ABSTRACT
The magician Parafaragaramus, and his moral guidance of Don Quixote, changed drastically in French culture throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reflecting a shift from a religious and mythical worldview to one more empirically scientific. While Don Quixote continued on his course as an icon of non-conforming idealism, his former mentor gradually drifted apart from him and was transformed into an alter ego, a figure whose power had remade his literary protégé but after the French revolution went on to help implement new social reforms. An example is his fictional collaboration with Benjamin Franklin in writing the constitution of Pennsylvania. From there his capacity to improve people's shared lives was downgraded to something like investigative reporting, similar to his original power to know and reprimand any unethical behavior even dreamed of by Don Quixote. That role led him back into his Punch-and-Judy role of actively pursuing rule breakers, done so zealously that he was sometimes called a thief of happiness. That removed any vestiges of respected authority or associations with progress, making him into a stage magician, an object of ridicule, and finally a dangerous scientist harming nature and linked to Don Quixote only by his mad delusions.
