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because each of them had one or two wise men whose purpose was not only to record their deeds, but to depict their slightest thoughts and fancies, no matter how secret they might be; and so good a knight could not be so unfortunate as to lack what Platir and others like him had in abundance.2 And therefore I was not inclined to believe that so gallant a history had been left maimed and crippled, and I blamed the malignity of Time, the devourer and consumer of all things, who had either hidden it away or consumed it.

On the other hand, it seemed to me that since works as modern as Deceptions of Jealousy and Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares3 had been found among Don Quixote’s books, his history also had to be modern, and though it might not be written down, it had to live on in the memories of people from his village and from other villages nearby. This thought left me disconcerted and longing to know, really and truly and in its entirety, the life and miracles of our famous Spaniard Don Quixote of La Mancha, the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and in these calamitous times to take up the exercise and profession of chivalric arms, righting wrongs, defending widows, and protecting those maidens who rode, with whips and palfreys, and bearing all their virginity on their backs, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley; and unless some villain, or some farmer with hatchet and pitchfork, or some enormous giant forced her, a maiden could, in days of yore, after eighty years of never once sleeping under a roof, go to her grave as pure as the day her mother bore her. I say, then, that for these and many other reasons, our gallant Don Quixote is deserving of continual and memorable praise, as am I, on account of the toil and effort I have put into finding the conclusion of this amiable history, though I know very well that if heaven, circumstances, and fortune do not assist me, the world will be deprived of the almost two hours of entertainment and pleasure the attentive reader may derive from it. This is how I happened to find it:

One day when I was in the Alcaná market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant; as I am very fond of reading, even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclinations to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling, and I saw that it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read it, I looked around to see if some Morisco4 who knew Castilian, and could read it for me, was in the vicinity, and it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter, for even if I had sought a speaker of a better and older language,5 I would have found him. In short, fortune provided me with one, and when I told him what I wanted and placed the book in his hands, he opened it in the middle, read for a short while, and began to laugh.

I asked him why he was laughing, and he replied that it was because of something written in the margin of the book as an annotation. I told him to tell me what it was, and he, still laughing, said:

“As I have said, here in the margin is written: ‘This Dulcinea of Toboso, referred to so often in this history, they say had the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha.’”

When I heard him say “Dulcinea of Toboso,” I was astounded and filled with anticipation, for it occurred to me that those volumes contained the history of Don Quixote. With this thought in mind, I urged him to read the beginning, which he did, extemporizing a translation of the Arabic into Castilian and saying that it said: History of Don Quixote of La Mancha. Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli,6 an Arab Historian. I needed a good deal of cleverness to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears; moving more quickly than the silk merchant, I bought all the papers and notebooks from the boy for half a real, but if he had been astute and known how