Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

again seven or eight leagues off at the Ojos de la Guadiana, near Daimiel. Ruy González Clavijo availed himself of the phenomenon to boast to Tamerlane in 1403 that his master King Henry had a bridge so large that a hundred thousand sheep browsed upon it. ↩

Proverb 110. ↩

Proverb 163. ↩

Proverb 56. ↩

Proverb 13. ↩

The Spanish form of Fugger, the name of the great Augsburg capitalists of the sixteenth century. ↩

Referring to the ballad quoted in Part I Chapter V and elsewhere. ↩

The Travels of the Infante Don Pedro of Portugal Through the Four Quarters of the World, written by Juan Gomez de Sanestevan Saragossa, 1570, was a popular book and passed through several editions. ↩

A passing compliment to his patron, the Conde de Lemos. ↩

Literally, “some of the dear.” ↩

A fashion introduced by the Duke of Lerma, whose feet were disfigured by bunions. ↩

Verses of shorter lines than the ballad, and generally of a humorous or satirical cast. ↩

The war to which the youth was bound was probably that which had arisen in Italy in 1613, out of the conflicting claims of the Dukes of Savoy and Mantua to the Duchy of Montferrat. ↩

It is not easy to say what passage Cervantes could have been thinking of. ↩

A proverbial phrase, expressive of extreme impatience. ↩

Officers who have charge of the expenditure of the municipality. ↩

A polite way of saying “after you,” when pressed to drink. ↩

Proverb 1. ↩

The eastern part of La Mancha, adjoining the Cuenca Mountains, and now part of the province of Cuenca. It had nothing to do with the kingdom of Aragón, as Cervantes seems to have supposed; the name, so Fermín Caballero (Pericia Geográfica de Cervantes) says, being derived from a hill called Monte Aragón. ↩

Vota a Rus, an obscure oath, but probably a Manchegan form of Voto d Dios. Rus is the name of a stream and castle near San Clemente. ↩

A giantess in Amadís of Gaul. ↩

In the original, Sancho’s mistake is patio for pacto. ↩

I.e., belonging to judicial astrology. ↩

There is, however, no trace of the story of Gaiferos and Melisenda (which is the correct form of the name) in any French chronicle or romance. Master Pedro’s puppet-show follows closely the ballad⁠—

“Asentado está Gaiferos
En el palacio real,”

which is in the three oldest Cancioneros de Romances, and in Duran’s Romancero General, No. 377. ↩

These lines are not a quotation from the old ballad, but from a more modern piece of verse in octaves, in the National Library at Madrid. “Tables” was a game something like tric-trac or backgammon; not chess, as Dunlop supposes. It was played with dice. ↩

In the Chanson de Roland, “Durendal.” ↩

Marsilio is, of course, the Marsiles of the Chanson de Roland, and, in spite of the company in which he appears, a historical personage, the name being a corruption of Omari filius, i.e., Abd el Malek Ibn Omar, Wali of Saragossa at the time of Charlemagne’s invasion. In the ballad, however, he is called Almanzor. ↩

Góngora has a droll ballad on this subject⁠—

“Desde Sansueña á Paris”⁠—

in which he expresses his sympathy with Melisendra’s sufferings during her ride. ↩

Proverb 3. ↩

From the ballad on the rout of King Boderick’s army at the battle of the Guadalete⁠—

“Las huestes del Rey Bodrigo
Desmayaban y huian.”

—⁠Cancioneros de Romances, S.A. Antwerp. Duran, Romancero General, No. 599

↩

Proverb 104. ↩

The joke here is untranslatable. Don Quixote says, “not to catch the ape, but the she-ape;” pillar la mona being a slang phrase for “to get drunk.” ↩

Here we have an additional proof that Cervantes did not supply the correction in the second edition, Part I Chapter XXIII, and was not even aware that it had been made. ↩

From this it would seem that Cervantes was under the impression that La Mancha de Aragón belonged to the kingdom of Aragón. ↩

I.e., a Sardinian pony, just as we say “a Shetland.” ↩

V. the ballad⁠—

“Ya cabalga Diego Ordoñez.
Desmayaban y huian.”

—⁠Cancioneros de Romances, Antwerp, 1550. Duran, Romancero General, No. 791

↩

The Cazoleros (or, more properly, Cazalleros) were the people of Valladolid, so called because of their townsman, Cazalla, burned as a Lutheran in 1559; the Berengeneros were the Toledana, berengenas, or eggplants, being grown in large quantities in the neighbourhood; the inhabitants of Madrid were nicknamed the Ballenatos, i.e. the whalemen, from a story that they took a mule’s packsaddle, floating down the Manzanares in a flood, for a whale. Who the people of the clock town, or the Jaboneros⁠—the soap-men⁠—were, is uncertain. ↩

Proverb 219. ↩

Proverb 132. ↩

Don Quixote forgets that Sancho was not with him the first time he left home. ↩

Proverb 138. ↩

Proverb 83. ↩

Cervantes allows them but five days in all for this journey. The nearest and most accessible point of the Ebro would