An elderly gentleman in La Mancha reads so many romances of chivalry that his brains dry up and he decides to become a knight errant, riding out on a bony horse with a basin on his head to right the wrongs of the world. Miguel de Cervantes published the first part in 1605 and invented, almost by accident, the modern novel. The comedy is broad and physical, windmills mistaken for giants, inns for castles, but beneath it runs a question that has never been settled: is Quixote a fool or the only sane man in a world too cynical for ideals? Sancho Panza, his squire, begins as a foil and ends as a believer. Cervantes, himself a wounded soldier and former captive, knew that the line between delusion and faith is the narrowest in human experience.