The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 08
1605
Translated by John Ormsby
In the wilds of the Sierra Morena, where Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have fled after their humiliating defeat, a saddle-pad hanging from a bush promises adventure. Inside it: a fortune in gold, embroidered handkerchiefs, and personal relics. The knight is certain this belongs to some disgraced knight, and so they wait. What they find instead is Cardenio, a young man whose mind has shattered not from reading romances, but from a betrayal so cruel it has driven him to live like a beast in the mountains. His story of friendship turned to jealousy, of honor corrupted by lust, collides with Don Quixote's own delusions in ways that are both comic and devastating. Here the novel shifts tone: the farce of the knight-errant meets genuine human catastrophe. Cardenio's tragedy will unfold across several chapters, but it begins here, in this meeting of two madmen, one performing madness, one broken by it.
