Dorothea’s impersonation of Princess Micomicona turns a rescue plan into a chivalric adventure that Don Quixote can accept on his own terms. Rather than confront his belief in knight-errantry, the curate and his companions stage a plea for help in which Dorothea appears to be a wronged princess and Don Quixote becomes the knight whose intervention she needs. The ruse succeeds in drawing him away from his rocky retreat and securing a pledge to pursue her cause, while leaving the supposed injury and kingdom entirely within the fiction they have constructed for him.

The Rescue Plan

Don Quixote has refused Sancho Panza’s attempt to persuade him to leave the wilderness. Sancho has told him that Dulcinea expects him at El Toboso, but Don Quixote insists that he cannot appear before her until he has performed deeds worthy of her favor. Sancho fears that if this self-imposed penance continues, his own hopes of advancement will also be postponed. The curate answers that they will bring Don Quixote away even against his will, then explains the plan to Cardenio and Dorothea.

Dorothea proposes to play the distressed damsel herself. She has read many books of chivalry and says she knows how such a woman should appeal to a knight-errant. Her familiarity with the genre makes her not merely a person in costume but the author and performer of a role designed around Don Quixote’s expectations. The curate accepts the proposal, and the group moves quickly from discussion to preparation.

The plan also depends on keeping familiar faces from disrupting the performance. Dorothea rides the curate’s mule, while the barber attaches an ox-tail beard as part of his disguise. Sancho is told not to let Don Quixote recognize either man, since the success of the scheme depends on his believing the scene before him. The curate and Cardenio stay behind at first: Cardenio does not want the earlier quarrel with Don Quixote to come back to mind, and the curate sees no need to appear yet. They follow more slowly while Dorothea and the barber go ahead with Sancho.

Dorothea Becomes Princess Micomicona

Dorothea’s disguise is assembled from belongings she has carried with her: a complete petticoat of rich material, a fine green mantle, a necklace, and other ornaments from a small box. She explains that she brought them from home in case she needed them, though she has not used them before. In these clothes she presents herself as a grand lady. Sancho, who has never seen a woman he considers so beautiful, asks the curate who she is and why she has come to such a remote place.

The curate supplies the story that makes her appearance legible to Sancho. She is, he says, the heiress in the direct male line of the great Kingdom of Micomicon, a princess who has come from Guinea to seek Don Quixote’s help against a wicked giant who has wronged her. The tale borrows the familiar materials of romance—distant lands, a dispossessed ruler, a giant, and a celebrated knight—and gives Sancho a practical reason to support it. He hopes that if Don Quixote restores the princess’s kingdom, his own promised future will advance as well.

Sancho goes further, urging the curate to recommend that Don Quixote marry the princess. He fears that his master may instead become an archbishop, an office for which Sancho believes his married state would be an obstacle to securing a profitable position. Marriage, in his calculation, would lead toward an empire and toward the reward he expects for himself. His credulity is therefore mixed with self-interest: he takes the invented kingdom seriously because it appears to offer a route to the hopes he has attached to Don Quixote’s adventures.

The Plea and the Pledge

After traveling about three-quarters of a league, the party finds Don Quixote clothed but without his armor among the rocks. Sancho identifies him, and Dorothea rides forward with the bearded barber following. The barber’s attendant role supports the scene, while Dorothea dismounts and kneels before Don Quixote. Her appeal is framed as a formal request from a distant, afflicted woman to a knight famed for defending the helpless. She will not rise until he grants the boon she seeks.

Don Quixote initially refuses to hear the details before she stands. Dorothea persists, and Sancho quietly assures his master that the request is harmless: it is only a matter of killing a giant, and the petitioner is Princess Micomicona. Don Quixote answers that he will act according to his duty and conscience as a knight. He then allows the supposed princess to rise and grants the boon before she has fully stated its terms.

Dorothea makes the request precise: Don Quixote must accompany her wherever she leads and undertake no other adventure or quest until he has avenged her against the traitor who has usurped her kingdom. He accepts. His promise is not simply to help her in general; it binds him to her cause and temporarily rules out competing adventures. He assures her that, with God’s help and his arm, she will regain her throne, and urges that they begin without delay.

The Fiction Holds

Once Don Quixote has pledged himself, he refuses Dorothea’s attempt to kiss his hands, helps her rise, and embraces her courteously. He orders Sancho to check Rocinante’s girths and arm him at once. Sancho takes down the armor, which has been hung on a tree, and equips his master. Don Quixote’s return to armor marks the practical consequence of the performance: the man who had remained in the wilderness now has a destination and a new undertaking. The ruse works by translating the companions’ desire to bring him home into the language of a knight’s obligation.

The party sustains the fiction as they travel. Don Quixote praises the supposed princess’s cause but objects to excessive praise of himself, while still promising that his strength will be at her service. When he asks why the curate is traveling alone and lightly equipped, the curate invents a second account: he and Master Nicholas were traveling to Seville to collect money when footpads robbed them, and the barber needed a false beard after losing his own. He then tells Don Quixote that neighborhood talk blames the robbery on galley slaves who had recently been freed by a daring man.

That story brings the consequences of Don Quixote’s earlier intervention into the rescue scene. The curate describes the liberator as a lawless man who has opposed justice and released dangerous offenders, but does not name Don Quixote. Sancho has already told the curate and the barber who freed the galley slaves. Don Quixote changes color at the account, yet does not reveal that he was the liberator. The staged princess story therefore sits alongside a more uncomfortable truth: his own chivalric actions have already produced consequences that others condemn, even as he commits himself to another supposed act of redress.

Narrative Function

The episode makes performance the means of managing Don Quixote’s delusion. The curate and his companions do not persuade him that his imagined world is false; they supply a role within it that will move him in the direction they want. Dorothea’s reading of chivalric books gives her the knowledge to make the appeal convincing, while the clothes, jewelry, beard, mule, and carefully withheld identities furnish its visible and practical details.

The plan also exposes the different motives gathered around the fiction. Dorothea offers the performance as a way to carry out the rescue; Sancho accepts the princess’s story in the hope that it will bring him closer to wealth and rank; and Don Quixote responds to the demand as a test of his knightly duty. Their purposes are not the same, but the invented grievance briefly aligns them. The episode ends not with the resolution of the princess’s supposed wrong, but with Don Quixote armed and committed to follow her, allowing the rescue party to guide him onward without breaking the imaginative framework that governs his choices.