Doctor Recio and the Farmer's Suit — Don Quixote

From the justice court Sancho is carried to a palace where clarions sound, pages wash his hands, and Doctor Pedro Recio stands with a whalebone wand, whisking away every dish as too moist, hot, or furry while praising wafer cakes and quince conserve and forbidding even olla podrida at a governor's table.

Sancho asks if dinner is a jugglery trick, cites Hippocrates against partridge, and swears he is dying of hunger; he renames Recio de Malaguero, threatens a cudgel and chair, and declares a trade that does not feed its master is not worth two beans until a sweating courier arrives with the duke's letter.

The letter warns of a night attack and four disguised assassins, bids Sancho eat nothing presented, and Sancho orders Recio jailed as a slow-killing hunger enemy, then eats bread and grapes because poison cannot enter them and the tripes carry the heart.

His Biscayan secretary, newly named to that post, is told to obey the duke, kiss the duchess's hands, and send word to Teresa and Don Quixote; a farmer from Miguelturra paints Clara Perlerina's one-eyed, pitted, crooked charms and asks a recommendation plus three or six hundred ducats for his possessed bachelor son.

Sancho rises with his chair, calls him Don Bumpkin and devil's own painter at this hour of business, and drives him out for asking six hundred ducats half a day into rule; Hamete leaves Sancho in wrath and returns to Don Quixote still bandaged from the cat fright for eight days.