He was conceived and formed, as a broken writer’s bitter turning against his heroic soul and his heroic age; he becomes the Body of sublime acceptance--the symbol of what his misfortunes were to mock. Cervantes’ conscious will has no firm hold on Don Quixote. And this is plain almost from the outset in the fact that the Manchegan knight, despite his author’s assurance, _is not mad_. We had an inkling of this already in the too conscious, too ironic naming of Rocinante. Soon the proofs multiply; for the clown-blows that continue to rain upon Don Quixote in Part One cannot hold him from his organic growth. With Part Two, written ten years later, the blows and buffets are less frequent. Cervantes has had time to catch up with and humbly to accept his son. In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whom henceforth he will worship. Her he makes his “truth”; there is no evidence that the _fact_ of the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet, indeed he needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This shall be the golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the parley before and after with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight accepts Sancho’s _fact_ about the dish: he merely turns the fact, for his own purpose, into “truth.”