Miguel Cervantes

THE HISTORY OF DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA
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CHAPTER XXXV.

What passed between the Curate, the Barber, and Don Quixote, concerning his indisposition.

[Pg 172] The curate and the barber were almost a whole month without paying Don Quixote a visit, lest, calling to mind his former extravagances, he might take occasion to renew them. However, they failed not every day to see his niece and his housekeeper, whom they charged to treat and cherish him with great care, and to give him such diet as might be most proper to cheer his heart and comfort his brain, whence, in all likelihood, his disorder wholly proceeded. They answered, that they did so, and would continue it to their utmost power; the rather because they observed that sometimes he seemed to be in his right senses. This news was very welcome to the curate and the barber, who looked on this amendment as an effect of their contrivance in bringing him home in the enchanted waggon, as already recorded. Thereupon they resolved to pay him a visit, and make trial themselves of the progress of a cure, which they thought almost impossible. They also agreed not to speak a word of knight-errantry, lest they should endanger a wound so lately closed and so tender. Don Quixote received them very civilly, and when they inquired of his health, gave them an account of his condition, expressing himself very handsomely, and with a great deal of judgment. After they had discoursed a while of several matters, they fell at last on state affairs and forms of government, correcting this grievance, and condemning that, reforming one custom, rejecting another, and establishing new laws, as if they had been the Lycurguses or Solons of the age, till they had refined and new modelled the commonwealth at such a rate, that they seemed to have clapped it into a forge, and drawn it out wholly different from what it was before. Don Quixote reasoned with so much discretion on every subject, that his two visitors now undoubtedly believed him in his right senses.

His niece and housekeeper were present at these discourses, and, hearing him give so many marks of sound understanding, thought they could never return Heaven sufficient thanks for so extraordinary a blessing. But the curate, who wondered at this strange amendment, being resolved to try whether Don Quixote was perfectly recovered, thought fit to alter the resolution he had taken to avoid entering into any discourse of knight-errantry; and therefore began to talk to him of news, and, among the rest, that it was credibly reported at court, that the Grand Seignior was advancing with a vast army, and nobody knew where the tempest would fall; that all Christendom was alarmed, as it used to [Pg 173] be almost every year; and that the king was providing for the security of the coasts of Sicily and Naples, and the island of Malta. "His majesty," said Don Quixote, "acts the part of a most prudent (...)

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