“The reason of the unreason done to my reason so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.” And also when he read: “…the high heavens that divinely fortify you in your divinity with the stars, and make you deserving of the deserving that your greatness deserves.”

These lines are an imitation of Feliciano de Silva’s manner, pushed only a little past the real thing. The trick is one figure used without mercy: the same root bent into different forms and set side by side. Razón comes four times, plus sinrazón; then divinidad meets divinamente, and merecedora, merecimiento and merece all land in one clause. Each phrase sounds grand and folds back on itself as soon as you ask what it means. The lady’s beauty does the lover a sinrazón, a wrong. It eats away his razón, his reason, until there is little of it left. Cervantes aims the joke at that word. The gentleman reads sentences about a lover losing his reason, and the next sentence of the novel says he lost his own trying to understand them. Cervantes is mocking prose that mistakes sound for sense, and the readers who admire it for exactly that.