Altisidora serenades Don Quixote and stages the cat attack

Altisidora serenades Don Quixote at the Duke and Duchess’s castle, where a professed courtship becomes a test of his constancy and a prelude to a cruel practical joke. He answers the song by reaffirming his exclusive devotion to Dulcinea; shortly afterward, the Duke and Duchess unleash bells and cats at his chamber window, leaving him wounded and abed for five days. The episode turns the conventions of a chivalric serenade into court entertainment, but its laughter has a physical cost for its target.

The Serenade and Its Audience

The encounter begins at night, when Don Quixote, sleepless in the warmth, opens a grated window overlooking the garden. Below, he hears Altisidora confide to her companion Emerencia that the stranger has made her unable to sing without weeping. She worries that the Duchess might discover them, and that Don Quixote might not hear her; Emerencia assures her that he is awake. Altisidora then hesitates because a song might expose her feelings or make her seem wanton, before deciding that a blush is preferable to a sore heart. The exchange makes clear that the performance is meant to reach him: when he pretends to sneeze, the women are delighted, and Altisidora begins her ballad.

The song casts the knight as a celebrated Manchegan of extraordinary purity and virtue, praises his appearance and voice, and identifies the singer as Altisidora, a damsel of the household. Its courtly flattery borrows the familiar shape of romance, while the setting—a woman singing from the garden beneath a man’s window—recalls the very conventions Don Quixote has absorbed from his Books of chivalry. He immediately reads the scene as one of those adventures. Rather than ask whether the serenade is sincere, he fits it to the pattern of a damsel overcome by love and resolves not to yield.

Don Quixote’s Answer

His response is an inward declaration of fidelity to Dulcinea. He complains that women who look upon him fall in love, as though their pursuit were an injustice to the lady whose love already possesses him. In a series of contrasts, he makes himself yielding to Dulcinea and resistant to everyone else: to her he is “dough and sugar-paste,” but to other women “flint”; for her he is “honey,” for them “aloes.” The hyperbole makes his refusal both comic and absolute. Altisidora may sing or grieve, he insists to himself, but his constancy will survive every enchantment and every rival.

The following morning, Don Quixote appears in the castle’s gallery dressed with deliberate solemnity. He has put on travelling boots to conceal the damage to his stockings, along with his chamois suit, scarlet mantle, green velvet cap, sword, and rosary. Altisidora and her companion lie in wait; at the sight of him Altisidora pretends to faint, and her friend hastens to loosen her dress. The performance continues as a public scene, with the household watching. Don Quixote, in turn, sings of Dulcinea’s image fixed in his heart and of constancy as the quality that elevates love. The serenade has thus prompted not reciprocal courtship but a counter-song that restates the same unyielding allegiance.

The Bell-and-Cat Prank

While Don Quixote’s song is still being heard, a cord carrying more than a hundred bells is lowered from the gallery above his window. A great sackful of cats follows, smaller bells tied to their tails. The noise and scrambling animals startle the castle’s occupants—even the Duke and Duchess, who arranged the joke—and two or three cats slip through the grating into Don Quixote’s chamber. They extinguish the candles and race about in the darkness, turning a contrived disturbance into a frightening, uncontrolled-seeming melee.

Don Quixote draws his sword and attacks what he takes to be a rabble of enchanters, crying, “Avaunt, malignant enchanters! avaunt, ye witchcraft-working rabble!” He slashes at the cats as they rush for the window. One, cornered by his blows, leaps onto his face and clings to his nose. The Duke and Duchess hurry to the room with lights and a master-key; when the Duke tries to pull the animal away, Don Quixote demands to fight the supposed demon hand to hand. The cat, indifferent to his challenge, continues to scratch and bite until the Duke removes it and throws it out of the window.

Injury and Aftermath

The encounter leaves Don Quixote’s face full of punctures and his nose badly hurt. Altisidora herself applies bandages with oil of St John’s wort, turning the supposed beloved into the attendant at the wounded knight’s bedside. As she tends him, she blames his insensibility and obstinacy, and wishes that Sancho Panza will forget to whip himself so that Dulcinea will never be released from her enchantment. Her words link the flirtation to the larger castle entertainment surrounding Dulcinea’s supposed disenchantment, while also making Altisidora’s role in Don Quixote’s ordeal pointedly ambiguous: she woos him, nurses him, and reproaches him for refusing her.

Don Quixote answers her only with deep sighs. He thanks the Duke and Duchess for coming to his aid, explaining that he recognizes their good intentions rather than fearing the supposed enchanters. The narrator nevertheless makes plain the prank’s cost: the hosts had not expected it to affect him so severely, and he spends five days confined to bed. The episode’s reversal is characteristic of the castle’s mock adventures: a scene that Don Quixote interprets as a chivalric assault is actually a joke devised by his aristocratic hosts, yet the scratches and confinement are real. His imagination supplies the enemy; the court supplies the danger.