Don Quixote - Part I

Seeing this, the curate and the barber asked him what had happened him

that he gave himself such rough treatment.

"What should happen me?" replied Sancho, "but to have lost from one hand

to the other, in a moment, three ass-colts, each of them like a castle?"

"How is that?" said the barber.

"I have lost the note-book," said Sancho, "that contained the letter to

Dulcinea, and an order signed by my master in which he directed his niece

to give me three ass-colts out of four or five he had at home;" and he

then told them about the loss of Dapple.

The curate consoled him, telling him that when his master was found he

would get him to renew the order, and make a fresh draft on paper, as was

usual and customary; for those made in notebooks were never accepted or

honoured.

Sancho comforted himself with this, and said if that were so the loss of

Dulcinea's letter did not trouble him much, for he had it almost by

heart, and it could be taken down from him wherever and whenever they

liked.

"Repeat it then, Sancho," said the barber, "and we will write it down

afterwards."

Sancho Panza stopped to scratch his head to bring back the letter to his

memory, and balanced himself now on one foot, now the other, one moment

staring at the ground, the next at the sky, and after having half gnawed

off the end of a finger and kept them in suspense waiting for him to

begin, he said, after a long pause, "By God, senor licentiate, devil a

thing can I recollect of the letter; but it said at the beginning,

'Exalted and scrubbing Lady.'"

"It cannot have said 'scrubbing,'" said the barber, "but 'superhuman' or

'sovereign.'"

"That is it," said Sancho; "then, as well as I remember, it went on, 'The

wounded, and wanting of sleep, and the pierced, kisses your worship's

hands, ungrateful and very unrecognised fair one; and it said something

or other about health and sickness that he was sending her; and from that

it went tailing off until it ended with 'Yours till death, the Knight of

the Rueful Countenance."

It gave them no little amusement, both of them, to see what a good memory

Sancho had, and they complimented him greatly upon it, and begged him to

repeat the letter a couple of times more, so that they too might get it

by heart to write it out by-and-by. Sancho repeated it three times, and

as he did, uttered three thousand more absurdities; then he told them

more about his master but he never said a word about the blanketing that

had befallen himself in that inn, into which he refused to enter. He told

them, moreover, how his lord, if he brought him a favourable answer from

the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, was to put himself in the way of

endeavouring to become an emperor, or at least a monarch; for it had been

so settled between them, and with his personal worth and the might of his

arm it was an easy matter to come to be one: and how on becoming one his

lord was to make a marriage for him (for he would be a widower by that

time, as a matter of course) and was to give him as a wife one of the

damsels of the empress, the heiress of some rich and grand state on the

mainland, having nothing to do with islands of any sort, for he did not

care for them now. All this Sancho delivered with so much

composure--wiping his nose from time to time--and with so little

common-sense that his two hearers were again filled with wonder at the

force of Don Quixote's madness that could run away with this poor man's

reason. They did not care to take the trouble of disabusing him of his

error, as they considered that since it did not in any way hurt his

conscience it would be better to leave him in it, and they would have all

the more amusement in listening to his simplicities; and so they bade him

pray to God for his lord's health, as it was a very likely and a very

feasible thing for him in course of time to come to be an emperor, as he

said, or at least an archbishop or some other dignitary of equal rank.