Altisidora’s unrequited love for Don Quixote

Altisidora’s unrequited love for Don Quixote reaches its clearest expression at the moment he leaves the castle: she turns farewell into a public lament, while he treats her passion as hers alone and refuses to accept blame for it. The episode sets theatrical declaration against guarded courtesy, then punctures the drama with a misplaced-garters joke. Her attachment is voiced forcefully, but it does not alter his purpose or delay his departure.

Departure and Public Lament

The scene unfolds on the morning Don Quixote is to leave. He appears in full armor in the courtyard, watched by the castle household and by The Duke and The Duchess. Sancho Panza is already mounted on Dapple, with his travel gear; he is delighted by the little purse of two hundred gold crowns that The Duke’s majordomo has given him for the road. Don Quixote does not yet know about the money. This busy farewell provides Altisidora with an audience as well as a departing object of devotion: from among the duennas and handmaidens, she raises her voice in a song addressed to the knight.

Her lament casts Don Quixote as a cruel lover in flight. She asks why he is spurring his horse and insists that she is no dragon or threat, but a tender lamb. The contrast makes her complaint at once plaintive and playful: she presents herself as harmless, yet gives the departing knight the role of a man abandoning a woman who has loved him. Her praise of her own beauty, likened to that of a classical goddess, heightens the song’s mock-heroic register. The performance enlarges a private, unanswered attachment into a public accusation.

The refrain sharpens that accusation by calling Don Quixote names associated with men who abandon women, then wishing misfortune on him. Altisidora’s curses do not remain focused on her own disappointment. She connects his supposed betrayal of her with the continuing enchantment of Dulcinea, wishing that Sancho receive no mercy and that Dulcinea remain enchanted. In her song, Don Quixote’s failure to return her feelings becomes the imagined cause of harm to someone else. The linkage gives the lament its pointed irony: she measures his conduct toward her against his devotion to Dulcinea, the lady whose cause actually governs his journey.

Don Quixote’s Answer

Don Quixote does not answer the song directly. Instead, while Altisidora continues to lament, he turns to Sancho and asks whether he has taken the three kerchiefs and the garters she mentions. The shift from an accusation of lovelessness to a question about small missing possessions is comic, but it also shows what Don Quixote chooses to address. He does not accept the song’s account of himself as a faithless lover; he asks for the truth about the alleged theft. Sancho admits that he has the kerchiefs but denies having the garters.

The Duke then sustains the accusation as a matter of hospitality and honor. Since Don Quixote has received the castle’s welcome, The Duke says, taking even kerchiefs would be shameful, and he challenges the knight to return the garters or face a duel. His threat invokes the earlier encounter involving Tosilos, whose features, The Duke says, had been altered by enchanters. The joke gives the supposed theft the form of a chivalric dispute, pressing Don Quixote to defend both his conduct and his reputation before the watching household.

Don Quixote replies that he will return the kerchiefs because Sancho says he has them, but denies responsibility for the garters: neither he nor Sancho has them, he says, and Altisidora should search her hiding places. He also refuses to draw his sword against The Duke, from whom he has received hospitality and favors. His defense therefore rests on two distinct grounds: he will correct the part of the charge that Sancho’s admission supports, but he will not confess to an act he says he did not commit. As for Altisidora’s passion, he says that her own confession shows her to be in love and that this is not his fault. He asks The Duke to think better of him and to let him continue his journey.

The Garters and the Farewell

The Duchess wishes Don Quixote success and says that his continued presence inflames the hearts of the damsels who see him. She promises to chastise Altisidora so that she will not transgress again with either her eyes or her words. Her response recognizes the spectacle of the song while treating it as behavior to be checked, not as a claim that obliges Don Quixote to return affection. The episode thus places the woman’s bold expression of desire inside the household’s public order: The Duchess can rebuke her, while Don Quixote asks to leave.

Altisidora then withdraws the charge about the garters. She asks Don Quixote’s pardon and admits that she is wearing them, comparing her mistake to searching for an ass while already mounted on it. That correction collapses the apparent theft and the threatened duel into a practical joke of mistaken possession. Sancho seizes on the admission to defend himself: he says he is hardly the sort to conceal thefts, even though opportunities had been available during his governorship. The exchange recalls his recent position and ends the false accusation with his characteristic appeal to his own conduct.

Don Quixote bows to The Duke and The Duchess and to the assembled onlookers, turns Rocinante, and rides out, with Sancho following on Dapple. His course is set for Saragossa. The final action gives the relationship its decisive shape: Altisidora has made her desire and disappointment audible to the whole household, but Don Quixote neither answers her as a lover nor abandons his journey. His courtesy is real, his denial of theft is emphatic, and his explanation of her love places responsibility for it outside himself. The scene’s comic reversal leaves her declaration unanswered even as the mistaken evidence against him is cleared.