The scrutiny and burning of Don Quixote’s library is both a household effort to cure his chivalric delusion and a comic demonstration of how little control its guardians have over the stories that shape him. The curate does not judge every book alike: he distinguishes poetry from chivalric romance, preserves works he esteems, and proposes cutting passages from one pastoral book. Yet the eventual fire consumes books the examiner might have saved, while the sealed room and fabricated magician give Don Quixote another enchanted explanation for what has happened.

The Cure and the Books Under Examination

The examination begins from the belief that Don Quixote’s books of chivalry have caused his disorder. His niece, however, fears that simply removing those volumes will not remove the danger. She argues that the pastoral books could lead her uncle to imagine himself a shepherd, wandering through fields and woods, singing and piping; poetry itself, she warns, might prove an infectious affliction. Her concern expands the proposed cure from a ban on chivalric romance to suspicion of imaginative literature more broadly.

The curate accepts that argument as a reason to keep the remaining books out of Don Quixote’s reach, but his verdict on the first pastoral work is not simply to destroy it. He identifies it as the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor and proposes removing the material about the sage Felicia and the magic water, along with almost all its longer verse passages. The prose, he says, may remain, as may the book’s distinction as the first of its kind. His decision makes the examination resemble an editorial operation as much as a purge: the work is judged capable of preservation, but only after its supposedly hazardous elements have been cut away.

Discrimination and Fatigue

The curate’s judgments continue to separate books he regards as valuable from those he condemns. Of two further Diana volumes, he sends the one by the Salamancan author to join the condemned books, while recommending that Gil Polo’s be preserved. The difference matters because the household’s intervention is not represented as a uniform rejection of reading. Its examiner acts as a critic, drawing distinctions among works even while serving a plan to remove books from a vulnerable reader.

That selectivity is especially clear when the curate considers heroic verse. He praises the Araucana, the Austriada, and the Montserrate as the finest Castilian works in that form, says they can stand comparison with Italy’s most celebrated poetry, and regards them as Spain’s richest poetic treasures. Their literary merit earns them protection in his assessment. But that ideal discrimination proves fragile in practice: tired, the curate declines to inspect any more volumes and orders the rest burned without determining their contents. When the barber holds up The Tears of Angelica, the title alone is enough for the curate to recognize the loss that burning it would entail; he praises its author’s standing and the translation of Ovid’s fables. The pause comes too late to prevent a broader failure of inspection.

The Fire and Its Unequal Verdict

That night the housekeeper burns all the books in the yard and throughout the house. The account explicitly recognizes that some volumes deserved preservation in lasting archives, but says their fate was determined by the examiner’s laziness. The proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty thus describes a material consequence, not merely an abstract moral: books judged worthy of survival alongside the condemned are lost because the process becomes indiscriminate once careful scrutiny stops.

The episode holds two standards of judgment in tension. The curate can identify particular works as meritorious and even prescribe selective alteration, yet the household’s practical remedy ends in the destruction of unexamined books. The fire therefore does not enact a coherent literary canon. It exposes the difference between the curate’s critical judgments and the sweeping action taken in the name of curing Don Quixote. The preserved titles and the accidental losses together make the library’s fate a record of both discernment and error.

The Sealed Room and the Magician’s Story

Destroying the books is not enough for the curate and the barber: they also have the room walled up and plastered over, hoping Don Quixote will not find the place where the collection had been. They decide that, if he asks, they can say a magician carried away the room and its contents. Two days later, Don Quixote rises and goes directly to look for his books. Where the door used to be, he feels the wall and searches with his eyes, saying nothing for a long while before asking the housekeeper where the room has gone.

The household supplies the explanation it has prepared. The housekeeper says that the devil carried everything away; the niece instead describes a magician arriving on a cloud, riding a serpent, entering the room, and departing through the roof amid smoke. She gives the supposed visitor the name Sage Munaton and attributes the destruction to a private grudge against the owner of the books. These incompatible details show the cover story being improvised, but its central claim matches the magical framework through which Don Quixote understands his life. In trying to hide the physical evidence of their intervention, his guardians furnish him with a new enchantment and allow the library’s disappearance to continue his imagined story.