page_title: Don Quixote
section_title: The Third Sally
hierarchical_section_title: Don Quixote / Summary / Part 2 / The Third Sally
caption_attribution_description: Español: Billete de 1 peseta (Anverso). Banco de España. Madrid, 19 de noviembre de 1951. Luis Gasca Collection.
context_page_description: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, or just Don Quixote, is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes. It was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. A founding work of Western literature, it is often labeled "the first modern novel" and many authors consider it to be the best literary work ever written.
  The plot revolves around the adventures of a noble from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical monologues on knighthood, already considered old-fashioned at the time. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story.
context_section_description: When strangers encounter the duo in person, they already know their famous history. A Duke and Duchess, and others, deceive Don Quixote for entertainment, setting forth a string of imagined adventures resulting in a series of practical jokes. Some of them put Don Quixote's sense of chivalry and his devotion to Dulcinea through many tests. Pressed into finding Dulcinea, Sancho brings back three ragged peasant girls and tells Don Quixote that they are Dulcinea and her ladies-in-waiting. When Don Quixote only sees the peasant girls, Sancho pretends (reversing some incidents of Part One) that their derelict appearance results from an enchantment.
  Sancho later gets his comeuppance for this when, as part of one of the Duke and Duchess's pranks, the two are led to believe that the only method to release Dulcinea from her spell is for Sancho to give himself three thousand three hundred lashes. Sancho naturally resists this course of action, leading to friction with his master. Under the Duke's patronage, Sancho eventually gets a governorship, though it is false, and he proves to be a wise and practical ruler although this ends in humiliation as well. Near the end, Don Quixote reluctantly sways towards sanity.
  The lengthy untold "history" of Don Quixote's adventures in knight-errantry comes to a close after his battle with the Knight of the White Moon (a young man from Don Quixote's hometown who had previously posed as the Knight of Mirrors) on the beach in Barcelona, in which the reader finds him conquered. Bound by the rules of chivalry, Don Quixote submits to prearranged terms that the vanquished is to obey the will of the conqueror: here, it is that Don Quixote is to lay down his arms and cease his acts of chivalry for the period of one year (in which he may be cured of his madness). He and Sancho undergo one more prank by the Duke and Duchess before setting off.
  Upon returning to his village, Don Quixote announces his plan to retire to the countryside as a shepherd, but his housekeeper urges him to stay at home. Soon after, he retires to his bed with a deathly illness, and later awakes from a dream, having fully recovered his sanity. Sancho tries to restore his faith, but Quixano (his proper name) only renounces his previous ambition and apologizes for the harm he has caused. He dictates his will, which includes a provision that his niece will be disinherited if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry. After Alonso Quixano dies, the author emphasizes that there are no more adventures to relate and that any further books about Don Quixote would be spurious.
caption: Don Quixote on a 1951 1 Peseta banknote.
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