PART II - CHAPTER VI.

by Miguel de Cervantes

　　OF WHAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS NIECE AND HOUSEKEEPER; ONEOF THE MOST IMPORTANT CHAPTERS IN THE WHOLE HISTORYWhile Sancho Panza and his wife, Teresa Cascajo, held the aboveirrelevant conversation, Don Quixote's niece and housekeeper were notidle, for by a thousand signs they began to perceive that their uncle andmaster meant to give them the slip the third time, and once more betakehimself to his, for them, ill-errant chivalry. They strove by all themeans in their power to divert him from such an unlucky scheme; but itwas all preaching in the desert and hammering cold iron. Nevertheless,among many other representations made to him, the housekeeper said tohim, "In truth, master, if you do not keep still and stay quiet at home,and give over roaming mountains and valleys like a troubled spirit,looking for what they say are called adventures, but what I callmisfortunes, I shall have to make complaint to God and the king with loudsupplication to send some remedy."To which Don Quixote replied, "What answer God will give to yourcomplaints, housekeeper, I know not, nor what his Majesty will answereither; I only know that if I were king I should decline to answer thenumberless silly petitions they present every day; for one of thegreatest among the many troubles kings have is being obliged to listen toall and answer all, and therefore I should be sorry that any affairs ofmine should worry him."Whereupon the housekeeper said, "Tell us, senor, at his Majesty's courtare there no knights?""There are," replied Don Quixote, "and plenty of them; and it is rightthere should be, to set off the dignity of the prince, and for thegreater glory of the king's majesty.""Then might not your worship," said she, "be one of those that, withoutstirring a step, serve their king and lord in his court?""Recollect, my friend," said Don Quixote, "all knights cannot becourtiers, nor can all courtiers be knights-errant, nor need they be.There must be all sorts in the world; and though we may be all knights,there is a great difference between one and another; for the courtiers,without quitting their chambers, or the threshold of the court, range theworld over by looking at a map, without its costing them a farthing, andwithout suffering heat or cold, hunger or thirst; but we, the trueknights-errant, measure the whole earth with our own feet, exposed to thesun, to the cold, to the air, to the inclemencies of heaven, by day andnight, on foot and on horseback; nor do we only know enemies in pictures,but in their own real shapes; and at all risks and on all occasions weattack them, without any regard to childish points or rules of singlecombat, whether one has or has not a shorter lance or sword, whether onecarries relics or any secret contrivance about him, whether or not thesun is to be divided and portioned out, and other niceties of the sortthat are observed in set combats of man to man, that you know nothingabout, but I do. And you must know besides, that the true knight-errant,though he may see ten giants, that not only touch the clouds with theirheads but pierce them, and that go, each of them, on two tall towers byway of legs, and whose arms are like the masts of mighty ships, and eacheye like a great mill-wheel, and glowing brighter than a glass furnace,must not on any account be dismayed by them. On the contrary, he mustattack and fall upon them with a gallant bearing and a fearless heart,and, if possible, vanquish and destroy them, even though they have forarmour the shells of a certain fish, that they say are harder thandiamonds, and in place of swords wield trenchant blades of Damascussteel, or clubs studded with spikes also of steel, such as I have morethan once seen. All this I say, housekeeper, that you may see thedifference there is between the one sort of knight and the other; and itwould be well if there were no prince who did not set a higher value onthis second, or more properly speaking first, kind of knights-errant;for, as we read in their histories, there have been some among them whohave been the salvation, not merely of one kingdom, but of many.""Ah, senor," here exclaimed the niece, "remember that all this you aresaying about knights-errant is fable and fiction; and their histories, ifindeed they were not burned, would deserve, each of them, to have asambenito put on it, or some mark by which it might be known as infamousand a corrupter of good manners.""By the God that gives me life," said Don Quixote, "if thou wert not myfull niece, being daughter of my own sister, I would inflict achastisement upon thee for the blasphemy thou hast uttered that all theworld should ring with. What! can it be that a young hussy that hardlyknows how to handle a dozen lace-bobbins dares to wag her tongue andcriticise the histories of knights-errant? What would Senor Amadis say ifhe heard of such a thing? He, however, no doubt would forgive thee, forhe was the most humble-minded and courteous knight of his time, andmoreover a great protector of damsels; but some there are that might haveheard thee, and it would not have been well for thee in that case; forthey are not all courteous or mannerly; some are ill-conditionedscoundrels; nor is it everyone that calls himself a gentleman, that is soin all respects; some are gold, others pinchbeck, and all look likegentlemen, but not all can stand the touchstone of truth. There are menof low rank who strain themselves to bursting to pass for gentlemen, andhigh gentlemen who, one would fancy, were dying to pass for men of lowrank; the former raise themselves by their ambition or by their virtues,the latter debase themselves by their lack of spirit or by their vices;and one has need of experience and discernment to distinguish these twokinds of gentlemen, so much alike in name and so different in conduct.""God bless me!" said the niece, "that you should know so much,uncle--enough, if need be, to get up into a pulpit and go preach in thestreets--and yet that you should fall into a delusion so great and afolly so manifest as to try to make yourself out vigorous when you areold, strong when you are sickly, able to put straight what is crookedwhen you yourself are bent by age, and, above all, a caballero when youare not one; for though gentlefolk may be so, poor men are nothing of thekind!""There is a great deal of truth in what you say, niece," returned DonQuixote, "and I could tell you somewhat about birth that would astonishyou; but, not to mix up things human and divine, I refrain. Look you, mydears, all the lineages in the world (attend to what I am saying) can bereduced to four sorts, which are these: those that had humble beginnings,and went on spreading and extending themselves until they attainedsurpassing greatness; those that had great beginnings and maintainedthem, and still maintain and uphold the greatness of their origin; those,again, that from a great beginning have ended in a point like a pyramid,having reduced and lessened their original greatness till it has come tonought, like the point of a pyramid, which, relatively to its base orfoundation, is nothing; and then there are those--and it is they that arethe most numerous--that have had neither an illustrious beginning nor aremarkable mid-course, and so will have an end without a name, like anordinary plebeian line. Of the first, those that had an humble origin androse to the greatness they still preserve, the Ottoman house may serve asan example, which from an humble and lowly shepherd, its founder, hasreached the height at which we now see it. For examples of the secondsort of lineage, that began with greatness and maintains it still withoutadding to it, there are the many princes who have inherited the dignity,and maintain themselves in their inheritance, without increasing ordiminishing it, keeping peacefully within the limits of their states. Ofthose that began great and ended in a point, there are thousands ofexamples, for all the Pharaohs and Ptolemies of Egypt, the Caesars ofRome, and the whole herd (if I may such a word to them) of countlessprinces, monarchs, lords, Medes, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, andbarbarians, all these lineages and lordships have ended in a point andcome to nothing, they themselves as well as their founders, for it wouldbe impossible now to find one of their descendants, and, even should wefind one, it would be in some lowly and humble condition. Of plebeianlineages I have nothing to say, save that they merely serve to swell thenumber of those that live, without any eminence to entitle them to anyfame or praise beyond this. From all I have said I would have you gather,my poor innocents, that great is the confusion among lineages, and thatonly those are seen to be great and illustrious that show themselves soby the virtue, wealth, and generosity of their possessors. I have saidvirtue, wealth, and generosity, because a great man who is vicious willbe a great example of vice, and a rich man who is not generous will bemerely a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy bypossessing it, but by spending it, and not by spending as he pleases, butby knowing how to spend it well. The poor gentleman has no way of showingthat he is a gentleman but by virtue, by being affable, well-bred,courteous, gentle-mannered, and kindly, not haughty, arrogant, orcensorious, but above all by being charitable; for by two maravedis givenwith a cheerful heart to the poor, he will show himself as generous as hewho distributes alms with bell-ringing, and no one that perceives him tobe endowed with the virtues I have named, even though he know him not,will fail to recognise and set him down as one of good blood; and itwould be strange were it not so; praise has ever been the reward ofvirtue, and those who are virtuous cannot fail to receive commendation.There are two roads, my daughters, by which men may reach wealth andhonours; one is that of letters, the other that of arms. I have more ofarms than of letters in my composition, and, judging by my inclination toarms, was born under the influence of the planet Mars. I am, therefore,in a measure constrained to follow that road, and by it I must travel inspite of all the world, and it will be labour in vain for you to urge meto resist what heaven wills, fate ordains, reason requires, and, aboveall, my own inclination favours; for knowing as I do the countless toilsthat are the accompaniments of knight-errantry, I know, too, the infiniteblessings that are attained by it; I know that the path of virtue is verynarrow, and the road of vice broad and spacious; I know their ends andgoals are different, for the broad and easy road of vice ends in death,and the narrow and toilsome one of virtue in life, and not transitorylife, but in that which has no end; I know, as our great Castilian poetsays, that--It is by rugged paths like these they goThat scale the heights of immortality,Unreached by those that falter here below.""Woe is me!" exclaimed the niece, "my lord is a poet, too! He knowseverything, and he can do everything; I will bet, if he chose to turnmason, he could make a house as easily as a cage.""I can tell you, niece," replied Don Quixote, "if these chivalrousthoughts did not engage all my faculties, there would be nothing that Icould not do, nor any sort of knickknack that would not come from myhands, particularly cages and tooth-picks."At this moment there came a knocking at the door, and when they asked whowas there, Sancho Panza made answer that it was he. The instant thehousekeeper knew who it was, she ran to hide herself so as not to seehim; in such abhorrence did she hold him. The niece let him in, and hismaster Don Quixote came forward to receive him with open arms, and thepair shut themselves up in his room, where they had another conversationnot inferior to the previous one.