His deeds get him into trouble. Part One abounds in buffets that unhorse him, knock out his teeth, bathe him in blood and muddy him all over. Part Two has a less rollicking mood. Cervantes has been affected by Don Quixote. But there is worse: Don Quixote, enacting Justice, brings trouble to others--and to the best of them. There is the boy whom he frees from a flogging master, and who is flogged the worse, in payment for the humiliation the master has suffered from Don Quixote. There is the freeing of the convicts--a menace to every household in the land. There is the freeing of the lion, to the probable disgrace of the poor keeper. Don Quixote wrecks funerals: he maims an innocent Penitent for life. He unhinges Sancho’s peace: brings the anarchy of ambition into the breast of this sweet clod of the earth. He visits destruction upon the unfortunate inns which he takes for castles. He robs a barber of his copper dish. He drubs innocent servants. He smashes the sole fortune of Maese Pedro--his set of puppets. He commits sacrilege even: plunging full-tilt upon a pilgrimage of disciplinants, breaking legs and wresting from the outraged hand of a priest an image of the Virgin. Though he offends many and amuses more, he convinces no one. That a prophet should inspire jeers and hatred is natural: but that he should have not one disciple? and that at the end of his mission, he should recant, and call his mission folly? How can such win the love of the world? The strong whom he encounters laugh at him. The weak flee from him. The Nurse and his niece do not laugh: they weep and tear their hair for his unseemly conduct. In the bachelor Carrasco he inspires a nagging irritation. This man is common sense incarnate: he is ill-at-ease before the irreducible vision of the artist. He goes out of his way to down him: dons the armor of folly in order to bring home the fool. This must not be construed as altruism. Carrasco pays tribute to Don Quixote, in despite of himself. It is his own peace he is after. He is aware, albeit far too rational ever to admit it to himself, that this utter idealist stalking La Mancha robs his small reality of ease. Common sense--the sense of approximation and of compromise--is fragile and is nervous. It must sequester the poet-prophet in his home town. Perhaps the ugliest episode in the book treats of the knight’s entertainment in the castle of the Duke and Duchess. They are the worldly-wise, the worldly-cultured, even as Carrasco is the pragmatist. They take Don Quixote in; and make him a show for their own genteel delectation. They are the perpetual patron of the artist. They feed him, flatter him, serve him: everything but believe him. Their minds hold him safe from their hearts. And nowhere does the knight of the Sorrowful Figure appear so pathetic, so ridiculous, so disarmed, as under this ducal roof where he is lionized and where whole pageantries are enacted to pander to his need of enacting Justice.