Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, not long ago there lived a gentleman of the kind who kept a lance in the rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound. A stew of mostly beef, with some mutton, cold chopped meat most nights, scraps and eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, an occasional pigeon as a treat on Sundays, consumed three-quarters of his income. The rest went on a fine woolen coat, velvet breeches for holidays with matching slippers, and homespun for weekdays. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a young man who worked both in the fields and in town, who could saddle the old horse as well as handle the pruning shears. Our gentleman was around fifty years old; he was of sturdy build, lean, and gaunt-faced; a keen early riser and a lover of the hunt. They say that he bore the surname Quijada or Quesada (there is some disagreement on this point among the authors who write about this case), although reasonable conjecture suggests that he was called Quijana; but this matters little to our story; it is enough that in the telling of it, we do not stray one bit from the truth.
It should be known, then, that this aforementioned gentleman, in the times when he was idle (which was most of the year) devoted himself to reading books of chivalry with such enthusiasm and pleasure that he almost completely forgot about the exercise of hunting, and even the administration of his estate; and his curiosity and madness in this matter reached such a point that he sold many acres of arable land to buy books of chivalry to read; and so he brought home as many of them as he could find; and of all of them none seemed to him as good as those composed by the famous Feliciano de Silva: because the clarity of his prose, and those intricate phrases of his, seemed to him like pearls; and especially when he came to read those compliments and letters of challenge, where in many places he found written: the reason for the unreason that to my reason is done, in such a way my reason weakens, that with reason I complain of your beauty, and also when he read: the high heavens that of your divinity divinely with the stars are fortified, and make you worthy of the merit that your greatness deserves. With these and similar phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind, and stayed awake trying to understand them, and unravel their meaning, which Aristotle himself would not have been able to extract or understand, if he had been resurrected for that purpose alone. He was not very happy with the wounds that Don Belianis gave and received, because he imagined that no matter how great the masters who had healed him, he would still have his face and entire body full of scars and marks; but with all that he praised in his author that ending his book with the promise of that never-ending adventure, and many times he felt the desire to take up the pen and finish it to the letter as promised there; and without a doubt he would have done so, and even succeeded, if other greater and continuous thoughts had not prevented him.