Don Quixote Ch. 32: Back at the Inn

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Back at the Inn: Books the Landlord Defends

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Summary

The party reaches the inn Sancho dreads, and Quixote goes straight to the garret to sleep while the others drop the rescue disguises. The landlady snatches her tail back from the barber, the curate plans the galley-slave cover story, and Dorothea and Cardenio draw stares from the whole household.

At dinner everyone retells Quixote's madness, the carrier fight, and Sancho's blanketing. The curate blames chivalry books for the damage, but the landlord says harvest workers gather to hear them and that the tales make his grey hairs grow young again. His wife, Maritornes, and even the daughter join in praising knights, lovers under orange trees, and ladies cruel enough to drive men mad.

The curate moves to burn Felixmarte and Cirongilio; the landlord answers with mill-wheels, bean-pod giants, and fiery serpents until Dorothea whispers he could play second Quixote. When the curate insists none of those knights ever lived, the landlord cites the Royal Council licence and refuses to be fed pap. Sancho overhears that knights-errant are out of fashion and quietly resolves to quit if this quest fails. Then the curate finds a manuscript titled "Novel of the Ill-advised Curiosity" in the valise and begins reading it aloud to the room.

In this chapter: Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Reading Why People Defend Fiction

People often fight for a story because it gives them feeling, honour, or youth that ordinary life withholds, not because they cannot tell fact from lie. The landlord says chivalry tales make harvest workers listen until their grey hairs feel young again, then rejects the curate's bonfire with bean-pod giants and Royal Council licence.

Ask what hunger a belief feeds before you try to discredit it.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: The Landlady

The landlady tugs at the barber and says he is not going to make "a beard of my tail" any longer. The rescue disguise is still on the floor, and she wants the comb back in her hair. The men are arguing whether the knights ever lived, and she is trying to get her own hair off the joke.

Continue this thoughtThe People Who Love Him Feed the Plot

Coming Up in Chapter 33

In Florence the inseparable friends Anselmo and Lothario share everything until marriage parts them. Anselmo confesses a stranger hunger: he must have Lothario woo Camilla in earnest to prove her virtue by temptation.

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Original text

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Chapter 32

Back at the Inn: Books the Landlord Defends

WHICH TREATS OF WHAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE’S PARTY AT THE INN Their dainty repast being finished, they saddled at once, and without any adventure worth mentioning they reached next day the inn, the object of Sancho Panza’s fear and dread; but though he would have rather not entered it, there was no help for it. The landlady, the landlord, their daughter, and Maritornes, when they saw Don Quixote and Sancho coming, went out to welcome them with signs of hearty satisfaction, which Don Quixote received with dignity and gravity, and bade them make up a better bed for him than…

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Back at the Inn: Books the Landlord Defends

Summary

Why This Matters