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By Root 1006 0

you, and devote your intellectual talents to another kind of reading that redounds to the benefit of your conscience and the increase of your honor! And if, following your natural inclination, you still wish to read books about great chivalric deeds, read Judges in Holy Scripture, and there you will find magnificent truths and deeds both remarkable and real. Lusitania had a Viriato,1 Rome had a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an Alexander, Castilla a Count Fernán González,2 Valencia a Cid, Andalucía a Gonzalo Fernández,3 Extremadura a Diego García de Paredes,4 Jerez a Garcí Pérez de Vargas,5 Toledo a Garcilaso,6 Sevilla a Don Manuel de León.7 Reading about their valorous deeds can entertain, instruct, delight, and astonish the highest minds. This would certainly be a study worthy of your grace’s intelligence, Señor Don Quixote, and from it you would emerge learned in history, enamored of virtue, instructed in goodness, improved in your customs, valiant but not rash, bold and not cowardly, and all of this would honor God, and benefit you, and add to the fame of La Mancha where, I have learned, your grace has his origin and birthplace.”

Don Quixote listened very attentively to the canon’s words, and when he saw that he had concluded, he looked at him for a long time and said:

“It seems to me, Señor, that the intention of your grace’s discourse has been to persuade me that there have been no knights errant in the world, and that all the books of chivalry are false, untrue, harmful, and of no value to the nation, and that I have done wrong to read them, and worse to believe them, and worse yet to imitate them by setting myself the task of following the extremely difficult profession of knight errantry which they teach, and you deny that there ever were Amadises in the world, whether of Gaul or of Greece, or any of the other knights that fill the writings.”

“That is precisely what I meant; what you have said is absolutely correct,” said the canon.

To which Don Quixote responded:

“Your grace also said that these books have done me a good deal of harm, for they turned my wits and put me in a cage, and it would be better for me to alter and change my reading and devote myself to books that are truer and more pleasant and more instructive.”

“That is true,” said the canon.

“Well, then,” replied Don Quixote, “it is my opinion that the one who is deranged and enchanted is your grace, for you have uttered so many blasphemies against something so widely accepted in the world as true that whoever denies it, as your grace has done, deserves the same punishment that your grace says you give to books when you read them and they anger you. Because wanting to convince anyone that there was no Amadís in the world or any of the adventuring knights who fill the histories, is the same as trying to persuade that person that the sun does not shine, ice is not cold, and the earth bears no crops, for what mind in the world can persuade another that the story of Princess Floripes and Guy de Bourgogne is not true, or the tale of Fierabrás and the Bridge of Mantible, which occurred in the time of Charlemagne, and is as true as the fact that it is now day?8 If that is a lie, it must also be true that there was no Hector, no Achilles, no Trojan War, no Twelve Peers of France, no King Arthur of England who was transformed into a crow and whose return is awaited in his kingdom to this day. Who will go so far as to say that the history of Guarino Mezquino is false,9 and the search for the Holy Grail, and that the loves of Don Tristan and Queen Iseult, and those of Guinevere and Lancelot, are apocryphal, even though there are persons who can almost remember having seen the Duenna Quintañona,10 who was the greatest pourer of wine in Great Britain? And this is so true that I remember my paternal grandmother saying, whenever she saw a lady with a formal headdress: ‘My boy, she looks like the Duenna Quintañona.’ And from this I argue that she must have known her, or at least seen a portrait of her. And who can deny the truth of the history of Pierres