This is the second of three articles providing a table of contents, summary and selected paintings for the second book of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
As they were riding together towards Saragossa, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza came across a group of falconers, including a Duke and Duchess who already knew of the knight and his squire from reading the book of their adventures. When both of them fell to the ground as they dismounted in front of the Duchess, her huntsmen helped them back to their feet. After they had exchanged pleasantries, the knight and his squire rode back with the Duke and Duchess to their castle, where the household had been briefed to treat them with great respect and not, under any circumstances, to laugh at them.
After Don Quixote had changed into the fine clothing they lent him, they went to eat, with the knight seated at the head of the table. Sancho told a story which had a dig at his master, causing the knight to seethe with anger. The Duke’s chaplain next told Don Quixote that he wasn’t a knight errant at all. At that the knight rose to his feet to respond.
36 Guests of the Duke and Duchess
Seething with anger, Don Quixote rose and delivered a searing riposte, which led to the churchman storming out. Unexpectedly, maids then arrived to wash and lather Don Quixote’s beard, a peculiar procedure they also performed on the Duke. Sancho Panza, though, was attended to by scullions who weren’t as pleasant. His master and the Duchess discussed the nobility of the lady Dulcinea, and when they rose from the meal the Duchess invited Sancho to talk with her in a cool room. She elicited an account of what had actually happened at the Cave of Montesinos before the squire went away to sleep. The Duchess went to tell her husband what Sancho had to say, and to devise a trick to play on Don Quixote.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were taken out hunting by the Duke and Duchess. The party met with quick success in the form of a wild boar, but Sancho Panza climbed a tree in fright, and was suspended from a branch when he fell. The rest had killed the boar, so they retired to take lunch. After dark, the wood came alive with fires and sounds of Moors in battle. A messenger announced they would be told how to disenchant the lady Dulcinea, and later a succession of three ox carts came to them, followed by a chariot carrying Merlin and a young maiden. The wizard told Sancho that, to disenchant the lady, he had to lash himself three thousand three hundred times on the bare buttocks. Although Sancho resisted, he finally agreed just before dawn, and the party returned to the castle of the Duke and Duchess, their first trick proving highly successful.
38 The hunting party and the first trick
When Sancho Panza later admitted to the Duchess that he’d only managed five smacks with his hand, she offered to provide him with a suitable scourge, to ensure that he satisfied the requirements to disenchant the lady Dulcinea. She read through a letter which the squire had written to his wife, and showed it to the Duke, who was also highly amused. After lunch they all went into the garden, where three musicians led in the squire to the Countess of Trifaldi, or the Dolorous Duenna. He requested to bring her to the Duke and the famous knight Don Quixote to tell them of her plight, and when that was granted went to fetch her with the musicians.
When the Dolorous Duenna arrived in the company of a dozen veiled duennas and her squire, she told the group her tale of woe. The Countess had been the duenna responsible for the upbringing of a beautiful princess, who was seduced by a knight at court, and fell pregnant. The Countess arranged for the couple to be married, but the princess’s mother died within three days from anger and grief over that marriage. The queen’s cousin, an enchanter, appeared in order to avenge her death, and turned the princess into a brass monkey, and the knight into a metal crocodile. He wanted to kill the Countess, but gave her and all the other duennas long and thick beards instead. As they then had nowhere to go, their lives had been a misery ever since.
Don Quixote assured the Countess of Trifaldi that he would stop at nothing to relieve her and the dozen duennas of their long and thick beards. She told the knight that the enchanter who had done this to them had promised to send his magic wooden horse to collect them shortly after dusk, and transport them thousands of miles to Kandy in a few moments. Once it had grown dark, the wooden horse arrived, and the knight and his squire mounted it and were blindfolded. The staff of the Duke and Duchess then blew air at them with bellows and singed the pair with burning fibres, convincing them there were flying high over the earth. They finally lit the tail and the firecrackers inside the horse exploded, tossing them into the air.
When they had recovered they read a parchment proclaiming the success of their quest, and the duennas were no longer bearded. Sancho Panza told the Duchess that he’d removed his blindfold and seen the earth far below him, as well as celestial goats. Don Quixote took the opportunity to point out that he’d best believe the knight’s account of what he had seen in the Cave of the Montesinos, if he wanted to be believed himself.
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were soon the victims of the next of the Duke and Duchess’s wicked tricks. After a bit of persuasion, Sancho Panza dressed up as a combination of a man of letters and of arms, and was lectured at length by his master about the duties of a governor. He then went off to a nearby town with his large retinue to exercise his power as its governor.
Without his squire, Don Quixote was forlorn. When undressing for bed, he laddered one of his stockings, and couldn’t sleep with the heat. When he opened his window he heard one of the Duchess’s maids confessing to her desire for him, but couldn’t be persuaded from devotion to his Lady Dulcinea, so he slammed his window shut and went back to bed.
Sancho Panza assumed the governorship of the ‘Island’ of Barataria amid general rejoicing. Once he’d given thanks and been presented with the keys to the town, he was taken into the courtroom to sit in judgement on a series of disputes. The first was between a farmer and a tailor, and his resolution brought laughter. The second involved a loan which the lender insisted hadn’t been repaid, but Sancho showed that it had been, thanks to a cunning trick in which the sum had been hidden in a walking stick. The third was a woman who claimed a herdsman had raped her, but Sancho demonstrated how she fought harder for money than to preserve her virginity.
Back in the palace, Don Quixote fell victim to another of the Duke and Duchess’s tricks when trying to dodge the advances of the maid Altisidora. The unintended result was that he was confined to bed for five days after a cat dug its claws into his face.
Sancho Panza tried to eat lunch with his doctor sat beside him. The latter, though, dismissed every dish as being unhealthy for Sancho to eat, driving the starving governor to tell him to leave. As the doctor was going, an urgent message from the Duke was read out, warning the governor of an imminent night attack on the town, and that four assassins were out to kill him. Sancho’s immediate response was to have the doctor thrown into the dungeon. A farmer was granted an audience, in which he even had the gall to ask for money towards his son’s dowry.
Back in the Duke’s palace, Don Quixote was recovering from his facial wounds inflicted by a cat, and was visited at night by an old duenna. A wealthy farmer’s son had fallen in love with her daughter, and she wanted someone to put pressure on the young man’s father to get them married. She also told him that the Duchess’s beauty depended on two fountains in her legs letting the poison drain from her body. The knight’s bedroom was plunged into darkness as someone entered, gave the duenna a thorough slippering, then pinched Don Quixote until he was aching all over. The duenna left in silence.
44 A governor starved and a knight pinched
Sancho Panza made up for his lunchtime starvation by eating voraciously at dinner. It was then night, when as governor of the ‘Island’ of Barataria he had to do his rounds of the town accompanied by his full retinue. They first came across two men fighting with knives, who turned out to be a successful gambler, and someone without job or income who had helped him in a nearby gaming house. Sancho redistributed some of the winnings, and banished the vagrant for ten years. A pretty young woman was brought to him dressed as a man, and told her story of how she’d been kept in isolation, then went with her brother to explore the town in disguise.
Back in the palace, the Duchess had sent a page to Sancho’s wife with letters asking for some acorns, and a gift of jewellery. Others in the village were disbelieving at first, but she got an altar boy to write replies to her husband and the Duchess.
After a light breakfast, Sancho Panza was asked to give judgement on a case more like a logic puzzle before he could adjourn for a more liberal lunch. A messenger then arrived with a letter from Don Quixote, who suggested that he was about to fall out of favour with the Duke and Duchess. Sancho made a series of by-laws which were so successful that they were retained long after his brief spell as governor.
Just as Don Quixote was about to ask permission to leave the Duke’s palace for Saragossa and jousting, the old duenna and her daughter burst in and begged him to challenge the daughter’s suitor to marry her. He agreed, and issued his challenge to the young man. The Duchess’s page then returned with Teresa Panza’s letters, which were read aloud.
That night, as Sancho was about to fall asleep, his ‘island’ was attacked. He was trussed up in a couple of shields to protect him, and the attackers were repelled by the townspeople. That was all too much for the squire, who announced that he was returning to his former life and relinquishing his post as their governor.
Further reading
Wikipedia
List of characters
English translation by John Ormsby (1885)
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, trans John Rutherford (1604, 2000) Don Quixote, Penguin, ISBN 978 0 140 44909 9.
Roberto González Echevarría (2015) Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Yale UP, ISBN 978 0 300 19864 5.
Roberto González Echevarría (ed) (2005) Cervantes’ Don Quixote, A Casebook, Oxford UP, ISBN 978 0 19 516938 6.
The Eclectic Light Company 