Don Quixote

As the rain begins to fall, Quixote becomes convinced a man in the distance is wearing a famous golden helmet that once belonged to the knight Mambrino. Panza mocks the idea; the helmet is actually a shiny brass basin, worn by a barber riding a donkey. Quixote rushes toward the barber, who leaps from his donkey and runs away into the night. His basin falls to the ground. As Panza laughs, Quixote holds up the basin and decides that a magician has transformed it out of spite. Panza takes the barber’s saddle from the donkey, and the men return to the road. As they travel, Panza wonders whether they should sign up to serve for an emperor rather than wandering the countryside. At least, he reasons, they may get paid. Quixote refuses to go to any court before he has become famous through his good deeds. He tells a story in which he eventually becomes a famous knight. Panza, he explains, will be a count. All they need to do is find a king with a war to fight and a beautiful daughter to marry. 

As they continue their journey, Quixote and Panza find a dozen men chained together under the guard of four armed soldiers. The men are convicts who have been sentenced to hard labor as rowers on a ship. Quixote decides he is responsible for the prisoners. He talks to them about their crimes, and he becomes increasingly sympathetic even though the men may be lying to him. When Quixote asks the soldiers to free the prisoners, they refuse. Quixote attacks and, in the confusion, the prisoners are freed, and the guards run away. In exchange for their freedom, Quixote asks the prisoners to go to Dulcinea and tell her about his great deed. The men refuse—they need to hide from the authorities instead. When Quixote becomes angry, the prisoners throw rocks at him. They knock Quixote and Panza to the ground, steal their clothing, and run away. 

Worried the Holy Brotherhood will be searching for the escaped prisoners, Panza recommends that he and Quixote hide in the Sierra Morena Mountains. They ride to the mountains. Quixote’s mind is filled with stories about knights while Panza is only worried about food. They discover a large, abandoned bag, and when they search it, they find luxurious clothes, gold coins, and a notebook. Panza takes the gold coins as payment for his suffering while Quixote investigates the notebook. Inside is a long, sad love poem and a letter to a woman, accusing her of being deceitful. Returning to the road, Quixote spots a naked man clambering quickly over a pile of rocks.

When the man disappears, Quixote decides to investigate. Panza is worried the man is the owner of the abandoned bag and that he will want his money. They journey on and find a goatherd with his flock. The goatherd explains how, half a year before, a young aristocrat named Cardenio came to the mountains to serve a self-imposed exile. As the goatherd is explaining Cardenio’s story, Cardenio emerges from the forest. Quixote spots the naked man and in a panicked, impulsive moment, he embraces Cardenio. 

Cardenio sits with the other men and tells them his story. He reveals he once fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Luscinda. Before they could marry, however, a Duke named Ricardo invited Cardenio to visit him in Andalusia to become a companion to his son. Cardenio felt he had no choice but to say yes, so he traveled to Duke Ricardo’s estate. He became good friends with the Duke’s son Fernando, who was in love with a local peasant girl. Desperate to take his mind off his romantic infatuation, Fernando asked to visit Cardenio’s home. By the time they departed for Cardenio’s home, Fernando had slept with the local woman and grown tired of her. After hearing about Luscinda, however, he began to fall in love with her, just like Cardenio. When Cardenio mentions a book he gave to Luscinda, Quixote seizes upon the reference and launches into a long discussion on the topic of chivalry. He argues about the subject with Cardenio, who hits Quixote and runs away again into the night. 

Inspired by his stories of chivalric knights, Quixote decides that an act of fantastical passion might help demonstrate his worth. He will mimic Amadis of Gaul and seclude himself while acting in a wild fashion, hoping to demonstrate his love for Dulcinea. At the same time, he orders Panza to deliver a letter filled with love poetry to Dulcinea. He recognizes her from Quixote’s wild descriptions and realizes that she is not the beautiful, innocent young woman Quixote believes her to be. When Panza complains that this knightly chivalry seems absurd, Quixote blames cunning, malicious magicians for making him seem foolish. As Quixote and Panza talk, a famous murderer named Gines de Pasamonte (one of the prisoners who Quixote freed in an earlier Part 1, Chapter) steals Panza’s donkey. When Panza discovers the theft in the morning, he is so sad that Quixote promises to give him three of his own donkeys when they finally return home. The men continue and reach a point on a mountainside where Quixote wants to perform a demonstration of his love for Dulcinea. He strips naked and performs two somersaults while Panza records the feat in a letter to deliver to Dulcinea. Quixote excuses his lurid fantasies by claiming that, for him, Dulcinea is just as good as any princess and that poets and romantics must indulge reality a little. Panza takes the letter and travels alone to find Dulcinea. 

As Quixote wanders the forest writing sad poetry, Panza goes in search of Dulcinea. He stops at the inn where he stayed a few days before and finds that Master Nicolas and Pero Perez are staying there as well. When they ask him about Quixote, he recounts their adventures thus far. They ask to see Quixote’s letter to Dulcinea, but Panza realizes he has lost it.

He recounts what he can for the men, who transcribe the jumbled words into a new letter. After writing everything down, Perez and Nicholas worry that Quixote has lost touch with reality. Panza frets about his friend, so the men console him by assuring him that Quixote is braver than he is smart, so there is no fear that he may be forced to join the church. Panza will definitely get his donkeys, they assure him. When Panza leaves the room, however, the men hatch a plan to bring Quixote home. Their plan will include dressing Perez as a woman in need of a knight. They convince Panza to help them by indulging in Quixote’s ludicrous promises that he will be made a governor of an island. 

Borrowing women’s clothes from the innkeeper’s wife, Perez and Nicholas follow Panza back into the mountains. Perez dresses in the women’s clothing while Nicholas disguises himself as a squire with a fake beard, though they disagree over which man should dress as a woman. As Panza goes to search for Quixote, the two men encounter Cardenio. Panza has already warned them about Cardenio, but they want to hear his story nonetheless. Cardenio finishes his story, explaining how Fernando tricked him into leaving the village for a few days. While he was away, he received a letter from Luscinda in which she explained she will marry Fernando. Cardenio traveled back to his village and, in a brief conversation with Luscinda, listened to her explain how she will die before she marries anyone. Cardenio watched the ceremony from a hiding place. He saw Luscinda faint just after the ceremony and, convinced she had killed herself just as she planned, he ran away to live a life of despair in the mountains. 

Perez, Nicholas, and Cardenio encounter a young woman dressed in a man’s clothes. She reveals herself as Dorotea, the young girl who was in love with Fernando and who was tricked into sleeping with him. Having heard about Fernando’s marriage to Luscinda, she set out in search of her former lover, but she has so far been unable to find him. She claims she would rather not find him at all than to find him and discover that he is married. At the time, she was traveling with a servant boy. Cardenio recognizes the names and turns pale. Dorotea explains that she reached Luscinda’s town and heard about the wedding and Luscinda fainting and revealing a letter in her clothes that claimed she was already engaged to Cardenio.

The letter also revealed her intention to kill herself after the wedding. Fernando was furious and had to be prevented from killing Luscinda himself. He left the town. When Luscinda recovered, she learned that Fernando and Cardenio were both gone. She ran away to search for Cardenio while Dorotea continued her search for Fernando. When Dorotea was in a secluded part of the woods, however, the young servant boy accompanying her tried to rape her. She pushed the boy off the edge of a cliff and, fearing punishment, disguised herself as a boy. She found work as a shepherd, but when the other shepherds also tried to assault her, she ran away again. 

Cardenio reveals his true identity to Dorotea. He hopes they can both be happy and they can both be reunited with their respective partners. Perez recruits both of them to search for the missing people, including Quixote and Fernando. Nicholas explains the situation with Quixote to Cardenio and Dorotea, and Dorotea promises to help. She takes the role of the damsel in distress, meaning that Perez does not need to disguise himself as a woman. When Panza returns, he believes that Dorotea is an actual princess named Micomicona of Micomicon, a place in modern day Ethiopia. Hoping this is a princess that Quixote can impress and possibly marry, Panza eagerly leads her to meet Quixote. Nicholas accompanies them, disguised as Dorotea’s squire.

When they meet, Dorotea theatrically falls to her knees and begs Quixote to help her by killing a giant who is terrorizing her kingdom. He accepts the mission. In the meantime, Perez works on a disguise for Cardenio. Once the disguise is complete, Perez waits by the side of the road. When Quixote arrives, the priest begs his friend for help. Slightly confused, Quixote agrees. When Perez says he was robbed by a group of escaped criminals, Quixote blushes but accepts this mission as well. Dorotea explains that the route to her kingdom passes through Quixote’s village, so they should return immediately.