Sancho's proverbs, ranked
My squire speaks in proverbs the way a fountain speaks in water. I have ranked a few, with my verdicts.
I have told Sancho a thousand times that a proverb, like salt, is good in moderation and ruinous by the handful. He agrees, and then answers me with six proverbs on the subject of moderation. He strings them together like onions on a rope, one pulling the next, until the meaning is lost somewhere in the middle and we are both standing in a field wondering what the question was.
And yet. I have kept a record of some of his sayings, partly as a penance and partly because, I confess, a few of them are wiser than half the philosophers in my library. I give them here, ranked from those I most admire to those I most deplore, with the occasion on which each was said, so that the reader may judge for himself.
| Proverb | When he said it | My verdict |
|---|---|---|
| A good heart breaks bad luck. | After the windmills, while helping me up | Worthy of Seneca. I nearly wept. |
| Hunger is the best sauce, and poor men never lack it. | Eating dry bread and onions under a cork oak | True, and so modestly put that I forgave the onions. |
| Who goes to borrow wool may come home shorn. | Before I attacked the flocks of sheep | Correct, as it turned out, but a squire should not be correct at such moments. |
| Better a sheep's tail of your own than a lion's head of someone else's. | On leaving his island | Sound. A little bitter. He had earned it. |
| Every cloud passes, but some pass slowly. | In the rain, near the fulling mills | A pretty saying. I suspect he invented it. |
| The fox who counts the hens is not the one who feeds them. | Of the Duke's steward | Shrewd, and possibly slanderous. I have struck it from the record. It remains on the record. |
| Where there are bacon hooks, there may be no bacon. | On being shown the Duke's kitchen | I do not understand this one, and neither does he. |
| A closed mouth catches no flies, but it catches no supper either. | When I told him to be silent at dinner | Disobedient, and very amusing. I punished him by laughing. |
| The church bell rings for everyone and goes to mass for no one. | Of the priest | Uncharitable. Do not repeat it to the priest. |
| Give him who gives, and take from him who takes, and eat a little sausage. | At Camacho's wedding, while eating a great deal of sausage | Three proverbs fused into one, and the third is not a proverb but a plan. |
The reader will notice a pattern. Most of Sancho's best sayings are about food, many of his worst ones are also about food, and the few that are not about food were said while he was eating. He tells me this is because the belly carries the heart, and not the other way round. I tell him the heart should carry the belly, and he says that his would need a cart.
Still, he has served me loyally through windmills and wineskins, through blankets, boats and wooden horses, and he has never once used a proverb to excuse running away, which is more than can be said for many educated men with quotations from the Latin. If he must speak in proverbs, then let him. I would rather have one squire who talks too much than a hundred who say nothing at all.
When I told him this, he said: a full barn is noisier than an empty one. I have added it to the list. It is somewhere in the middle.
La Mancha