ers and landlords, brigands and bachelors—stands one old man with a secret. He is a case for the psychologists: he attempts to deceive the whole world. But he is not so sly that you cannot catch him at his game. Here and there he betrays himself. The main lines of his plot appear now and then in his words. The threads of his veil of deception are revealed by flashes of full light.
Don Quixote is the man grown tired of the life of every-day.
His poor, homely, respectable life with his curate and his womenfolk bores him to death. All his restricted provinciality, with its scanty moments of relief in hunting or reading, palls upon him. He wants to amuse himself for a while. Chivalry, as he has learned it in the great romances, offers him the bright path of a masquerade without peril. As a man of letters and of experience he understands that he cannot suddenly change his way of life without a pretext. And he sees just one harmless path of liberation: madness.
Partly in earnest and partly in fun he therefore feigns that he is mad. His madness is as noble and as literary as the man himself. It does not interfere with his Catholic faith, so necessary to one who seeks to live without disaster; indeed it takes on the aspect of an evangelical crusade, so far as it may do so within the limits of the indispensable imitation.
