Don Quixote is not only the humorous literary masterpiece that we know. The old hidalgo, double enlightened by the author, Cervantes, takes us to visit the arid and windy highlands of Castile. Olivier Page traces the expedition of Don Quixote and his acolyte Sancho Pança.

Don Quixote, an overwhelming success

This year, Spain is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first publication of a book now recognized as a universal masterpiece: Don Quixote. After the Bible, it would be the second most widely read book in the world. It has also been translated into all languages, and, if only in French, there are no less than 80 different editions. At the beginning of January 1605, the Madrid editor Juan de la Cuesta put on sale the first part of a book entitled Don Quixote: “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, aged 58 years old.

In Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, Portugal, the success was overwhelming: six reissues in one year! It is translated into English, German, Italian. Upon its release in France, the novel immediately became a bestseller. In 1615, the French ambassadors who accompanied Anne of Austria, future wife of Louis XIII, visited Cervantès to greet him. One of them said: “How such a man, Spain did not make him rich”

The wealth? Cervantes never knew her. His life is like a succession of setbacks and a sum of disappointments. To live, he exercises the “food” profession of tax collector in Andalusia. He was also food commissioner, responsible for preparing the Expedition of the Invincible Armada on behalf of Philip II. Modest penniless civil servant, always on the road, Cervantes has no money left. Worse, in 1588, condemned for various embezzlements, he was excommunicated by the Chapter of Seville which accused him of having taken over wheat and barley intended for canons. Twice he is imprisoned. In 1590 he thought of embarking for the Indies (America) but could not do so because of the Inquisition which found him of Jewish origins.

The Cervantes Saavedra family is said to have “converso” ancestors, that is to say Spanish Jews converted to Christianity to escape the Inquisition. In 1600, Cervantès was locked up in the prison of Seville, located at 52 in calle Sierpes. Between four walls, he is serving his sentence while beginning the writing of Don Quixote. Released thanks to a deposit paid by his relatives, he pulls the devil by the tail, but his book walks from the fire of God as soon as it was published in 1605.

A masterpiece of universal literature

Cervantes tells there with a scouring humor the adventures of an old gentleman from Manche (the southern part of Castile) who dreams of resuscitating the forgotten order of the wandering chivalry. Inspired, intoxicated even, by reading the novels of chivalry, Don Quixote (of his real name Alonzo Quijano) decides to leave his lonely and studious life to walk the paths of the English Channel. “Splendor of the English Channel, celestial body of Spain”, mounted on a skinny horse named Rossinante, the hidalgo advances at trotting speed, followed a few meters away by a small mule ridden by Sancho Pança, a brave man of the devoted countryside which serves him as a squire.

There is obviously nothing in common between these two men. The old gentleman wears the medieval and anachronistic outfit of a knight of yesteryear. Wearing a helmet imitating the shape of a beard dish (we call it a salad), he holds a long medieval spear in his hand. He is tall, dry, with an austere face, an ascetic allure and the slender figure of a monk-soldier or a penitent. Her hallucinatory gaze reveals an intense inner quest carried by an almost biblical ethical requirement. The goal of this horseback adventure? It is above all a moral enterprise, founded on the principles of European chivalry: “Revenge the offenses, redress the wrongs, repair the injustices, correct the abuses, pay the debts, defeat the grievances, support the young ladies, defeat the bad guys and defeat the giants.”

Sancho is the opposite of his master: cheeky, round, practical and full of common sense, he only dreams of living well (in short, eating, drinking, sleeping), without spending himself or taking any risks. To stimulate him, Don Quixote promises him the title of governor of the conquered islands if he completes his journey and knows how to overcome the dangers with bravery. For Sancho, happiness is having a little money, living quietly with your family and avoiding trouble. As badly matched as it is, our duo ventures into the harsh and arid landscapes of the Castilian plateau. From village to castle, from inn to hotel, they walk cahin-caha. The idealism and the generosity of the hidalgo seem to be constantly restrained and brought back to reality by his squire in the down to earth spirit. In addition, the ideal of Don Quixote is fueled by a loving mystic. He dedicates the least of his actions to a charming young girl he has never seen but to whom he has boundless love: a young farmer named Dulcinée, living in the village of El Toboso.

This makes the knight all the more exalted. What horrible Sancho who does not understand that we can love platonically an invisible and inaccessible ugly! Like some neurotics of modern times, the old hidalgo of the English Channel does not see reality as it really is but as he dreams it. Like an enlightened man, he ends up believing in his visions. It’s quite simple: Don Quixote does not believe in what he sees, but he sees what he believes. The character of Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey looks like him, but he is still less likely to laugh.

Our man thus confuses peaceful windmills with menacing giants. One of the most famous burlesque scenes is that where he attacks a mill by planting his spear in the canvas of the rotating wings which he has taken for monstrous arms. The faithful Sancho then flies to the aid of his master, knocked down to the ground and half passed out. Our two men therefore face the most diverse obstacles, multiply unusual encounters and get lost in endless tangles. An ordinary flock of sheep turns into a fearsome death squad. Knock on the sheep. Don Quixote brutally spits them with his spear, but a furious shepherd knocks down the wandering knight with a slingshot. Each pitfall, each twist, each altercation takes, along their journey, a carnivalesque dimension that snatches laughter from readers. In short, this is a very serious book, the fruit of a life of experience and observation, which shows the ups and downs of existence, but which we still read today with a laugh.

“Cervantes wrote it to make people laugh. It’s a funny book. People were writhing in laughter when they read it in the 17th century,” says Jacqueline Schulmann, translator of the work for the Editions du Seuil. Is this why the greatest writers claim that Cervantes invented the modern novel? The volume II of Don Quixote, published at the end of the year 1615, ten years after the exit of volume I, will know the same craze. Even the illiterate people of the 17th century know Don Quixote because readers declare it aloud on the forecourt of the cathedral of Seville. Is it not one of the genius traits of its author to have written in a language accessible to all?

In the footsteps of Don Quixote

One year after the publication of volume II, on April 23, 1616, Cervantes, aged 69, died in his house in Calle Leon in Madrid. He was buried the next day, dressed in his Franciscan robe at the Trinitarian convent of Saint-Ildefonse, a religious order which he had approached at the end of his life. Today, his grave has disappeared. In rue Leon, which has since been renamed rue Cervantès, the writer’s last house has also disappeared. At this address, there is just one plaque left. As if the only important thing had been forever written in his work and not in the stone of the monuments.

Similarly, after personal research, it appears that Cervantes has no living descendants today. Its posterity is however immense and crosses the ages. He is the father of a literary masterpiece read by hundreds of millions of readers for four hundred years. Madrid certainly counted in its existence, but it is never mentioned in his book. However, this is perhaps the only city in the world which has dedicated some of its streets to characters from the novel: there are calle Don Quijote, calle Sancho Pança, and even calle Dulcinea! Is there a Gargantua street in Touraine or an Inspector Maigret street in Belgium?

This looks like an almost unique case in the history of letters: the imaginary creature of Cervantes has become a universal human archetype, a symbol that has overshadowed its creator. Some readers still don’t know who Cervantes is today, but they have heard of Don Quixote. Power of Spanish literary genius! The proof? The dictionary has approved two common names: Don Quixote and Don Quixote. The adjective quixotic is not yet official, but it is used. As for Don Juan, he is also a character in Spanish literature (1625, Tirso de Molina) who has become for everyone the archetype of the libertine seducer. Finally, let’s not forget Tartuffe, the character of Molière’s comedy, a universal symbol of deceit and hypocrisy.

Small guide for the use of the wandering knight on the paths of the English Channel

Here we are in the cradle of this unique destiny: Castile. Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547 in Alcalá de Henares, a city located about thirty kilometers north of Madrid. Her father, a modest barber surgeon, was deaf. They say little Miguel stuttering, effeminate, but brilliant poet. It is in Alcalá de Henares that any itinerary must begin in the footsteps of Don Quixote. At the age of 20, following a duel, the young Cervantes was condemned to have his right-hand cut. To escape this sentence, he fled out of the country and became the servant of a cardinal in Rome (and his giton, it is said). In 1570, at the age of 23, he enlisted as an arquebusier in the troop of Don Juan of Austria and fought the Turks at the battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571.

“Certainly, he lost his left hand, but it was for the glory of the right hand! ” Launches José Ignacio González-Aller Hierro, curator of the Naval Museum of Madrid. In the nearby Army museum, we keep the supposed sword that Cervantes carried to Lepanto, as well as his inkwell, two symbolic objects that fixed his destiny. At the time, glory came through arms or the pen! Unable to follow the first path, after the loss of his left hand, Cervantès opted for a literary career. On his return from Lepanto, the valiant soldier is captured by Barbarians and finds himself a prisoner in Algiers. He remained captive there from 1575 to 1580.

For Arrabal, Cervantes would have known the condition of a slave, in addition to that of a servant. After five years of black dungeon and four attempts to escape, he is free and back in Spain. He writes comedies for the theater. He lives. Her captivity marked her, she returns in several of her books and children’s plays: La Vie à Alger, Numance, La Galatée. Works that will launch it anyway in literature.

On December 12, 1584, Cervantès married Catalina de Salazar y Palacios, mainly for financial reasons. He is 37 years old; she has just turned 15… The wedding takes place in the church of Esquivias, a village located about forty kilometers south of Madrid. We got there on a cool spring day. Incredible discovery! The town hall of this large town with white houses has kept the original marriage certificate, written in old Castilian. Let us not forget that the empire of Charles V was nicknamed “the Paper Empire”. Everything was scrupulously noted and recorded by columnists and notaries. The young couple Cervantès lived for several years in Esquivias in the house of a relative of the bride, a man called Don Alonso Quijada Salazar, a simple gentleman living on his income.“The resemblance between this name and that of the hero of the book, Alonzo Quijano, the real name of Don Quixote, is very strange. I think that in reality Cervantes was inspired by the personality of his wife’s uncle to create the character of Don Quixote,” says Eva, the curator of the Casa-Museo Cervantes in Esquivias.

The problem in the English Channel, where most of the adventures told in Don Quixote take placeis that each village wants to have proof that will allow it to affirm that it is the authentic village of origin of Don Quixote. Not the author’s native village, but that of a romantic character, a book hero. Unheard of in art history. Don Quixote is often thought to have existed. Well no: it is a product of the imagination. On this Castilian plateau beaten by the cold winds of winter and crushed by the heat of summer, the line between literature and life no longer exists. Hence our delicious confusion when exploring the English Channel: we no longer know where the real stops and where the imaginary begins.

From the start of Don Quixote, Cervantes seemed to have foreseen what is happening today in his province. He had voluntarily confused the tracks by not giving his reader any precise topographical indication on the village of his hero. “In a town in the English Channel, whose name I do not want to remember, not long ago lived one of these gentlemen with a spear at the rack, old-fashioned leather shield, doggy style for hunting and slender rosse.” These are the first lines of the book. At the end of volume II, Cervantès kills his old knight, who has died down after a life of madness. By confiding in a notary, his hero again muddles the trail.”This was the end of the Ingenious Hidalgo from which Cid Hamet did not want to indicate the native country from time to time, so that all the cities and all the towns of the English Channel would dispute the honor of having given birth to it”. As if again Cervantes had guessed four hundred years in advance the intentions of the municipalities of the English Channel today. Irony of history! Now they are bickering who better to have the honor of announcing that Don Quixote was born there!

Reading the book through a magnifying glass, however, we note a fairly precise indication of Cervantes. Her hero heads to the village of El Toboso to look for her sweetheart. He writes: “(…) the village of Don Quixote is one night and two days from El Toboso. “If we consider that a man on horseback traverses at this time approximately 50 kilometers per day, at normal pace, the village of origin of the hero would be thus with a hundred kilometers at most of El Toboso, rather towards the south since Don Quixote crosses central Spain, zigzagging from the center-east to the northeast. This has led some Cervantists to assert that the village of Villanueva de los Infantes, between Valdepeñas and Albacete, would probably be the “real” village of origin of the hero.

Adventures under the sign of Dulcinea

The village of El Toboso is only a large town, but one of the best preserved in the English Channel. His reputation has gone around the world. Cervantes very often mentions it in his book. As a good visionary, he predicted: “El Toboso will be famous and renowned for centuries. ” From a tourist bus arrives a group of Japanese who visit the Museo-Casa de Dulcinea, in search of the ghost of the beloved bride of Don Quixote. Next to the church, the Centro Cervantino houses the Cervantine Library: more than 450 rare editions of the book Don QuixoteThey are piously exhibited there, written in more than 40 languages. There are editions dedicated by the South African Nelson Mandela, the Polish Lech Walesa, the Egyptian Mubarak, as many personalities from very diverse backgrounds who attest to a global interest in this book. The blind has not been forgotten, there is a Braille edition.

The road crosses a very beautiful landscape, sometimes horizontal, sometimes bumpy, punctuated from time to time by small groups of farms scattered behind thin hedges. Large cultivated fields undulate according to the relief. This Spanish countryside under a sheepish and springtime sky takes you far away. Something special, its arid appearance, encourages spiritual stripping. It is no coincidence that most of the novel takes place there. The only natural obstacles to the glance of the gaze towards the horizon, small stony hills, crowned by fortified castles (like Belmonte), occasionally carry windmills which seem to await the return of the wandering knight. From the plain of Montiel depopulated, in the South, to the grassy plain of Aranjuez, in the North, it is indeed the eternal Channel, as described by Cervantes, a landscape of the soul, severe and ascetic, which nevertheless fits so well with the generous ideal of Don Quixote. Mysterious spirit of the place!

In Campo de Criptana, near the town of Alcázar de San Juan, in Consuegra, further west, dozens of windmills have been restored as historic monuments to the glory of the English Channel and Don Quixote. We join the highway that connects Madrid to Seville, and we stop at Puerto Lapice, a modest village with a great reputation! In the book, Don Quixote and Sancho Pança stop in a very simple inn that the old hidalgo confuses with a castle. He was knighted there by the innkeeper, whom he took for a great lord. The souvenir shops are full of figurines, statuettes, various resin objects, representing the famous duo of the novel. Always the same silhouettes recognizable at first glance:

Innumerable are the advertising panels, the posters and tourist signs, the municipal monuments (statues in iron, bronze, stone, concrete, marble), evoking the epic of the two characters. In Argamasilla de Alba, a house houses the headquarters of the Association of Cervantists, an international group of teachers, translators and researchers from around the world, all specialists (and never in agreement!) Of Cervantès’ work. After descending a staircase dug in the rock of the basement, we arrive by lowering our heads in a sort of cellar called the Cueva de Medrano. This obscure place would have served as a dungeon for Cervantes between 1600 and 1603, during his second detention after the prison on Sierpes street in Seville. The prison does not give talent, but at least the detainee will have had time to write.

In the book, Don Quixote and his squire hide for a few days in a gorge in the Sierra Morena where Sancho mourns the loss of his donkey. In the lagoons of Ruidera (now a natural park), Don Quixote, suspended at the end of a rope, explores the cave of Montesinos. It is not the dark hell announced by Sancho that the old man discovers, but a transparent crystal palace (alcazar) where a sort of bearded Merlin delivers his visions of wisdom to the much-awaited visitor. Another reference to the quest for the Grail.

Other places, other villages appear over the 1,200 pages of the book, proof that the author knew this region of the English Channel, bordering Andalusia, perfectly. He had crossed it on horseback in all weathers, going from Madrid to Seville. Also mentioned is the small town of Almagro where Cervantes played some of his comedies. The little 17th century theater has not aged, embedded like a secret jewel in very old arcaded halls. No inventory to carry out but let us also quote the lost villages of Tirteafuera, between Caracuel and Almodovar del Campo, or of Miguelturra, “2 leagues” from Ciudad Real.

Beloved barcelona

The “official” route of Don Quixote is limited to a trip to the province of La Manche and yet, in the book, it is in Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, that our two characters come to the end of their long journey. Cervantes praises it: “Barcelona, a city unique in location and beauty, an archive of courtesy, a refuge for foreigners, a hospital for the poor, the homeland of the Braves, revenge for offenses and kind correspondence with faithful friendships. ” Unfortunately, at the end of the trip, Don Quixote is not the same: it recognizes the extravagance and deceptive seduction books of chivalry. The enslaved madman returns to reason. Feeling death approaching, the old hidalgo “recognizes his stupidity”. The reader is saddened and no longer laughs as before.

“I was mad, and I am reasonable. I was Don Quixote de la Manche, and I am now Alonzo Quijano the good.” Determined to stop his wandering life, he left Barcelona, and Zaragoza, returns to his village to become a shepherd and lead a quiet life. By a curious transfer, at the same time as his master turns away from it, the squire begins to praise the wandering chivalry. The end of the book in a way consecrates the victory of Sancho’s practical ideas. In fact, one was nothing without the other: two sides of the human soul, idealism and common sense. Cervantes concludes: “He braved the entire universe, was the scarecrow and the bogeyman of the world. What ensured his happiness was to die wise and to have lived mad”.

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