The Scorecard
Full spoilers ahead, the ending included. Here is my question. What is the most famous scene in Don Quixote? The windmills. So I counted. That scene runs four hundred eighty-eight words, in a book of about four hundred three thousand. That is roughly one word in eight hundred.
So what fills the other eight hundred? Three sallies, which is the book’s own word for his trips out. For every adventure I wrote down three things. What he thinks it is. What it is. And what it costs him. In my reading, he is wrong almost every time, and the bill is a rib, a tooth, or somebody else’s wine.
My edition is John Ormsby’s English translation, Project Gutenberg ebook number nine ninety-six. It has one hundred twenty-six chapters, fifty-two in Part One and seventy-four in Part Two. Every count is mine, run on that text, skipping the introduction, the prefaces and the license, and counting chapter titles.
The First Sally
Sally one is the shortest. It takes chapters two to five, four chapters, about nine thousand words, only two percent of the book. In chapter one a country gentleman of about fifty reads so many chivalry books that he loses his wits. He renames himself Don Quixote of La Mancha, his horse Rocinante, and a farm girl who never knew about it Dulcinea.
Then he rides out. What he thinks is a castle is an inn. The two women at the door are, to him, maidens. In chapter three the innkeeper plays along and knights him, after the new knight guards his armor beside a well. When two carriers move that armor to water their mules, he fights them. A carrier’s head is laid open. Don Quixote is stoned, but unhurt.
Chapter four is where the book first shows its cost. He stops a farmer from whipping a boy named Andres. The farmer swears to pay, and then whips the boy again as soon as the knight is gone. Next a muleteer breaks the knight’s lance and beats him. A neighbor carries him home on a donkey, in chapter five. In my reading, sally one is the only one where the damage lands mostly on other people.
Chapter Eight of One Hundred Twenty-Six
Now the windmills. They fall in chapter eight of one hundred twenty-six, about four percent of the way in, by words. Don Quixote sees thirty or forty windmills and calls them giants. Sancho asks, “What giants?” The knight charges anyway. The sail catches his lance, breaks it, and rolls horse and rider across the plain. Rocinante’s shoulder is half out.
Then comes the move that runs the whole book. He says the sage Friston, who carried off his library, turned the giants into mills to rob him of the glory. When the world contradicts him, an enchanter did it. That is the first of many, and I will count them in a minute.
Here are two other counts. The word windmill appears nine times in the whole book, and five of them are in chapter eight. The word giant, or giants, appears eighty-nine times. The most are not in the windmill chapter. Chapter thirty-five, the wine skins, uses it twelve times. Chapter eight uses it eight.
The Early Ledger
Straight after the windmills he fights a Biscayan squire, and this one he wins. It costs him half an ear and part of his helmet. Keep that score, because wins are rare. Now the ledger for three that come soon after.
In chapter fifteen his horse goes after some carriers’ mares. The carriers beat the horse. Don Quixote says he counts for a hundred, and attacks. Both he and Sancho are beaten down.
In chapter seventeen, back at an inn, he brews a healing balsam, drinks it, and is sick. Sancho is tossed in a blanket by nine men, and the innkeeper keeps his saddlebags.
In chapter eighteen he sees two armies. They are two flocks of sheep and a cloud of dust. The shepherds throw stones that bury a couple of ribs in his body and knock out three or four teeth. And in chapter twenty, he hears a terrible noise in the night. It is six fulling hammers. It costs him his pride, and Sancho some blows from the lance, for laughing.
The Basin, the Skins and the Cage
Chapter twenty-one gives us the famous helmet. A barber is riding in the rain with his brass basin on his head. Don Quixote calls it the helmet of Mambrino, and he keeps it. Cost: none. The basin returns later, and so does the barber.
In chapter twenty-two he frees a chain of convicts, and they repay him with stones. A student smashes the basin on his head, and Sancho’s coat is stolen. Then in chapter thirty-five he dreams of a giant, slashes it, and the giant is skins of red wine. The innkeeper loses the wine and beats the knight.
Part One ends when the curate and the barber, in disguise, shut him in a cage on an ox cart. They bring him home. His housekeeper and his niece curse the books. And the narrator says only that he cannot find a third sally, though a rumor of one exists.
Part Two, and the Enchanted Count
Part One came out in sixteen oh five, and Part Two in sixteen fifteen, according to Wikipedia and Britannica. The book knows it. Part Two opens a month after Part One’s ending, and soon a young scholar, Samson Carrasco, tells Don Quixote that his story is printed. Carrasco says over twelve thousand copies. That is his claim, not mine.
Now the count. The enchant words appear two hundred eighty-seven times, not counting disenchant. One hundred three in Part One. One hundred eighty-four in Part Two. That is five point three per ten thousand words, against eight point eight. Seventy-four chapters out of one hundred twenty-six use them. The peak is chapter twenty-three of Part Two, the cave, with twenty-two.
Part Two also gives him real wins. In the Knight of the Mirrors fight he wins, and the face under the helmet is Carrasco’s, in disguise. Then, when two caged lions arrive, he waits at the door. The lion shows its rump and lies down. He renames himself the Knight of the Lions. Sancho pays two gold crowns for the delay.
The Island of Barataria
Sancho was promised an island in chapter seven of Part One. Counting straight through the book, that is chapter seven. The island arrives at chapter ninety-seven, which is Part Two, chapter forty-five. And it is a joke. A duke and duchess who have read Part One stage it, and Sancho is made governor of a village of about a thousand people.
Before that, the same household stages a flight. Don Quixote and Sancho are blindfolded and set on a wooden horse called Clavileno. Bellows blow wind in their faces, and burning tow singes them. They think they have flown through the sky. In chapter forty-one they are thrown to the ground, and the horse is only wood.
The governorship runs nine chapters, about twenty-eight thousand words. Early on he does well. In one judgment he guesses that a debtor’s walking stick holds ten gold crowns, and he breaks it open. He also handles a stolen purse and the dispute of a tailor and five caps. In my reading, this is the best he does anywhere.
Then a doctor strikes every dish off his table with a whalebone wand, and a mock attack ends it. The narrator says the seventh night. The majordomo says ten days. The text disagrees with itself. Sancho leaves with half a loaf and a cheese and says, “I neither lose nor gain.”
The White Moon
Now for the last fight. In Barcelona a knight in white arrives and calls himself the Knight of the White Moon. The terms are set before they charge. If Don Quixote loses, he goes home for a year. He does lose. The White Moon knocks him and Rocinante down without touching him with his lance. Don Quixote still says Dulcinea is the fairest woman in the world.
Under the helmet again is Samson Carrasco, the man he beat in the Mirrors fight. So the book’s last fight is won by the man who lost its first. Cost: honor, bruises, and a year at home.
Home he goes, planning to become a shepherd. Instead a fever puts him in bed for six days. He sleeps six hours and wakes sane. He says he is no longer Don Quixote, but Alonso Quixano the Good. He makes a will. Sancho keeps what is left. His niece inherits, but loses it if she marries a man who knows chivalry books. He dies three days after the will, calmly, in bed.
The Final Score
My scoreboard, and it is a draft. In my view, the sallies run like this. The first is short and hurts other people. The second is long and hurts him. The third is the longest, and the cost turns from broken ribs into staged jokes played on him, by people who have read about him. Part Two is about thirteen thousand words longer than Part One, by my count.
Is it worth reading? In my view, yes, in pieces. Read chapters one to eight, then the three end chapters. And if you stay, Part Two’s Barataria chapters are the funniest stretch in my reading.
Which adventure would you score as his best? Tell me in the comments. If you liked the scorecard, subscribe, and tap like. The full Don Quixote guide, with every number, is at book explained dot com.
