Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [275]
“Oh!” said the niece at this point. “You can kill me if my uncle doesn’t want to be a knight errant again!”
To which Don Quixote said:
“I shall die a knight errant, and let the Turk come down or go up whenever he wishes and however powerfully he can; once again I say that God understands me.”
And then the barber said:
“I beg your graces to give me leave to tell a brief story that occurred in Sevilla; since it is very much to the point here, I should like to tell it now.”
Don Quixote gave his permission, and the priest and the others listened carefully, and the barber began in this manner:
“In the madhouse in Sevilla was a man whose relatives had put him there because he had lost his reason. He was a graduate in canon law from Osuna, but even if he had graduated from Salamanca, in the opinion of many he would not have been any less mad. This graduate, after some years of confinement, came to believe that he was sane and in his right mind, and with this thought he wrote to the archbishop earnestly entreating him, in carefully chosen phrases, to have him removed from the misery in which he was living, for through God’s mercy he had now recovered his reason, but his relatives, in order to enjoy his share of the estate, were keeping him there, and despite the truth would have wanted him mad until his death. The archbishop, persuaded by his many well-written and well-reasoned letters, ordered one of his chaplains to learn from the superintendent of the madhouse if what the licentiate had written was true, and to speak to the madman as well, and, if it seemed he was in his right mind, to release him and set him free. The chaplain did so, and the superintendent told him that the man was still mad; though he often spoke like a person of great intelligence, he eventually would begin to say countless foolish things, as many and as deeply felt as his earlier rational statements, and this the chaplain could see for himself if he spoke to him. The chaplain agreed, visited the madman, spoke to him for more than an hour, and in all that time the madman never made a confused or foolish statement; rather, he spoke so judiciously that the chaplain was obliged to believe that the madman was sane; one of the things the madman told him was that the superintendent bore him ill will because he did not want to lose the gifts his relatives gave him for saying he was still mad, though with periods of lucidity; the greatest obstacle for him in his misfortune was his wealth, because in order to enjoy it, his enemies were deceptive and denied the mercy Our Lord had shown by turning him from a beast back into a man. In short, what he said depicted the superintendent as suspect, his relatives as greedy and heartless, and himself as so reasonable that the chaplain resolved to take him back so that the archbishop could see and touch the truth of the matter for himself. With this virtuous intention, the good chaplain asked the superintendent to return the clothes the licentiate had been wearing when he was first admitted; again the superintendent told him to think about what he was doing because there was no doubt that the licentiate was still mad. The superintendent’s warnings and admonitions were in vain: the chaplain insisted on taking him away; the superintendent obeyed, since it was by order of the archbishop, and the licentiate was dressed in his clothes, which were new and decent, and when he saw himself in the raiment of a sane man and no longer wearing the clothing of a madman, he asked the chaplain to please give him permission to say goodbye to his mad companions. The chaplain said that he wished to accompany him and see the madmen who were in the hospital. And so they went up, along with some other people, and when the licentiate reached a cage that held a raving maniac who was, however, calm and quiet for the moment, he said:
‘Brother, see if there is anything you wish to ask of me, for