Don Quixote delivered his discourse in such a manner and in such correct
language, that for the time being he made it impossible for any of his
hearers to consider him a madman; on the contrary, as they were mostly
gentlemen, to whom arms are an appurtenance by birth, they listened to
him with great pleasure as he continued: "Here, then, I say is what the
student has to undergo; first of all poverty: not that all are poor, but
to put the case as strongly as possible: and when I have said that he
endures poverty, I think nothing more need be said about his hard
fortune, for he who is poor has no share of the good things of life. This
poverty he suffers from in various ways, hunger, or cold, or nakedness,
or all together; but for all that it is not so extreme but that he gets
something to eat, though it may be at somewhat unseasonable hours and
from the leavings of the rich; for the greatest misery of the student is
what they themselves call 'going out for soup,' and there is always some
neighbour's brazier or hearth for them, which, if it does not warm, at
least tempers the cold to them, and lastly, they sleep comfortably at
night under a roof. I will not go into other particulars, as for example
want of shirts, and no superabundance of shoes, thin and threadbare
garments, and gorging themselves to surfeit in their voracity when good
luck has treated them to a banquet of some sort. By this road that I have
described, rough and hard, stumbling here, falling there, getting up
again to fall again, they reach the rank they desire, and that once
attained, we have seen many who have passed these Syrtes and Scyllas and
Charybdises, as if borne flying on the wings of favouring fortune; we
have seen them, I say, ruling and governing the world from a chair, their
hunger turned into satiety, their cold into comfort, their nakedness into
fine raiment, their sleep on a mat into repose in holland and damask, the
justly earned reward of their virtue; but, contrasted and compared with
what the warrior undergoes, all they have undergone falls far short of
it, as I am now about to show."