales, which delight and teach at the same time. Although the principal aim of these books is to delight, I do not know how they can, being so full of so many excessively foolish elements; for delight conceived in the soul must arise from the beauty and harmony it sees or contemplates in the things that the eyes or the imagination place before it, and nothing that possesses ugliness and disorder can please us. What beauty, what proportion between parts and the whole, or the whole and its parts, can there be