Master Nicholas

Master Nicholas, the village barber, is both a lively judge of romances of chivalry and one of the most resourceful friends trying to bring Don Quixote home. He helps trace the knight after his first disappearance, joins the curate in examining the books blamed for his delusions, and takes part in a rescue plan that depends on disguises and invented identities. The plan makes Nicholas more than a bystander: its practical arrangements place him inside the very romance-inspired performance they are meant to end.

Identity and Literary Judgment

Nicholas’s literary opinions emerge in the village’s spirited comparison of famous knights. The curate argues with Don Quixote about whether Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul was the better knight. Nicholas rejects both as the highest standard, preferring the Knight of Phoebus; he also considers Don Galaor, Amadis’s brother, a worthy rival. In his view, Don Galaor meets every occasion with courage and is neither overly delicate nor given to lamentation. The detail gives Nicholas an individual voice in the conversation: he is not simply a helper summoned to manage Don Quixote, but someone with his own confident ranking of the heroes who have captured the knight’s imagination.

His literary judgment is also bound to the village’s concern about what those books have done. When Don Quixote has been missing for three days, the household is in alarm, and his housekeeper blames his constant reading of romances for his decision to become a knight-errant. Nicholas is among the curate’s close friends who gather at the house as the search brings Don Quixote back. The crisis thus shifts the barber’s knowledge of chivalric books from a matter of debate into a practical question: how to respond to a man whose reading has remade his understanding of the world.

The Search and the Library

After hearing the peasant describe how he found Don Quixote and what the knight said on the way home, the curate becomes more determined to act. The next day he summons Nicholas, and the two go to the house. While Don Quixote sleeps, the curate asks for the keys to the room where the books are kept. Nicholas joins the examination, handling the volumes one by one for the curate to inspect and judge. More than a hundred large, well-bound books, as well as smaller ones, fill the room; the housekeeper even returns with holy water, fearing that the books’ supposed magicians might retaliate against their expulsion.

The scene gives Nicholas a specific role in the effort to contain the consequences of Don Quixote’s reading. The curate makes the judgments, while Nicholas supplies the books for inspection. Their work is deliberate rather than indiscriminate: the curate wants to see what each volume contains because some may not deserve the fire. The barber’s participation connects their shared friendship with a sober, practical response, even as the household’s fear of enchantment echoes the very imaginative world they are trying to curb.

Disguise and the Rescue Plan

Nicholas later joins the curate’s plan to lead Don Quixote away from his adventures. He takes on the part of the princess’s squire, accompanying Dorothea, who presents herself as a princess in need of the knight’s help. Sancho Panza walks on foot, while Nicholas rides a mule. When Don Quixote insists that the curate should not travel on foot, Nicholas dismounts and offers him the saddle. As Nicholas tries to climb up behind him, the hired mule kicks, startling the barber and sending him to the ground. His false beard comes away, exposing the disguise at precisely the moment the group is trying to sustain it.

The mishap threatens to undo the scheme, but the curate quickly retrieves the beard and puts it back, passing the repair off as a charm. Don Quixote accepts the explanation as a marvel and asks to learn the supposed charm, believing it might heal more than a beard. Nicholas’s exposed disguise therefore becomes part of the fiction that keeps the larger disguise intact: the barber’s accident does not reveal the plan to Don Quixote, but instead gives his beliefs another apparent wonder to absorb.

At the inn, Nicholas’s disguise has another borrowed component: the landlady’s tail, used as part of the false beard. When she demands its return, the curate tells Nicholas that the stratagem is no longer needed and that he can appear in his own character. Nicholas gives the tail back. If Don Quixote asks after the princess’s squire, the group has an explanation ready: the squire has gone ahead to announce the princess’s arrival and the coming of her deliverer. The false role is thus retired without abandoning the story that has guided Don Quixote toward home.

Friendship and Narrative Role

The rescue shows Nicholas working in concert with the curate, but his place in the wider circle of village friendship appears again when news reaches Sancho’s family. Teresa Panza speaks of the curate and Nicholas as people who have always been close friends of Sancho’s father. Her words place the barber’s assistance within a continuing relationship, rather than making it a one-time intervention prompted only by Don Quixote’s disappearance.

Nicholas’s actions balance judgment with improvisation. He can argue seriously about the merits of the Knight of Phoebus and Don Galaor, help assess a crowded library, and then maintain a theatrical disguise through a mishap that might have exposed the rescue plan. The comic episode does not make him another deluded knight; it shows a practical friend adapting to Don Quixote’s expectations in order to guide him. His part in the rescue depends on participating in the romance-like fiction, even as its purpose is to bring the knight back to ordinary life.