In a village of La Mancha, whose name I don’t want to remember, there lived not long ago one of those gentlemen who possess a lance in its rack, an old-fashioned shield, an emaciated workhorse, and a hunting hound for coursing game. A stew containing somewhat more beef than mutton,¹ a salmagundi most nights, fried eggs and bacon² on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, a squab as an extra treat on Sundays, used up three-fourths of his income. The rest of it was finished off by a doublet of fine dark cloth, and velvet breeches for holidays with slippers of the same material; while on weekdays he did himself proud with an outfit of the best medium-quality brown cloth that could be found. In his home he had a housekeeper past forty and a niece not yet twenty, as well as a manservant³ for both domestic and field work, who both saddled his horse and wielded the pruning hook. Our gentleman was getting on for fifty; he was of a robust constitution, with a skinny body and a lean face; he was a very early riser, and quite fond of hunting. They say his family name was Quijada, or Quesada,⁴ for there is some disagreement about this in the authors who write about the matter, though by likely conjectures it may be understood that his name was Quejana. But this is of little importance to our story; it will suffice that, in the telling of it, we do not depart in the least from the truth.

chivalry with such interest and pleasure that he nearly forgot entirely his pursuit of hunting, and even the management of his estate; and his foolish infatuation with these things led him to sell off many acres of arable land in order to purchase books of chivalry to read. So, he brought home as many of them as he could find. Among them all, he thought none were so good as those written by Feliciano de Silva,⁵ because the clarity of his prose and those complicated phrases of his seemed as precious as pearls to him, especially when he happened to read those gallant compliments and those letters containing challenges, in which he frequently found passages like: “The reason for the unreasonable injury being done to my reason so weakens my reason that with reason I complain about your beauty.” And likewise when he read: “The lofty heavens that divinely with the stars fortify you with your divinity, and make you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves.”

so, from an insufficiency of sleep and an excess of reading, his brain dried out, and he finally lost his mind. His imagination was filled with everything he read in his books, not only enchantments but also fights, battles, challenges, wounds, gallant compliments, love affairs, storms, and impossible nonsense; and he became so convinced that all that apparatus of talked-up and dreamed-up fiction he read was the truth, that for him there was no other history in the world that was so accurate. He used to say that Ruy Díaz, the Cid,⁷ had been a very good knight, but couldn’t compare with the Knight of the Burning Sword, who with a single backhand stroke had cut in half two fierce, immense giants. He was more favorably inclined toward Bernardo del Carpio, because at Roncesvalles he had killed Roland (who was protected by spells) by means of the same ruse Hercules used when he throttled Antaeus, the son of the Earth, between his arms. He had much good to say about the giant Morgante because, even though he was of that race of giants who were all arrogant and insolent, he alone was affable and courteous. But above all he was fond of Renaut of Montauban, especially when he saw him sallying forth from his castle to rob everyone he came across, and when, in foreign parts, he stole that idol of Mahomet which was all of gold, as his story relates. To be able to give a round of kicks to the traitor Ganelon, he would have given up his housekeeper, and his niece into the bargain.⁸