The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Volume 1 (of 3)

[Transcriber's note: the illustrations in the source volumes were uncaptioned. The captions I've added are my best guess as to what is going on in the illustrations.]

[Frontispiece: Gil Blas being presented to royalty]

Alain René Le Sage

The Adventures

Of

Gil Blas

Of Santillane

Translated From The French By Tobias Smollett

Preceded By

_A Biographical And Critical Notice Of Le Sage_

By George Saintsbury

With Twelve Original Etchings by R. de Los Rios

_In Three Volumes--Vol. I._

LONDON J. C. NIMMO AND BAIN 14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C. NEW YORK: SCRIBNER, WELFORD & CO. 1881

The Author'S Declaration.

There are some people in the world so mischievous as not to read a work without applying the vicious or ridiculous characters it may happen to contain to eminent or popular individuals. I protest publicly against the pretended discovery of any such likenesses. My purpose was to represent human life historically as it exists: God forbid I should hold myself out as a portrait-painter. Let not the reader then take to himself public property; for if he does, he may chance to throw an unlucky light on his own character: as Phædrus expresses it, _Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam_.

Certain physicians of Castille, as well as of France, are sometimes a little too fond of trying the bleeding and lowering system on their patients. Vices, their patrons, and their dupes, are of every day's occurrence. To be sure, I have not always adopted Spanish manners with scrupulous exactness; and in the instance of the players at Madrid, those who know their disorderly modes of living may reproach me with softening down their coarser traits: but this I have been induced to do from a sense of delicacy, and in conformity with the manners of my own country.

Gil Blas To The Reader

Reader! hark you, my friend! Do not begin the story of my life till I have told you a short tale.

Two students travelled together from Penafiel to Salamanca. Finding themselves tired and thirsty, they stopped by the side of a spring on the road. While they were resting there, after having quenched their thirst, by chance they espied on a stone near them, even with the ground, part of an inscription, in some degree effaced by time, and by the tread of flocks in the habit of watering at that spring. Having washed the stone, they were able to trace these words in the dialect of Castille: _Aqui està encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias_. "Here lies interred the soul of the licentiate Peter Garcias."

Hey-day! roars out the younger, a lively, heedless fellow, who could not get on with his deciphering for laughter: This is a good joke indeed: "Here lies interred the soul." ... A soul interred! ... I should like to know the whimsical author of this ludicrous epitaph. With this sneer he got up to go away. His companion, who had more sense, said within himself: Underneath this stone lies some mystery; I will stay, and see the end of it. Accordingly, he let his comrade depart, and without loss of time began digging round about the stone with his knife till he got it up. Under it he found a purse of leather, containing a hundred ducats, with a card on which was written these words in Lathi: "Whoever thou art who hast wit enough to discover the meaning of the inscription, I appoint thee my heir, in the hope thou wilt make a better use of my fortune than I have done!" The student, out of his wits at the discovery, replaced the stone in its former position, and set out again on the Salamanca road with the soul of the licentiate in his pocket.

Now, my good friend and reader, no matter who you are, you must be like one or the other of these two students. If you cast your eye over my adventures without fixing it on the moral concealed under them, you will derive very little benefit from the perusal: but if you read with attention you will find that mixture of the useful with the agreeable, so successfully prescribed by Horace.

Contents Of Vol. I.

Biographical And Critical Notice Of Le Sage, By George Saintsbury

Book The First.

Chapter I.

The Birth and Education of Gil Blas.

Chapter II.

Gil Blas's Alarm on his Road to Pegnaflor; his Adventures on his Arrival in that Town; and the Character of the Men with whom he Supped.

Chapter III.

The Muleteer's Temptation on the Road; its Consequences, and the Situation of Gil Blas between Scylla and Charybdis.

Chapter IV.

Description of the Subterranean Dwelling and its Contents.

Chapter V.

The Arrival of the Banditti in the Subterraneous Retreat, with an Account of their Pleasant Conversation.

Chapter VI.

The Attempt of Gil Blas to Escape, and its Success.

Chapter VII.

Gil Blas, not being able to do what he likes, does what he can.

Chapter VIII.

Gil Blas goes out with the Gang, and Performs an Exploit on the Highway.

Chapter IX.

A more Serious Incident.

Chapter X.

The Lady's Treatment from the Robbers. The Event of the Great Design conceived by Gil Blas.

Chapter XI.

The History of Donna Mencia de Mosquera.

Chapter XII.

A disagreeable Interruption.

Chapter XIII.

The lucky Means by which Gil Blas escaped from Prison, and his Travels afterwards.

Chapter XIV.

Donna Mencia's Reception of him at Burgos.

Chapter XV.

Gil Blas dresses himself to more Advantage, and receives a second Present from the Lady. His Equipage on setting out from Burgos.

Chapter XVI.

Showing that Prosperity will slip through a Man's Fingers.

Chapter XVII.

The Measures Gil Blas took after the Adventure of the ready-furnished Lodging.

Book The Second.

Chapter I.

Fabricio introduces Gil Blas to the Licentiate Sedillo, and procures him a Reception. The Domestic Economy of that Clergyman. Picture of his Housekeeper.

Chapter II.

The Canon's Illness; his Treatment; the Consequence; the Legacy to Gil Blas.

Chapter III.

Gil Blas enters into Doctor Sangrado's Service, and becomes a famous Practitioner.

Chapter IV.

Gil Blas goes on practising Physic with equal Success and Ability. Adventure of the recovered Ring.

Chapter V.

Sequel of the foregoing Adventure. Gil Blas retires from Practice, and from the Neighborhood of Valladolid.

Chapter VI.

His Route from Valladolid, with a Description of his Fellow-traveller.

Chapter VII.

The Journeyman Barber's Story.

Chapter VIII.

The Meeting of Gil Blas and his Companion with a Man soaking Crusts of Bread at a Spring, and the Particulars of their Conversation.

Chapter IX.

The Meeting of Diego with his Family; their Circumstances in Life; great Rejoicing on the Occasion; the parting Scene between him and Gil Blas.

Book The Third.

Chapter I.

The Arrival of Gil Blas at Madrid. His first Place there.

Chapter II.

The Astonishment of Gil Blas at meeting Captain Rolando in Madrid, and that Robber's curious Narrative.

Chapter III.

Gil Blas is dismissed by Don Bernard de Castil Blazo, and enters into the Service of a Beau.

Chapter IV.

Gil Blas gets into Company with his Fellows; they show him a ready Road to the Reputation of Wit, and impose on him a singular Oath.

Chapter V.

Gil Blas becomes the Darling of the Fair Sex, and makes an interesting Acquaintance.

Chapter VI.

The Prince's Company of Comedians.

Chapter VII.

History of Don Pompeyo de Castro.

Chapter VIII.

An Accident, in Consequence of which Gil Blas was obliged to look out for another Place.

Chapter IX.

A new Service after the Death of Don Matthias de Silva.

Chapter X.

Much such another as the Foregoing.

Chapter XI.

A theatrical Life, and an Author's Life.

Chapter XII.

Gil Blas acquires a Relish for the Theatre, and takes a full Swing of its Pleasures, but soon becomes disgusted.

Book The Fourth.

Chapter I.

Gil Blas, not being able to reconcile himself to the Morals of the Actresses, quits Arsenia, and gets into a more reputable. Service.

Chapter II.

Aurora's Reception of Gil Blas. Their Conversation.

Chapter III.

A great Change at Don Vincent's. Aurora's strange Resolution.

Chapter IV.

"The Fatal Marriage"--a Novel.

Chapter V.

The Behavior of Aurora de Guzman on her Arrival at Salamanca.

Chapter VI.

Aurora's Devices to secure Don Lewis Pacheco's Affections.

Alain René Lesage.

A critic of whom I desire to speak with all respect--the Rector of Lincoln--has said that "mere style cannot confer immortality upon any book apart from its contents." The context from which this remark is taken deals with the Provinciales and _Pensées_ of Pascal, concerning which Mr. Pattison thinks that the former are but an ephemeral pamphlet, the latter are for all time. So startling a judgment makes the reader a little inclined to dogmatize hyperbolically in his turn, and to say that there is nothing perennial but style. This, indeed, would be merely running from one extreme to another; nevertheless, there is more truth in it than in the other exaggeration, for the attitude of men's minds changes singularly, from one time to another, with regard to any "contents;" it changes very little with regard to the expression of those contents. This is, perhaps, nowhere seen more clearly than in the case of very voluminous authors whose works are preserved in unequal remembrance. When such cases are examined, it will generally be found that the reason for the preference which posterity has expressed has been almost entirely due to literary merit. Between the merit of the contents of Defoe's different novels there is not very much to choose; yet no one who speaks with competence will question that the literary art of _Robinson Crusoe_ is, on the whole, far superior to that of _Moll Flanders_ and _Colonel Jack_. So, in the not wholly dissimilar case of our present author, the contents of _Estévanille Gonzales_ and _The Bachelor of Salamanca_ are not much less interesting, if they are less interesting at all, than those of _Le Diable Boiteux_ and _Gil Blas_, while _Guzman d'Alfarache_ has perhaps a positive advantage over much of the latter. But Lesage was never so well inspired from the literary point of view as in the two works which have been justly deemed his masterpieces, and in this lies the justice of the selection.

The reasons of the inequality of Lesage's work are to be sought in the same cause which, in all probability, accounts for such inequality in all cases. Where men never write below themselves, it will almost invariably be found that their work has either been thrown off in the heyday of youth, or, if spread over a long course of years, has been written for pleasure merely; at any rate, without any immediate pressure of want. Pegasus, as one of the greatest of English writers in our time has put it, must, in the unhappier cases, be too frequently spurred, and will not always answer to the spur. Now the long life of the author of _Gil Blas_ was anything but one of ease. He had few patrons, and was not of a temper to have many. Literature, unfortunately, was stick, crutch and all to him, and he was unlucky in his law affairs, a fact which probably accounts for the continual satire he pours on law and lawyers. Yet, by birth, at any rate, he belonged to the profession. His father, Claude Lesage, was at once Advocate, Notary and _Greffier_ (Registrar) of the Royal Court of the small district of Rhuys, the out-of-the-way peninsula which bounds the Morbihan on its eastern side. Alain René was born on the 8th of May, 1668 (his mother being by name Jeanne Brenugat), at Sarzeau, the chief town of the district, which, it may be well to remind readers, was also the locality of the Abbey of St. Gildas de Rhuys, the very uneasy refuge of Abelard after his calamities. It is not a little characteristic of the peculiar bent of Lesage's genius, that it shows hardly any local colour, though Brittany has, of all French provinces, left most mark on her children as a rule, and though Lesage's birthplace lay in perhaps the most striking part of the Duchy, But Lesage left his native province young; he never, so far as I know, returned to it, and he very probably had unpleasant associations connected therewith. The father's triple office was profitable enough, but he died when his son was young, and the property he left him was dissipated or embezzled by a dishonest guardian, a personage of frequent occurrence in those days, and one whom Lesage smites again and again in his novels. That the boy was at school at Vannes, the neighbouring episcopal city, until 1686, is known; but this is almost all that is known about his youth, and then he disappears for some eight years. It has been supposed that he may have held some small post in the financial department of the province, or that he may have continued his studies at Paris, the latter being by far the more probable hypothesis. Anyhow, in 1692 he was admitted as an advocate at the Bar of Paris. But he apparently got no clients, and when he was six-and-twenty he took to himself a wife, Marie Elisabeth Huyard. She is said to have been remarkably beautiful, and they lived for many years together, it would seem, happily enough; but she had no fortune, she was only a tradesman's daughter, and his marriage can hardly have added to the young lawyer's resources. Falling in with an old schoolfellow, Danchet, who had already made some mark in literature, he was recommended by him to seek the same refuge for the destitute. His _coup d'essai_, a translation of the letters of Aristænetus, which appeared in 1695 (he had been married in August or September, 1694), has made his biographers and critics rather merry. He certainly might have done better, but it is doubtful whether the oddity of the choice--comparatively worthless as the book is--struck that age as it strikes ours. The indiscriminate reign of the classics, early and late, good and bad, genuine and spurious, was not yet over, and many a young man of letters had made his _début_ with work not intrinsically better. Lesage, however, had no luck--he had not much at any period during his life--and the book fell flat. A more useful adviser in every sense, however, fell to his lot in the person of the Abbe de Lyonne. Lyonne not merely gave him, or procured him, a pension or annuity of six hundred livres--no despicable assistance to modest housekeeping at that time, when living at Paris was extraordinarily cheap--but recommended him to study Spanish literature, of which he himself was a great lover. Three-quarters of a century before, this literature had been greatly admired and largely borrowed from in France, but the age of the great writers of Louis the Thirteenth's time and his son's had put it out of fashion. Lesage began by simple translation or adaptation, and, as in the case of Aristænetus, he was not too fortunate in his models. In drama, at least, he did not go far wrong, choosing Rojas, Lope de Vega and Calderon for his originals, and producing plays which were sometimes acted. But a version of the worthless _New Don Quixote_ of Avellaneda was sorry work for the future author of _Gil Blas_. The play which he conveyed from Calderon--_Don César Ursin_--had some merit; and in 1707, being then hard upon his fortieth year, he scored two great successes. His little piece of _Crispin Rival de son Maître_ appeared, and was loudly and deservedly applauded, while the _Diable_ obtained still greater favour. It ran through several editions in the year, and many legends of the usual character we told about its success. The most characteristic, and probably the truest, is that Boileau found his footboy with a copy, and declared that if such a book stayed a night in his house the boy should not stay another. Lesage was already hailed as a Molière Redivivus, and this of itself was sufficient to irritate Boileau in his sour old age. But it would probably have been sufficient for that vigorous but narrow critic that the book was not in any style which he had himself recommended, or which he could understand; for Boileau was the incarnation of the merely French spirit of literature in its most contracted form; Lesage, as we shall see, was not specially or primarily French at all except in his wit, the very quality which the author of the Namur Ode was least qualified to appreciate. Lesage, however, had not yet arrived at his apogee. Despite his theatrical successes he was never on very good terms with the players of the regular theatre, and a small piece--_Les Etrennes_--was refused by them at the beginning of 1708. The author took it back, set to work on it, and refashioned it into _Turcaret_, the best French comedy, beyond all doubt, of the eighteenth century, and probably the best of its kind to be found outside the covers of Molière's works. It is in connection with _Turcaret_, the success of which was very great, though the powerful class offended by it did not conceal their displeasure, that one of the few personal and characteristic anecdotes we possess of Lesage is told. He had been asked to read his play to a fashionable company at the Duchess of Bouillon's, and, being delayed by law business, was late. The Duchess--let it be remembered that it was some half-century before all Paris interested itself in the quarrel of two "miserable scribblers who live in garrets"--rebuked him with some asperity for keeping her an hour waiting. "Eh bien, Madame," replied the poet; "je vous ai fait perdre une heure, je vais vous en faire gagner deux;" and he put his manuscript in his pocket, and, resisting all entreaties, went away. The anecdote rests on the authority of Colle, who, in such a case, is fairly trustworthy, and it probably explains why Lesage's life was one of struggle. Though his independence was, most likely, natural and usual, it is said to have been made more touchy on this particular occasion by the fact that he had lost the case which had detained him. However this may be, his dissatisfaction with the _Maison de Molière_ soon assumed a still more active form, and for five-and-twenty years the best living comic dramatist of France gained his bread chiefly by writing for the stage of the _Foire_, the irregular but licensed booths set up during fair time. Lesage is said to have written no less than twenty-four farce-operettas, as they may perhaps best be termed, for these boards, and the number of his works for them alone, or in collaboration, is sometimes put at sixty-four and sometimes at a hundred and one. It was about the time that he took to this occupation, in which he was kept in company by not a few writers of talent, if not of genius, notably by Piron, that _Gil Blas_ appeared in 1715. This, his greatest work, was scarcely so popular as _Le Diable Boiteux_, and it was long before it was finished, while the number of editions during the thirty years of the author's life was by comparison surprisingly small. Among the few positive statements that we have about Lesage's literary gains is one to the effect that a hundred pistoles had been advanced to him as prepayment for the last volume several years before it was completed. It does not of course follow that this was the whole price. The two first parts, as has been said, appeared in 1715, the third in 1724, the fourth in 1735. Thus Lesage evidently took time about his greatest work, though he was compelled to do much else in a hurry. His productions were sufficiently miscellaneous, though most of them had to do with the vein of literary ore which had been so fortunately indicated to him. A version of _Guzman d'Alfarache_, much altered and improved; _Histoire d'Estévanille Gonzales_ and _Le Bachelier de Salamanque_, were the chief of these, while he also translated the _Orlando Inamorato_. A curious collection of imaginary letters, called the _Valise Trouvée_, and some minor works, came from his pen; besides which he was at the close of his life occupied on a collection of anecdotes which appeared after his death. He also superintended a collection of his _Théâtre de la Foire_, as he had previously one of his regular pieces. One work not yet mentioned, the "Life and Adventures of M. de Beauchêne, Captain of Flibustiers," brings him curiously near to Defoe, especially as in this, not less than in the English cases, a groundwork of actual memoirs is said or supposed to have existed. From his children Lesage had both trouble and profit. The eldest was bred a lawyer, but became an actor and was disowned by his father. The second took orders, obtained a canonry at Boulogne, and became the mainstay of the family. Worn out by seventy years of life and thirty or forty of literary work, Lesage about 1740 retired with his wife and daughter to the city where his son lived, and spent there his remaining years, dying on the 17th of November, 1747. A very curious and interesting letter from the Count de Tressan is in existence, giving an account of him in his very last days. Tressan is known to all students of French literature as having laboriously dressed the stories of the Chansons de Gestes in eighteenth-century garments for the readers of the _Biblothèque des Romans_--to which act we owe Wieland's _Oberon_--and as having, in ignorance of the existence of the original, bravely extemporized a _Chanson de Roland_, which stands, perhaps, in more absurd contrast to the true Chanson than any other conjectural restoration does to any other original. But he had a real interest in literature, and seems to have been amiable enough at this time. He was a military officer of high standing in the days of Fontenoy, and after that battle was for some time at Boulogne, where he used to visit Lesage. "The old man (he was then about seventy-seven) was," says Tressan, "in a state of half torpor till midday, but he then revived, and was fairly in possession of his faculties till sundown"--a fact from which the philosophic Count makes some large inferences in proper eighteenth-century style. But, even when most wide awake, Lesage was very deaf, and nothing would induce him to put his trumpet to his ear when persons he disliked were his interlocutors, though it went up readily enough when any one he liked approached. This is the last and one of the very few personal pieces of gossip we have about him, and it proves satisfactorily that a hard worker and a great benefactor of his species, who had not in his time enjoyed too many of the gifts of fortune, at any rate passed his last years in peace and in such comfort as might be. His wife outlived him but a very short time and died at the age of eighty.

If an author is to be judged only by those works whose popularity has stood the test of time, Lesage need only be considered as the author of _Crispin Rival de son Maître_, of _Turcaret_, of _Le Diable Boiteux_, and of _Gil Blas de Santillane_. His other prose works are, indeed, of considerable bulk, but they are for the most part distinguished by the merits of the more celebrated pieces in a less prominent, and by the faults in a more prominent, degree. His _Guzman d'Alfarache_ is chiefly interesting as a specimen of extremely skilful _remaniement_, a process more often applied in modern times to dramatic work than to prose fiction, and which, perhaps, in the case of prose fiction, has never been so well managed as here. _M. de Beauchêne_ has, as has been already mentioned, some interesting points of resemblance to the methods of Defoe. _Le Bachelier de Salamangue_ has a certain interest, because of its connection with the theory or hypothesis of a lost Spanish original of _Gil Blas_. If Lesage himself may be trusted, there was certainly such an original in the case of the _Bachelor_, and one of the many suppositions tending to deprive him of the credit of his greatest work supposes that both were extracted or rehandled from the same work. _Estévanille Gonzales_ is, perhaps, the least attractive of all, while it is also one of the least original, and the translations from the Italian, &c., need not delay us. Among the minor works the chief are:--first, a lively and well-written little dialogue, called _Une Journée des Parques_, which has had the luck to be oftener reprinted than most of Lesage's _opuscula_; secondly, the already-mentioned collection of imaginary letters called _La Valise Trouvée_; and, lastly, the collection of anecdotes which was the author's last work and which was not published until after his death. Of Lesage, however, it is truer than of most writers, that he is best seen in his best work. His pot-boilers usually have something of his easy style and much of his pleasant subacid wit, but they fail, as a rule, to show the power of truthful character-drawing which was his greatest merit, and their wit itself degenerates into mere smartness more frequently than could be wished.

Somewhat more notice must be given to his work for the _Théâtre de la Foire_, not merely because it has considerable intrinsic merit, but because of its volume, of the constant labour spent on it for full a quarter of a century by the author, and last, but not least, because of its curious form. The pieces which were played at the fairs of Paris were very popular, and their popularity was the subject of constant jealousy on the part of the regular actors of the _Théâtre Français_, though the other two branches of the legitimate drama, the opera and the _Comédie Italienne_, were sometimes more or less in alliance with their little sister. Not a few of Lesage's pieces deal directly with the vicissitudes of _la Foire_. The plays represented on these boards were a curious mixture of the _commedia dell' arte_ and the old French farce. Harlequin in particular is an almost invariable character, though the full complement of Pierrot, Scaramouche, Colombine, &c., only occasionally appears. The plays were of three kinds. One of these was drama reduced to nearly its simplest terms. There was no speaking on the stage and the actors confined themselves to pantomime in dumbshow, while two little cherubs sat up aloft with a long roller of wood, from which, from time to time, they unrolled placards on which short songs, set to popular airs, were inscribed. These songs were sung by the audience, assisted by the actors and orchestra. Here, of course, the author's work was limited to the conception of the action, the expression of it by stage directions to the actors, and the composition of the songs. A second kind of piece was the _Vaudeville_ proper, in which the whole play is written in lyrical _couplets_. In the third and most elaborate, ordinary prose dialogue is mixed up with songs. This last sometimes attained considerable dimensions and was divided into acts. These popular pieces were, throughout the eighteenth century, composed by authors whose literary standing was by no means low--such as Lesage, Piron, Collé, and many others--and when a piece had a particular vogue it was not unfrequently transferred, at the command of some great personage, to the boards of the opera. Our author, as has been said, wrote a very large number of these curious compositions in all the three styles just described. Their literary value is, of course, far from great, but they display a good deal of invention, a command of easy verse, and much less indulgence in the besetting sin of the fair theatre, license of language, than most of their fellows. _La Princesse de Carizme_, one of the longest, and possessing something like a plot, is also one of the best. It turns on the well-known story of a princess whose beauty turns all who behold her mad. But, on the whole, the pieces which deal with the rivalry of the _Foire_ and the graver dramatic institutions are, perhaps, the most amusing. The contrasted display of the _Comédie Française_, her solemn tragic airs and the mannerisms of her lighter mood, with the impudent coquettishness of the personified _Foire_, gave Lesage a good opportunity, of which he did not scruple to avail himself. The contrast, of course, is an old one, and something like it had been frequently brought with success on the popular stage, even in early times. _La Querelle des Théâtres_ has something in it which reminds the reader of the old morality of _Science et Anerye_. The music of the pieces, too, has its interest, because it shows the remarkable conservatism of the French populace in these matters. Now-a-days new airs are a _sine quâ non_ for a comic opera that is to be successful. Lesage's pieces are all written to a few score tunes, which remained on duty during the whole eighteenth century, and may be still seen at the head of Béranger's songs a hundred years and more afterwards. But it must, of course, be understood that only regular students of literature can be recommended to attack Lesage's _Théâtre de la Foire_. It has received some mention here chiefly because most of his critics have been content to give second-hand judgments of it, and a second-hand judgment in matters literary has a habit of going farther and farther from the truth as it passes from pen to pen.

The two pieces of Lesage which, if they have not actually kept the stage, have at least secured their place in collections of the French drama, demand a longer mention. I say if they have not kept the stage, for I have no positive knowledge as to the question whether _Crispin_ and _Turcaret_ have of late years been represented. They are certainly amusing enough to read, and _Turcaret_ is something more than amusing. _Crispin Rival de son Maître_ is a much less ambitious piece than _Turcaret_. It is, in fact, only a longish farce in one act, but in a great number of scenes. Something of what an English critic once very unjustly called the "exaggerated manner of Molière" may be observed in it. Indeed, this phrase of Hazlitt has a good deal of truth when applied to this little piece; it is Molière's manner exaggerated by recourse to the Spanish style of comedy, from which the great playwright had refined and purified his own. There is the usual impecunious and unlucky lover, but the usual valet, instead of backing his master, enters with another valet into a wild plan for marrying the heroine himself. By playing into each other's hands the two rascals succeed for a time in hoodwinking the father, and, by gross flattery, in winning over the mother to their side. The scheme is upset by the simple fact that the father of the suitor whom Crispin personates soon appears, and by the still simpler one that the master, of course, recognizes and identifies his servant. But the intrigue, impossible as it is, is very briskly kept up, and the short bustling scenes hardly allow the audience to reflect on the improbability of the thing. The dialogue is full of brilliancy, rather resembling Congreve than Molière, and this, being unquestionably the best of its kind that a Parisian audience had heard for a generation, probably secured the popularity of the piece. _Turcaret_ is a much more important production. It has the full five acts of a regular comedy, and, though its plot is rather loose, the ruin and discomfiture of the financier Turcaret give a sufficient unity to it. The action, too, is well sustained, but the merit of the piece--a merit for which it stands almost alone in the French comedy of the eighteenth century--lies in the striking projection of the characters and the lively natural traits with which they are drawn. The objection which has been made to these characters--that they are rather partial than complete sketches of human nature--applies to all French drama and to almost all artificial comedy, whether French or English. It would not be easy to find a French drama, out of Molière, in which so many figures stand out so strikingly from the canvass, as is the case in _Turcaret_. The financier, ashamed of the lowness of his origin, ruthless to his debtors, and a swindler in his dealings with his associates, but capable of being bubbled of his money in the most open fashion by a great lady who condescends to permit his addresses; his wife, an incarnation of vulgar provincial vice, as desperately jealous of her husband as she is shamelessly unfaithful to him; the chevalier who exploits Turcaret's mistress just as that mistress exploits Turcaret; the baroness, not too scrupulous to plunder her suitor so long as she believes his addresses to be honourable, but generous enough and not wholly corrupted; the reckless marquis, who has at least the advantage over his friend, the chevalier, that he is not a knave: all these characters, in themselves mere stock characters of the oldest date, are made to live and breathe by touches of Lesage's genius. The most often-quoted scene of the play, where Madame Turcaret, introduced to the baroness's salon, gives an account of the diversions of Valognes, where "on lit tout les ouvrages d'esprit qu'on fait à Cherbourg, à St. Lo et à Coutances, qui valent bien les ouvrages de Vire et de Caen" is a masterpiece of its kind, and not much less can be said of the adroit servility of the waiting-maid Lisette. Frontin, her lover, has the defect of all the valets who descend from the Menandrian comedy--the defect of exceeding improbability--but he is not more improbable than Molière's Scapins and Gros Renés, and, indeed, not so improbable as some of them. It is also noticeable that, though the dialogue of _Turcaret_ is as full of witticisms as any reasonable man can desire, it has not the fault which is frequently noticeable in French manner-comedies and almost always in English--the fault of letting mere wit combats occupy the characters to the detriment of the dramatic interest of the play. Everything in _Turcaret_ tends duly to its end. There are few things more surprising, and perhaps it may be added, less satisfactory, in connection with the theory that a subsidized and established theatre tends to encourage the production of works of genius, than the fact of the subsequent disagreement of the players with Lesage. It is almost inconceivable that the man who wrote such a play should not have had it in him to write others of equal, if not greater, goodness. But, as we have seen, Lesage had no opportunity of improving upon _Turcaret_ or repeating his success, being almost immediately diverted from the regular theatre to the _Foire_, where, whatever he may have done, he certainly did not work for posterity. His dramatic career, indeed, was that of Molière reversed. The earlier writer began with a long apprenticeship to farce-writing and then turned his attention to regular comedy, the other began with regular comedy and was afterwards driven to farce. When one considers the special opening which drama presents to a man who, like Lesage, prefers to work on the inventions of others rather than to spin everything out of his own brains, his abandonment of it seems much to be regretted. Perhaps, however, on the whole the world has not lost; for where a play gives amusement now and then to hundreds, a novel gives it constantly to thousands, and it is extremely improbable that the very best work that Lesage could ever have produced in the way of drama would have added to the sum of human enjoyment as much as _Gil Blas_ has added.

It has already been observed that Lesage's manner of dealing with his originals when he wrote prose fiction sometimes resembled the usual manner of dramatic authors. If, however, this latter manner resembled the conduct of the author of _Le Diable Boiteux_ in the composition of this work, the charge of plagiarism which is constantly brought against dramatists could hardly stand. The _Diable Boiteux_ of Lesage and the _Diablo Cojuelo_ of Luis Velez de Guevara stand to each other in a very curious relation. At first the later work looks almost like a translation of the earlier; for two chapters it is a translation and very little more. But suddenly Lesage seems to have felt his own power and strikes off on an entirely new path. Neither the course of the story, nor the conclusion, nor even the great majority of the episodes and detached anecdotes in the _Diable Boiteux_ are derived, even by suggestion, from Guevara, while the simplicity of the French style and the unbroken stream of lively _narquois_ narration contrast as strongly as anything can do with the euphuism of Guevara and the singular encomiastic digressions on all sorts of personages which figure largely in the _Diablo Cojuelo_. The substance of the book is made up partly, no doubt, of anecdotes borrowed from divers Spanish sources, partly of more or less historical gossip about French men and women of the author's own time--Dufresny the comic author, Baron the actor, Ninon de L'Enclos are usually specified as figuring--partly of inventions of Lesage's own. As most people know, or ought to know, the plot is sufficiently simple. A young student, for whom an ambush has been laid by his perfidious mistress, escapes by way of the roof, makes his way into a neighbouring garret, which happens to be the laboratory of a magician, and is besought by a voice out of a phial to deliver the speaker from durance by breaking the bottle. The request is complied with, and the imprisoned sprite turns out to be Asmodeus, _Démon de la Luxure_. Here almost all borrowing from Guevara ceases. In the Spanish the new confederates journey to different parts of Spain, and the incidents of the story are mainly supplied by the efforts of envious devils to recapture Asmodeus. In the French the general plan is based on an exertion of the power of Asmodeus, whereby he unroofs the houses of Madrid and exhibits the fortunes of the inmates to the student, Don Cleofas, while an additional human interest is imparted by a fire, in which the good-natured and grateful demon rescues a young lady of high birth in the shape of Cleofas, and thereby secures for his liberator a prosperous marriage. As a connected story, the original, despite its digressions and episodes, perhaps has the advantage, though the ultimate decision on this point must be left to those who, unlike the present writer, can speak with equal authority on Spanish and on French literature. Lesage's pre-eminence must be sought in the scattered traits of wit and knowledge of human nature which he sprinkles liberally over his work, and in the brisk and vigorous style wherein the book is written. This latter is the real charm of the _Diable Boiteux_. Lesage took something from La Rochefoucauld, something and perhaps more from St. Evremond, and, availing himself of the general improvement in French prose style which had resulted from the schoolmastering of the academic critics, from Balzac to Boileau, produced a mixture of singular pungency and elegance. Couched as the whole work is in the form of a lengthy dialogue between the demon and Don Cleofas, the author has availed himself of the characteristics of his characters in a sufficiently artful fashion. The petulance of the student never allows the good demon to engage uninterrupted in too long a narration, but constantly recalls him to this or that interesting incident, which makes a digression in the midst of the histories and prevents any feeling of _longueur_ from stealing on the reader. Now this is a feeling which the general plan of the French-Spanish _Roman d'Aventures_ adopted by Lesage was only too much calculated to produce. The pedigree of stories of this kind was a long one. They arose unquestionably, on the one hand, from the prose Greek romances to which the Byzantine period gave rise, and on the other from the incomparable romances of chivalry, to use the usual though rather indiscriminate term of which France must claim the invention. To do the _Chanson de Geste_, the oldest form of the latter variety, justice, digression was not among its faults. But from the first the Greek prose romance seems to have been liable to it, and from the date of the _Romans d'Aventures_, which express in a way the union of the two, it was a crying sin of the western romance, whether it was written in verse or in prose. Everything by degrees became sacrificed to length, and the easiest way of attaining length was by indulging in numerous episodic excursions. Moral disquisitions, personal panegyrics, sentimental discussions on points of amatory law, which the earlier seventeenth century had endured, were impossible at the time when Lesage wrote, and he confined himself solely to the story within a story which his English followers, Smollett and Fielding, adopted from him, and which lasted even to the days of Scott, with the advantage to literature of producing what is, perhaps, the best short tale in any language--Wandering Willie's legend in _Redgauntlet_. By that time, however, the necessity of connecting the digressions definitely and directly with the general story had forced itself on the consideration of the romancer. Lesage's age was less difficult, and his episodes might be cut out without damaging such central story as he has, but with a woful consequence to the total interest and attraction of the book. What saved _Le Diable Boiteux_ was, let it be once more repeated, the smartness of the satire, the acuteness of the observation of life, and the pure fluent style in which the whole was embodied. The one means which has always been able to move a French audience or body of readers has been the untranslatable _malice_; and Lesage possessed the secret of this in an eminent degree. But he had more than this--he had also the faculty of informing his malicious side-hits at human nature, with a certain breadth and truth in which Voltaire himself fails except when he is at his very best, and of never going out of his way for a gibe, a mistake only too common among French authors. The fantastic setting; the absence of any attempt to get into the pulpit and preach, while a certain subtle under-flavour of moralizing reconciled the most moralizing of all centuries; the urbanity of the style, and the allusions, artfully scattered here and there, to personal adventures and personal gossip, were quite sufficient to attract contemporaries. That the popularity of the _Diable Boiteux_ has been more than ephemeral shows--let us repeat it, for it cannot be too often repeated--that observation of Nature, enbalmed with due preparation of art, is never likely to lose its hold upon men; if it were, adieu to literature.

The good qualities of _Turcaret_ and the _Diable Boiteux_ appeared in far more striking measure and co-ordinated far more skilfully in the great work which these volumes present once more to the reader in the version of the greatest but one of Lesage's followers. Of the general merits of _Gil Blas_ it is necessary to say very little. Nor is it necessary to add in this particular place anything to what has been said and will be said of the comparatively half-hearted estimation in which his countrymen have held the writer of this masterpiece. In French histories of literature Lesage holds but a subordinate place, and he is sometimes treated as second in the race to Defoe, though it is hardly necessary to say that the first and best of the great Englishman's romances is younger than _Gil Blas_ by nearly five years. Argument and abstract are equally superfluous. How _Gil Blas_ left his scarcely-unwilling kin, how he learnt by bitter experience not to trust too much to flatterers, how he fell among thieves, among the minions of the law, among actors (on whom Lesage took a terrible vengeance in this book for the treatment they had accorded to him), even those to whom the pleasure--_pace_ Mr. James Payn--of reading our book is yet to come, know, in virtue of a thousand quotations and allusions in every kind of literature. Of the latter parts of the book, which show in the author some such an idea as that by which Dickens, either before or after the fact, excused the transformation of Mr. Pickwick's character, perhaps less is known by those who have not actually read it. Only one episode--the famous and, indeed, immortal relapse of _Gil Blas_ into youthfulness in the matter of the Archbishop of Granada--has passed into general knowledge. I shall only say that it is perhaps the very happiest holding up of a mirror to one particular weak place of human nature that I know. Few people perhaps, save reviewers, who are in continual receipt of expostulations from the reviewed, know how eternal is the verity of the presentment. By some unhappy fortune the particular stanza of the poem, the particular chapter of the novel, the particular juncture of the plot, which the critic happens to blame is the very thing that is best in the book. "On n'a jamais composé de meilleur homélie que celle qui a le malheur de n'avoir pas notre approbation." This is only an illustration of the supreme merit of the book--its absolute truth to Nature. But another illustration may, perhaps, be pardonably given. It has been said, or hinted, that in the last two volumes Gil Blas is a much better as well as a much less ridiculous personage than he is in the first--this is especially the case in the last. Prosperity, age, the absence of temptation, account for this. But Lesage's unpitying, because absolutely veracious, talent would not suffer him to turn his intriguing fortune-hunter into a saint. The ugly episode of the journey to Toledo, in which the admired minister Olivarez and the respectable reformed rake Gil Blas play such awkward parts, is an instance of the truth which is put in the homely phrase Defoe loved--"What is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh." Now-a-days, perhaps, when the naturalist school, in its scorn of the namby-pamby, rushes into the opposite extreme and will have nothing but vice and ugliness, such a book as _Gil Blas_ is infinitely more instructive, as well as more refreshing to read, than all the rose-pink pictures of impossible virtues and all the half-told tales of life with the dark side of it kept out of sight that literature can muster. It will scarcely be pretended by any brisk young novelist of the nineteenth century that he has more insight than Lesage, scarcely, either, that Lesage was afraid to say what occurred to him or that his literary vocabulary and general equipment were unequal to the task. Yet here is a book as free from cant or from taint of the _hérésie de l'enseignement_ as any one can desire, and which yet leaves no bad taste in the mouth, meddles with no abnormal crimes, and suggests as a total reflexion not merely that all's well that ends well, but that in most cases with fair luck all does end fairly well.

The question of the origin, or, if the word be preferred, of the originality, of _Gil Blas_ may not be of much intrinsic importance. But its traditional importance in the history of literature is considerable, and something, perhaps, must be said about it here. The assertions of the more or less complete indebtedness of the author to a Spanish original may be classed under three heads. There is, first, the assertion that _Gil Blas_ is taken from the _Marcos de Obregon_ of Vincent Espinel. This was advanced very shortly after the appearance of the book, and currency was given to it by Voltaire, who roundly repeated it, in consequence, beyond all doubt, of the galling attacks which Lesage had made upon his early dramatic and epic efforts, not merely in his farces but in _Gil Blas_ itself, where the author of _Zaire_ figures as Don Gabriel Triaquero. The second is due to a Spanish Jesuit author, who, avowedly setting before him the object of claiming _Gil Blas_ for his own country, endeavours to make out that it is simply a translation of a Spanish original. The third is a more elaborate hypothesis and more difficult of disproof--its foundation, such as it is, has been already alluded to. It is supposed that Lesage extracted the matter, at least, of _Gil Blas_, as well as that of the _Bachelier de Salamanque_, from a manuscript Spanish original which has since disappeared. As to the first charge, it is one of those curiously hazardous ones, the making of which can only be accounted for on the general principle that some of most handfuls of mud which are thrown is likely to stick, for Espinel's work is unanimously confessed by competent examiners to be not in the least like _Gil Blas_ on the whole, though a very few detached traits may have been taken by Lesage from it, as they almost certainly were for others of his prose fictions. The patriotic hypothesis of Father Isla suffers only from the fact that there is not the faintest trace of a Spanish _Gil Blas_ or of any allusion to such a work. As for the third, it is obviously, and on the face of it, as impossible to disprove as to prove. There may have been French _Macbeths_ and _Lears_ from which Shakspeare adapted the existing pieces, for aught we know. But, when we dismiss merely hypothetical argument and examine the matter coolly, we find, first, that there is absolutely no external evidence that Lesage did in any way plagiarize _Gil Blas_; secondly, that there is overwhelming internal evidence that, while he made free use of his Spanish predecessors for details, for local colour and so forth the essential part of the book is fairly his own. The "picaroon" romance, as it is called, was a specially Spanish variety of _Roman d'Aventures_ which, abandoning giants and enchanters on the one hand and the long-winded sentimentalities of the _Amadis_ and the Scudéry romances on the other, confined itself to the actual life of the still but half-civilized dominions of the King of Spain and to the most exciting incidents of that life. Immense numbers of these books were written by Spaniards during the seventeenth century; and with many, if not the majority, of these Lesage was, we know, familiar. Many of the separate incidents of _Gil Blas_ have been traced to this literature, and, perhaps, more might be so. But there is no reason to believe that the general _cadre_ into which Lesage fitted these is not his own, and there is every reason to believe that the peculiar spirit with which he informs the whole and which gives it its peculiar value is absolutely his. The shrewd wit, neither sententious nor solemn, of his isolated sayings is assuredly not Spanish; the peculiar universality of his indications of the weaknesses of human nature is still less so. There is little of the kind, I may venture to say, in the greatest of Spanish writers, in Cervantes himself; there is nothing of the kind--competent authorities vouch for it--in any lesser Spanish writer. To the higher side of Spanish imagination, its poetry, its magnificence, its forgetfulness of the baser sides of life, Lesage has no claim to approach. But in regard to a sort of prosaic infallibility and universality which he has he may as fairly pretend that the Spaniards have nothing of his. If there is little of Don Quixote there is, perhaps, something of Sancho in some of his characters; but it is only such an agreement as writers starting from the most diverse points might attain.

To one charge which has been brought against _Gil Blas_, that of undue length, it is difficult to offer a very valid defence. That this length conduced to the anachronisms which the author admits in a characteristic and sarcastic _avertissement_ is very probable, but these are matters of very little consequence and may be ranked with the sea-coast of Bohemia and Hector's reference to Aristotle. It is of more importance that the extreme prolongation of the book has made it--it may freely be admitted--to a certain extent tedious. Nor does it seem reasonable to doubt that this prolongation was, in some degree, artificial--that is to say, that the favour with which the book was received and the offers of the publishers very likely induced the author to extend it a good deal more than he had at first designed. _Per contra_ it can only be alleged that, in the peculiar style of which _Gil Blas_ is an example, there is no natural limit to the exposition. The book having no defined plot, but being a picture of _quotquot agunt homines_ in so far as the life of a particular person touches that action, nothing but the death of the hero can be said to bring it to a close. This, indeed, is of the essence of the romance as opposed to the epic, and, in its so-called regular or non-Shakspearean form, the drama. These two latter presuppose a definite and limited plot. The romance does not, and it admits not only an indefinite extension in a straight line, but also digressions and episodes _ad infinitum_. That this is rather a weakness than a strength of the style may certainly be admitted, and the fact had been sufficiently exemplified, not merely in the mediæval poem and prose romances but in the _Amadis_ cycle, where the reader is conducted from generation to generation in a manner sufficient to weary the patience of the most robust. But it was characteristic of Lesage that he was an innovator rather in detail than in the general. He did not produce the modern novel--that was reserved for his younger contemporary Prévost. He only took an existing _genre_, made many small improvements in it, and produced a masterpiece therein. Perhaps it would be ungrateful to complain when he did so much that he did no more.

In the controversies which have arisen about Lesage's greatest work it is not very difficult to find a satisfactory explanation of his great and peculiar value. For the Spanish claim--absolutely unsupported as it is by one tittle of external evidence, and, indeed, as we may almost say, completely as it is rebutted by all such evidence--rests in reality on an expressed or understood idea that no one but a native writer could have so dealt with Spain and Spaniards. The retort to the charge is as instructive as the charge itself. Frenchmen appeal to Germans, Englishmen, and other foreigners to decide the cause, and the referees give their decision in a manner which is decisive. _Gil Blas_, they say, is not specially a Spaniard, though the art of his creator has dressed him up marvellously in the habits, garments and speech of Spain. He is simply a man, and the accuracy with which the author has hit the universal beneath the particular would have equally enabled him, had he chosen, to draw an Englishman or a German, and would have entitled Englishmen or Germans, had they been sufficiently shortsighted, to claim his work as borrowed or stolen from an English or German original. The reply is unanswerable, and the more one reads Lesage the more convinced one is of the sufficiency of it and the more proof one finds of its truth. It is in this quality of universality, of striking at the essential humanity of men and dealing with their accidental nationality only in such manner as might suit his purpose that Lesage's great genius consists, and in this quality he is, as it seems to me, at the head of all French writers, and only second to Shakspeare. Of course the range of the two is very different, it is even hardly commensurable. Lesage had his faculty at complete command within certain very restricted limits, but beyond those limits he was not in the least master of it, indeed it can hardly be said that he endeavoured to show it at all. Whether his thorough and comparatively early steeping in one peculiar and extremely artificial kind of literature--the picaroon romances and intrigue-dramas of Spain--narrowed his mind at the same time that it sharpened it is a question rather of psychology than of literature; but it is certain that he shows very little tendency to wander out of his own narrow circle, and that when he does so he becomes merely an ordinary man of letters, possessed of a pleasant wit and of a ready and skilful pen. But within his circle he hardly yields to the master himself. Indeed, Gil Blas may hold up his head in any company, even in the company of Shakspeare's children. There is the same invariable consistency, the same total absence of false notes, the same completeness of presentation. It was in this latter that Lesage differed most from his countrymen. The fatal doctrine of the ruling passion had made but little impression upon him. In drawing Gil Blas he has not an abstraction of intrigue and courtiership of the lower class before him as a model, he has a man who, for a long time, is given up partly by the unkindness of fortune, partly by natural bent, to intrigue and courtiership. To the last, touches of Nature, though they naturally grow fewer and fewer, chequer and diversify the presentment. Now this was what the French, since they had given themselves up to swallow the doctrines and do the bidding of Horace, as represented or misrepresented by the native critics of the Malherbe-Boileau school, could not attain to, and could hardly even understand. Had Boileau lived a little longer it may be shrewdly suspected that he would have regarded _Gil Blas_ with much more indignation than that with which he regarded _Le Liable Boiteux_, and it is noteworthy that the greater work was far less popular with its author's countrymen than the lesser. They would, doubtless, have liked Achilles to be always _iracundus inexorabilis acer_, and would have preferred that Gil Blas should have outwitted the parasite in the matter of the trout and kept the favour of the Archbishop of Granada. _Gil Blas_, too, is far less full than _Le Diable Boiteux_ of the epigrammatic _pointes_ which have never ceased to delight the true Frenchman--and, indeed, they are delightful enough--and which reach their climax in the writings of Voltaire. Such sayings as: "Vous n'avez pas des idées justes de notre enfer"--"On nous reconcilia, nous nous embrassames, et depuis ce temps nous sommes ennemis mortels"--"Je sais qu'il-y-a de bons remèdes mais je ne sais pas s'il-y-a de bons médecins"--"Tout payeur est traité comme un mari," and a hundred things besides, are worthy of the author of _Candide_ at his very best, and his countrymen could not fail to relish them. They were less keen to relish such a presentment as that of Gil Blas, and therefore Lesage's fame, great as it has been even in France, has been more European than French, and he is to be quoted and compared with foreigners rather than with his countrymen.

There is another point of importance in which Lesage has a resemblance to Shakspeare. He has not merely in some not small measure the quality of universality, but he has, and this in very great measure, the quality of detachment. He seems to look at his characters with the same inscrutable impartiality as that with which their creator contemplates Iago and Goneril, Macbeth and Claudius. He does not describe their monkey tricks with any particular gusto, at least of a personal kind, nor does he regard them with the least moral indignation. All that does not concern him. Writing as he did in a period of very low morality--there probably never was a time when the general moral standard was lower in Europe than in the first half of the eighteenth century--and taking for his models a mass of writings dealing with unscrupulous adventures and intrigue, he has had to describe what is bad much oftener than what is good. But it is impossible to say either that he gloats over the vices and follies which he describes, or that he records them with cynical amusement, or that he holds them up for righteous detestation. The least little appearance of the second attitude may sometimes be found in the utterances of Asmodeus, which are as personal as anything we have of his; but even this is, for the most part, dramatic merely. This quality, beyond all doubt, is connected with the former, and is, indeed, to a great extent implied by it. When a man is very much in earnest about points of morality, still more when he writes definitely with a moral or immoral purpose, he seldom succeeds in giving us the complete presentation of his characters. He is bribed, without knowing it, by his prepossessions, he cannot help, if he objects to the established standards of morality, softening the vicious characters unduly, or hardening them unduly if he be among the moral sub-division of the heretics of instruction. I do not know that Lesage has been much examined by the strenuous advocates of the moral element in literature, though they have not neglected Fielding, his English parallel. The fact is that Fielding's irregular life rather assists them, while the little that is known of Lesage goes to show that he was in his own person an exemplary liver. It is, however, true that the resemblances between Fielding and Lesage are great, not merely in that they adopted the same general conception of the novel, but that they succeeded in working out that conception and in bringing their characters, or some of them, under the _species œternitatis_. An Englishman naturally speaks with some caution about Fielding, because he himself is not in so good a position as foreigners to judge how far Fielding has accomplished this. Englishmen, however, are the best possible judges of Lesage, because they are equally free from bias connected with the language in which he writes and from bias connected with the country which he illustrates.

There is one important and intricate question which can hardly be passed over, though here, at least, it can only be very summarily dealt with. It has been said that until the present century no French writer, except Montaigne and Rabelais deserves the title of humorist, and this would, of course, exclude Lesage. On the other hand, the exclusion has been objected to in the interest of some mediæval writers. The truth is, that the whole question turns on one of the most disputed points in literature--the definition of humour. If, as it has been admirably put, the humorist is a man who "thinks in jest when he feels in earnest;" or if, as Thackeray puts it, he is a weekday preacher, then Lesage most assuredly is not one. For not only has he no direct moral purpose, which, indeed, is oftener than not fatal to humour, but it is difficult to discern that he has, as Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakspeare had, any general theory or grasp of the world or of life, whether poetical, ironical, or sceptical, which could supply him with the necessary background for humour. Neither had he, like Fielding and Thackeray himself, a passionate interest in that world--a sympathy with it which, in its way, is also sufficient to bring out the strokes of the strange invisible ink called humour. It would seem, therefore, that his exclusion is justified, and as he shares it with Molière, and even with Lafontaine, he need not be ashamed of his company. Like these still greater men, however, he had a wit so fine, so flexible, so far transcending the ordinary limitations of wit, that it almost amounted to humour, and may be said to be practically a substitute for it.

This brings us to the consideration of a point of very great importance--the style of Lesage. In all such cases the modern reader who merely looks back is very likely to be deceived by his point of view. Yet even the modern reader, if he has but some notion of the date of his author, must, I should think, be conscious of a singular modernness in _Gil Blas_ and the _Diable Boiteux_ compared with Bossuet, Fénelon, even Malebranche, and still more with Madame de Sévigné and Saint-Simon. Lesage, indeed, was one of a line of great writers chiefly of the lighter kind, who, perhaps, did most of any of their contemporaries to shape French style, as it has been generally understood until recently. Saint-Evremond and Pascal are the earliest of these, and Lesage, taking up the torch, handed it on to Voltaire. It is noteworthy that Voltaire, perhaps on the principle of kicking down his ladders, was unjust both to Saint-Evremond and to Lesage, though, as has been said, the latter had certainly provoked him. The great distinction of Lesage is the extreme ease of his writing and the manner in which his good things, such as those already cited above, drop naturally out in the midst of his narrative or dialogue, without any effort or apparent leading up. It would demand a much greater acquaintance with Spanish literature than any to which I, even at second-hand, can pretend, to decide whether his studies had anything to do with this; but I think that it may be tolerably safely assumed that they had not, except by way of contrast; for many, if not most, of the works which Lesage translated or followed were written in the extremest _gongorist_ or conceited style--a style as remote from his as Lyly's from Steele's. It may possibly be contended that it was in fighting against this excess that Lesage learnt the secret of a wise economy. Certainly, there are not merely few writers in whom there is so little archaism, affectation, mannerism, or deliberate oddity and obscurity, but also few in whom the style is so absolutely plain and unadorned, without being in the least vulgar, or, in the unfavourable sense, homely. His autobiographies, probably owing to this, have, more than most autobiographies, the air of being really told by a speaker and not elaborated in the study. There are no ponderous sentences, no phrases over which the reader sees that the pen has hung a long time, and, as has been already noted, none of the leading-up and preparation which certain witty writers are unable to avoid or to conceal. The most commonplace things are said with perfect simplicity, and yet, somehow or other, in a way on which it is impossible to improve. It must be a bold man who thinks he can better a saying of Lesage's, and that not because of any _tour de force_ of unusual phrase or out-of-the-way thought, but, on the contrary, because the simplicity has reached the lowest term. Nothing can be taken away, and nothing can be added that is not a useless addition.

The question of his alleged plagiarisms has been already, to some extent, dealt with. It has been shown, that is to say, that in the way of absolute stealing the charge has not the slightest probability. The strongest argument of all is, indeed, that when we see what he did with originals which we possess, such as _Guzman d'Alfarache_ and the _Diablo Cojuelo_, there could be no motive for discreditable appropriation in other cases. But, when the charge in its offensive sense has been laid aside, it remains to consider the use which he did make of _publica materies_. There can be no doubt that, as was the case with Shakspeare and Molière and many other men of the very greatest genius, he made wholesale and indiscriminate use thereof. There is proof of this in many cases; there is probability of it in many more. Indeed, there is in this and other instances almost ground for the paradox that it is only men of little creative power who are scrupulously original. Many very small poets, by luck or by care, have kept free from the charge of indebtedness to anybody, while Shakspeare calmly versifies whole pages of North's "Plutarch;" while Molière compels restitution of his goods from the unlucky people who happened to possess them first without the least scruple; while Milton lays Dutch dramatists and French epic poets and Italian opera librettists under contribution as coolly as if they had been Royalist squires. In Lesage's case there is, however, something more than this. In the three great cases just mentioned, and in many others, it is only now and then that the borrowers condescend to borrow; it is a passing freak, or, to speak more respectfully and with more critical truth, an occasional conviction that here are the tools of which they themselves can make the best use. But there are some men, and those not among the least in literature, who, from a certain idiosyncrasy, which may, perhaps, be termed an indolence of brain, have seemed to prefer always, when it was possible, to work on beaten tracks and to take their start from some already-accomplished work. The most remarkable example of this variety of talent in English literature is Dryden; the most remarkable in French literature is beyond all question Lesage. Yet Lesage must in respect of absolute originality be ranked below Dryden, because his greatest work, though its substance may be independent enough, springs in point of general design directly from Spanish originals, while the greatest work of Dryden, his satiric and didactic pieces, was not directly suggested by anything precedent. It may be said, indeed, that, of the four productions which we have singled out as exhibiting Lesage at his best, the two dramas are far more original than the two novels. Whether Lesage, had he been more favoured by the exponents of the regular drama and had he devoted himself longer thereto, would have produced something even more original than _Crispin_ and _Turcaret_ must be left among the merely scholastic problems of literature, the "might-have-beens" inquiry into which is bootless and idle. The time, however, had not come for any innovation on the set lines of French comedy and tragedy, even had the author been disposed for such innovation, and it is noteworthy enough that, when in his specially-chosen province of the _Théâtre de la Foire_ an opportunity appeared for a bold stroke, he declined it. On one occasion the jealousy of the regular actors had procured a police edict restricting their rivals to a single personage. The managers of the fair stage were in despair, for neither Lesage nor any of their other regular contributors would attempt the task of a monodrama, and recourse had to be had to the untried and fitful but fertile genius of Piron, whose _Arlequin Deucalion_ got them out of the difficulty. This anecdote seems to argue a certain indisposition to try experiments which is consistent enough with what we have of Lesage's work. It must be remembered, too, that he did not begin literary labour very young, and that he did not make any great success in it until he was already a man of middle age. There are not wanting examples of striking originality in conception as well as striking power of execution displayed by late-writing authors. But on the whole it may, perhaps, be safely said that invention is a habit as much as any other, and that it is a habit which is for the most part only acquired in youth.

Such are the principal critical points which present themselves in the life of this great novelist and master of French prose. As one turns over the leaves of a library catalogue and sees the immense number of editions, translations, and what not, that _Gil Blas_ has gone through and undergone in its century-and-a-half of life, it is impossible not to draw the conclusion that its goodness is a matter settled and out of hand. One generation may make egregious mistakes, and constantly does make egregious mistakes, about an author, leaving him to unjust neglect, or awarding to him still more absurd triumphs. Subsequent generations may, in a way, continue the mistake by leaving the justice of the verdict, for or against, undisturbed, because the evidence is undisturbed likewise. But when a book has actually been read by half-a-dozen successive sets of the inhabitants of the earth, when its most remarkable incidents and characters have become part of the common stock of furniture possessed even by a very modest housekeeper in things literary, then there is not much reason for questioning the value. The works, even the best works, of Lesage are, of course, not good throughout. Even in _Le Diable Boiteux_, despite its moderate length, there are _longueurs_, and there are most assuredly _longueurs_ in _Gil Blas_. Some of it is obsolete, some could be well spared now, some, it is difficult not to think, could have been well spared at any time. But its best things are as fresh as ever and are likely to continue so as long as human nature exists. The opening chapters, the address to the reader--Lesage was never happier than his addresses to the reader, prefaces, and such like things--the episodes of Sangrado and the Archbishop, half a hundred things beside, are as amusing to read for the twentieth time as for the first. What is, perhaps, of more importance, the same may be said of the best passages, even in the work which has been less favoured by the general approbation. But at the same time no one who weighs his words will attempt to deny that Lesage has produced a considerable amount of inferior work side by side with his masterpieces. Nor can it be denied that, as has been more than once here allowed, his range is but limited and that he seems to require a somewhat unusual amount of prompting and crutching before he is able to make his bow and say his say. These things debar him from the place among the chosen few of the writers of his country to which the wonderful success of his best work and the purity of his style would otherwise entitle him. In theoretical originality, in variety of work, in construction, he is very deficient. _Gil Blas_ drags rather than hastens to its end, the author having failed completely to extricate himself from the toils of the endless episodes and digressions of his Spanish models. _Turcaret_ in the same manner lacks unity and precision of plot. Excellence of style and surprising fidelity to human nature in character-drawing--these are the two pillars of Lesage's renown, and it is solidly established upon them. He is thus one of the few writers, to return to the point from which we started, of whom it can be definitely said that, if he had been in more fortunate worldly circumstances, he would have done better, unless, which is, perhaps, equally probable, he had done nothing at all. Necessity was with him, as with others, the mother of invention--the invention, that is to say, of his own talent. But with gifts which do not fall to the lot of one writer in a thousand, he did not always or very often succeed in getting those gifts into perfect working order. His selection of foreign subjects, and the very natural, though very unjust, suspicion of grave indebtedness to foreign models, have also worked against his fame. Yet, with those who have considered novel-writing seriously, he will always rank as one of the princes of character-drawing in its largest and most human sense, while with those who busy themselves with the history of French literature he will always hold the rank of the best writer of the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

History Of Gil Blas Of Santillane.

Book The First.

_Chapter I._

_The Birth And Education Of Gil Blas._

My father, Blas of Santillane, after having borne arms for a long time in the Spanish service, retired to his native place. There he married a chambermaid who was not exactly in her teens, and I made my debut on this stage ten months after marriage. They afterwards went to live at Ovieda, where my mother got into service, and my father obtained a situation equally adapted to his capacities as a squire. As their wages were their fortune, I might have got my education as I could, had it not been for an uncle of mine in the town, a canon, by name Gil Perez. He was my mother's eldest brother, and my godfather. Figure to yourself a little fellow, three feet and a half high, as fat as you can conceive, with a head sunk deep between his shoulders, and you have my uncle to the life. For the rest of his qualities, he was an ecclesiastic, and of course thought of nothing but good living, I mean in the flesh as well as in the spirit, with the means of which good living his stall, no lean one, provided him.

He took me home to his own house from my infancy, and ran the risk of my bringing up. I struck him as so brisk a lad, that he resolved to cultivate my talents. He bought me a primer, and undertook my tuition as far as reading went: which was not amiss for himself as well as for me; since by teaching me my letters he brushed up his own learning, which had not been pursued in a very scholastic manner; and, by dint of application, he got at last to read his breviary out of hand, which he had never been able to do before. He would have been very glad to have taught me Latin, to save expense, but, alas! poor Gil Perez! he had never skimmed the first principles of it in the whole course of his life. I should not wonder if he was the most ignorant member of the chapter; though on a subject involving as many possibilities as there were canons, I presume not to pledge myself for anything like certainty. To be sure, I have heard it suggested, that he did not gain his preferment altogether by his learning: but that he owed it exclusively to the gratitude of some good nuns whose discreet factor he had been, and who had credit enough to procure him the order of priesthood without the troublesome ceremony of an examination.

He was obliged therefore to place me under the correction of a master, so that I was sent to Doctor Godinez, who had the reputation of being the most accomplished pedant of Oviedo. I profited so well under his instructions, that by the end of five or six years I could read a Greek author or two, and had no very inadequate conception of the Latin poets. Besides my classical studies, I applied to logic, which enabled me to become an expert arguer. I now fell in love with discussions of all kinds to such an excess, that I stopped his majesty's subjects on the high road, acquaintance or strangers, no matter! and proposed some knotty point of controversy. Sometimes I fell in with a clan of Irish, and an altercation never comes amiss to them! That was your time, if you are fond of a battle. Such gestures! such grimaces! such contortions! Our eyes sparkling, and our mouths foaming! Those who did not take us for what we affected to be, philosophers, must have set us down for madmen.

But let that be as it will, I gained the reputation of no small learning in the town. My uncle was delighted, because he prudently considered that I should so much the sooner cease to be chargeable to him. Come here, Gil Blas, quoth he one day, you are got to be a fine fellow. You are past seventeen, and a clever lad: you must bestir yourself, and get forward in the world. I think of sending you to the University of Salamanca: with your wit, you will easily get a good post. I will give you a few ducats for your journey, and my mule, which will fetch ten or twelve pistoles at Salamanca, and with such a sum at setting out, you will be enabled to hold up your head till you get a situation.

He could not have proposed to me anything more agreeable: for I was dying to see a little of life. At the same time, I was not such a fool as to betray my satisfaction; and when it came to the hour of parting, by the sensibility I discovered at taking leave of my dear uncle, to whom I was so much obliged, and by calling in the stage effect of grief, I so softened the good soul, that he put his hand deeper into his pocket than he would have done, could he have pried into all that was passing in the interior of my hypocritical little heart. Before my departure I took a last leave of my papa and mamma, who loaded me with an ample inheritance of good advice. They enjoined me to pray to God for my uncle, to go honestly through the world, not to engage in any ill, and above all, not to lay my hands on other people's property. After they had lectured me for a good while, they made me a present of their blessing, which was all my patrimony and all my expectation. As soon as I had received it, I mounted my mule, and saw the outside of the town.

_Chapter II._

_GIL BLAS' ALARM ON HIS ROAD TO PEGNAFLOR; HIS ADVENTURES ON HIS ARRIVAL IN THAT TOWN; AND THE CHARACTER OF THE MEN WITH WHOM HE SUPPED._

Here I am, then, on the other side of Oviedo, on the road to Pegnaflor, with the world before me, as yet my own master, as well as master of a bad mule and forty good ducats, without reckoning on a little supplementary cash purloined from my much-honored uncle. The first thing I did was to let my mule go as the beast liked, that is to say, very lazily. I dropped the rein, and taking out my ducats, began to count them backwards and forwards in my hat. I was out of my wits for joy, never having seen such a sum of money before, and could not help looking at it and sifting it through my fingers. I had counted it over about the twentieth time, when all at once my mule, with head raised and ears pricked up, stood stock still in the middle of the high road. I thought to be sure something was the matter; looked about for a cause, and perceiving a hat upon the ground, with a rosary of large beads, at the same time heard a lugubrious voice pronounce these words: Pray, honored master, have pity on a poor maimed soldier! Please to throw a few small pieces into this hat; you shall be rewarded for it in the other world. I looked immediately on the side whence the voice proceeded; and saw just by a thicket, twenty or thirty paces from me, a sort of a soldier, who had mounted the barrel of a confounded long carbine on two cross sticks, and seemed to be taking aim at me. At a sight which made me tremble for the patrimony of the church committed to my care, I stopped short, made sure of my ducats, and taking out a little small change, as I rode by the hat, placed to receive the charity of those quiet subjects who had not the courage to refuse it, dropped in my contribution in detail, to convince the soldier how nobly I dealt by him. He was satisfied with my liberality, and gave me a blessing for every kick I gave my mule in my impatience to get out of his way; but the infernal beast, without partaking in the slightest degree of my impatience, went at the old steady pace. A long custom of jogging on fair and softly under my uncle's weight had obliterated every idea of that motion called a gallop.

The prospect of my journey was not much improved by this adventure as a specimen. I considered within myself that I had yet some distance to Salamanca, and might, not improbably, meet with something worse. My uncle seemed to have been very imprudent not to have consigned me to the care of a muleteer. That, to be sure, was what he ought to have done; but his notion was, that by giving me his mule my journey would be cheaper; and that entered more into his calculation than the dangers in which I might be involved on the road. To retrieve his error, therefore, I resolved, if I had the good luck to arrive safe at Pegnaflor, to offer my mule for sale, and take the opportunity of a muleteer going to Astorga, whence I might get to Salamanca by a similar conveyance. Though I had never been out of Oviedo, I was acquainted with the names of the towns through which I was to pass; a species of information I took care to procure before my setting out.

I got safe and sound to Pegnaflor, and stopped at the door of a very decent-looking inn. My foot was scarcely out of the stirrup before the landlord was at my side, overwhelming me with public-house civility. He untied my cloak-bag with his own hands, swung it across his shoulders, and ushered my honor into a room, while one of his men led my mule to the stable. This landlord, the most busy prattler of the Asturias, ready to bother you impertinently about his own concerns, and at the same time with a sufficient portion of curiosity to worm himself into the knowledge of yours, was not long in telling me that his name was Andrew Corcuelo; that he had seen some service as a sergeant in the army, which he had quitted fifteen months ago, and married a girl of Castropol, who, though a little tawny or so, knew how to make both ends meet as well as the best of them. He told me a thousand things besides which he might just as well have kept private. Thinking himself entitled, after this voluntary confidence, to an equal share of mine, he asked me in a breath, and without further preface, whence I came, whither I was going, and who I was. To all this I felt myself bound to answer, article by article, because, though rather abrupt in asking them, he accompanied each question with so apologetic a bow, beseeching me with so submissive a grimace not to be offended at his curiosity, that I was drawn in to gratify it, whether I would or no. Thus by degrees did we get into a long conversation, in the course of which I took occasion to hint, that I had some reasons for wishing to get rid of my mule, and travel under convoy of a muleteer. He seemed on the whole to approve of my plan, though he could not prevail with himself to tell me so briefly; for he introduced his remarks by descanting on all the possible and probable mischances to which travellers are liable on the road, not omitting an awkward story now and then. I thought the fellow would never have done. But the conclusion of the argument was, that if I wanted to sell my mule, he knew an honest jockey who would take it off my hands. I begged he would do me the favor to fetch him, which was no sooner said than done.

On his return he introduced the purchaser, with a high encomium on his integrity. We all three went into the yard, and the mule was brought out to show paces before the jockey, who set himself to examine the beast from head to foot. His report was bad enough. To be sure, it would not have been easy to make a good one; but if it had been the pope's mule, and this fellow was to cheapen the bargain, it would have been just the same: nay, to speak with all due reverence, if he had been asked to give an opinion of the pope's great toe, from that disparaging habit of his, he would have pronounced it no better than the toe of any ordinary man. He laid it down therefore, as a principle, that the mule had all the defects a mule could have; appealing to the landlord for a confirmation of his judgment, who, doubtless, had reasons of his own for not controverting his friend's assertion. Well! says the jockey, with an air of indifference, what price have you the conscience to ask for this devil of an animal? After such a panegyric, and master Corcuelo's certificate, whom I was fool enough to take for a fair-dealing man and a good judge of horseflesh, they might have had the mule for nothing. I therefore told the dealer that I threw myself on his mercy: he must fix his own sum, and I should expect no more. On this, he began to affect the gentleman, and answered that I had found out the weak side when I left it to his honor. He was right enough in that! His honor was his weak side! for instead of bidding up to my uncle's estimate of ten or twelve pistoles, the rascal had the impudence to offer three ducats, which I accepted with as light a heart as if I had got the best of the bargain.

Having disencumbered myself of my mule in so tradesmanlike a manner, I went with my landlord to a carrier who was to set out early the next morning for Astorga, and engaged to call me up in time. When we had settled the hire of the mule, as well as the expenses on the road, I turned back towards the inn with Corcuelo, who, as we went along, got into the private history of this muleteer. When I had been pestered with all the tittle-tattle of the town about this fellow, the changes were just beginning to ring on some new subject; but, by good luck, a pretty-looking sort of a man very civilly interrupted my loquacious friend. I left them together, and sauntered on, without the slightest suspicion of being at all concerned in their discourse.

I ordered supper as soon as I got to the inn. It was a fish day: but I thought eggs were better suited to my finances. While they were getting ready I joined in conversation with the landlady, whom I had not seen before. She seemed a pretty piece of goods enough, and such a stirring body, that I should have concluded, if her husband had not told me so, her tavern must have plenty of custom. The moment the omelet was served up, I sat down to table by myself, and had scarcely got the relish of it, when my landlord walked in, followed by the man who had stopped him in the street. This pleasant gentleman wore a long rapier, and might, perhaps, be about thirty years of age. He came up to me in the most friendly manner possible. Mr. Professor, says he, I have just now heard that you are the renowned Gil Blas of Santillane, that ornament of Oviedo and luminary of philosophy. And do my eyes behold that very greatest of all great scholars and wits, whose reputation has run hither so fast before him! Little do you think, continues he, directing his discourse to the landlord and landlady, little do you imagine, I say, what good luck has befallen you. Why, you have got hold of a treasure. In this young gentleman you behold the eighth wonder of the world. Then running up and throwing his arms about my neck, Excuse me, added he; but worlds would not bribe me to suppress the rapturous emotions your honored presence has excited.

I could not answer him so glibly as I wished, not so much for want of words as of breath; for he hugged me so tight that I began to be alarmed for my wind-pipe. As soon, however, as I had got my head out of durance, I replied, Signor cavalier, I had not the least conception that my name was known at Pegnaflor. Known? resumed he in the same pompous style; we keep a register of all great persons within a circuit of twenty leagues round us. You have the character of a prodigy here; and I have not a shadow of doubt, but one day or other Spain will be as proud of numbering you among her rare productions, as Greece of having given birth to her seven wise men. This fine speech was followed as before; and I really began to think that with all my classical honors I should at last be doomed to share the fate of Antaeus. If I had been master of ever so little experience, I should not have been the dupe of his rhodomontade. I must have discovered him, by his outrageous compliments, to be one of those parasites who swarm in every town, and get into a stranger's company on his arrival, to appease the wolf in their stomachs at his expense; but my youth and vanity tempted me to draw a quite opposite conclusion. My admirer was very clever in my eyes, and I asked him to supper on the strength of it. Oh! most willingly, cried he: with all my heart and soul. My fortunate star predominates, now that I have the honor of being in company with the illustrious Gil Blas of Santillane, and I shall certainly make the most of my good fortune as long as it lasts. My appetite is rather delicate, but I will just sit down with you by way of being sociable, and if I can swallow a bit! only just not to look for we philosophers are careless of the body.

These words were no sooner out of his mouth, than my panegyrist took his seat opposite to me. A cover was laid for him in due form and order. First he fell on the omelet with as much perseverance as if he had not tasted food for three whole days. By the complacency with which he eyed it I was morally certain the poor pancake was at death's door. I therefore ordered its heir apparent to succeed; and the business was despatched with such speed, that the second made its appearance on the table, just as we;--no:--I beg pardon;--just as he had taken the last lick of its predecessor. He pressed forward the main business, however, with a diligence and activity proportioned to the importance of the object he had in view: so that he contrived to load me with panegyric on panegyric, without losing a single stroke in the progress of mastication. Now all this gave me no slender conceit of my pretty little self. When a man eats, he must drink. The first toast of course was my health. The second, in common civility, was my father and mother, whose happiness in having such an angel of a son, he could not sufficiently envy or admire. All this while he kept filling my glass, and challenging me to keep pace with him. It was impossible to be backward in doing justice to such excellent toasts and sentiments: the compliments with which they were seasoned did not come amiss; so that I got into such a convivial mood, at observing our second omelet to disappear not insensibly, as just to ask the landlord if he could not find us a little bit of fish. Master Corcuelo, who to all appearance played booty with the parasite, told me he had an excellent trout; but those who eat him must pay for him. I am afraid he is meat for your masters. Meat for our masters! exclaims my very humble servant in an angry tone of voice: that is more than you know, my friend. Are you yet to learn that the best of your larder is not too good for the renowned Gil Blas of Santillane? Go where he will, he is fit to table with princes.

I was very glad that he took up the landlord's last expression; because if he had not, I should. I felt myself a little hurt at it, and said to Corcuelo with some degree of hauteur: Produce this trout of yours, and I will take the consequences. The landlord, who had got just what he wanted, set himself to work, and served it up in high order. At the first glance of this third course I saw such pleasure sparkling in the parasite's eyes, as to prove him to be of a very complying temper; just as ready to do a kindness by the fish, as by those said eggs of which he had given so good an account. But at last he was obliged to lay down his arms, for fear of accidents; as his magazine was crammed to the very throat. Having eaten and drank his fill, he bethought him of putting a finishing hand to the farce. Master Gil Blas, said he, as he rose from the table, I am too well pleased with my princely entertainment, to leave you without a word of advice, of which you seem to stand in much need. From this time forward be on your guard against extravagant praise. Do not trust men till you know them. You may meet with many another man, who, like me, may amuse himself at your expense, and perhaps carry the joke a little further. But do not you be taken in a second time, to believe yourself, on the word of such fellows, the eighth wonder of the world. With this sting in the tail of his farewell speech he very coolly took his leave.

I was as much alive to so ridiculous a circumstance, as I have ever been in after-life to the most severe mortifications. I did not know how to reconcile myself to the idea of having been so egregiously taken in, or, in fact, to lowering of my pride. So, so! quoth I, this rascal has been putting his tricks upon travellers, has he? Then he only wanted to pump my landlord! or more likely they were both in a story. Ah! my poor Gil Blas, thou hadst better hide thy silly head! To have suffered such knaves as these to turn thee into ridicule! A pretty story they will make of this! It is sure to travel back to Oviedo: and will give our friends a hopeful prospect of thy success in life. The family will be quite delighted to think what a blessed harvest all their pious advice has produced. There was no occasion to preach up morals to thee; for verily thou hast more of the dupe than the sharper in thy composition. Ready to tear my eyes out or bite my fingers off from spite and vexation, I locked myself up in my chamber and went to bed, but not to sleep; of which I had not got a wink when the muleteer came to tell me, that he only waited for me to set out on his journey. I got up as expeditiously as I could; and while I was dressing Corcuelo put in his appearance, with a little bill in his hand;--a slight memorandum of the trout! But paying through the nose was not the worst of it; for I had the vexation to perceive, that while I was counting over the cost, this hang-dog was chuckling at the recollection of the night before. Having been fleeced most shamefully for a supper, which stuck in my stomach though I had scarcely come in for a morsel of it, I joined the muleteer with my baggage, giving to as many devils as there are saints in the calendar, the parasite, the landlord, and the inn.

_Chapter III._

_THE MULETEER'S TEMPTATION ON THE ROAD; ITS CONSEQUENCES, AND THE SITUATION OF GIL BLAS BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS._

I was not the only passenger. There were two young gentlemen of Pegnaflor; a little chorister of Mondognedo, who was travelling about the country, and a young tradesman of Astorga, returning home from Verco with his new-married wife. We soon got acquainted, and exchanged the usual confidence of travellers, telling one another whence we came and whither we were going. The bride was young enough; but so dark-complexioned, with so little of what a man likes to look at in a woman, that I did not think her worth the trouble. But she had youth and a good crummy person on her side, and the muleteer, being rather less nice in his taste, was resolved to try if he could not get into her good graces. This pretty project occupied his ingenuity during the whole day; but he deferred the execution till we should get to Cacabelos, the last place where we were to stop on the road. We alighted at an inn in the outskirts of the town, a quiet convenient place, with a landlord who never troubled himself about other people's concerns. We were ushered into a private room, and got our supper snugly; but just as the cloth was taken away in comes our carrier in a furious passion:--Death and the devil! I have been robbed. Here had I a hundred pistoles in my purse! But I will have them back again. I am going for a magistrate;--and those gentry will not take a joke upon such serious subjects. You will all be put to the rack, unless you confess, and give back the money. The fellow played his part very naturally, and burst out of the room, leaving us in a terrible fright.

We had none of us the least suspicion of the trick, and, being all strangers, were afraid of one another. I looked askance at the little chorister, and he, perhaps, had no better opinion of me. Besides, we were all a pack of greenhorns, and were quite unacquainted with the routine of business on these occasions. We were fools enough to believe that the torture would be the very first stage of our examination. With this dread upon our spirits, we all made for the door. Some effected their escape into the street, others into the garden; but the whole party preferred the discretion of running away to the valor of standing their ground. The young tradesman of Astorga had as great an objection to bone-twisting as the rest of us: so he did as Eneas, and many another good husband has done before him;--ran away, and left his wife behind. At that critical moment the muleteer, as I was told afterwards, who had not half so much sense of decency as his own mules, delighted at the success of his stratagem, began moving his motives to the citizen's wife: but this Lucrece of the Asturias, borrowing the chastity of a saint from the ugliness of the devil who tempted her, defended her sweet person tooth and nail; and showed she was in earnest about it by the noise she made. The patrol, who happened to be passing by the inn at the time, and knew that the neighborhood required a little looking after, took the liberty of just asking the cause of the disturbance. The landlord, who was trying if he could not sing in the kitchen louder than she could scream in the parlor, and swore he heard no music but his own, was at last obliged to introduce the myrmidons of the police to the distressed lady, just in time to rescue her from the necessity of a surrender at discretion. The head officer, a coarse fellow, without an atom of feeling for the tender passion, no sooner saw the game that was playing, than he gave the amorous muleteer five or six blows with the butt end of his halberd, representing to him the indecency of his conduct in terms quite as offensive to modesty as the naughty propensity which had called forth his virtuous indignation. Neither did he stop here; but laid hold of the culprit, and carried plaintiff and defendant before the magistrate. The former, with her charms all heightened by the discomposure of her dress, went eagerly to try their effect in obtaining justice for the outrage they had sustained. His worship heard at least one party; and after solemn deliberation pronounced the offence to be of a most heinous nature. He ordered him to be stripped, and to receive a competent number of lashes in his presence. The conclusion of the sentence was, that if the Endymion of Asturian Diana was not forthcoming the next day, a couple of guards should escort the disconsolate goddess to the town of Astorga, at the expense of this mule-driving Acteon.

For my part, being probably more terrified than the rest of the party, I got into the fields, scampering over hedge and ditch, through enclosures and across commons, till I found myself hard by a forest. I was just going for concealment to ensconce myself in the very heart of the thicket, when two men on horseback rode across me, crying, Who goes there? As my alarm prevented me from giving them an immediate answer, they came to close quarters, and holding each of them a pistol to my throat, required me to give an account of myself; who I was, whence I came, what business I had in that forest, and above all, not to tell a lie about it. Their rough interrogatives were, according to my notion, little better than the rack with which our friend the muleteer had offered to treat us. I represented myself, however, as a young man on my way from Oviedo to Salamanca; told the story of our late fright, and faithfully attributed my running away in such a hurry to the dread of a worse exercise under the torture. They burst into an immoderate fit of laughter at my simplicity; and one of them said: Take heart, my little friend; come along with us, and do not be afraid; we will put you in a place where the devil shall not find you. At these words he took me up behind him, and we darted into the forest.

I did not know what to think of this odd meeting; yet on the whole I could not well be worse off than before. If these gentry, thought I to myself, had been thieves, they would have robbed, and perhaps murdered me. Depend on it, they are a couple of good honest country gentlemen in this neighborhood, who seeing me frightened, have taken compassion on me, and mean to carry me home with them and make me comfortable. But these visions did not last long. After turning and winding backward and forward in deep silence, we found ourselves at the foot of a hill, where we dismounted. This is our abode, said one of these sequestered gentlemen. I looked about in all directions, but the deuce a bit of either house or cottage: not a vestige of human habitation! The two men in the mean time raised a great wooden trap, covered with earth and briers, to conceal the entrance of a long shelving passage under ground, to which from habit the poor beasts took very kindly of their own accord. Their masters kept tight hold of me, and let the trap down after them. Thus was the worthy nephew of my uncle Perez caught, just for all the world as you would catch a rat.

_Chapter IV._

_Description Of The Subterraneous Dwelling And Its Contents._

I now knew into what company I had fallen; and I leave it to any one to judge whether the discovery must not have rid me of my former fear. A dread more mighty and more just now seized my faculties. Money and life, all given up for lost! With the air of a victim on his passage to the altar, did I walk, more dead than alive, between my two conductors, who finding that I trembled, frightened me so much the more by telling me not to be afraid. When we had gone two hundred paces, winding down a declivity all the way, we got into a stable lighted by two large iron lamps suspended from the vault above. There was a good store of straw, and several casks of hay and corn with room enough for twenty horses: but at that time there were only the two which came with us. An old negro, who seemed for his years in pretty good case, was tying them to the rack where they were to feed.

[Illustration: Thieves' Cave]

We went out of the stable. By the melancholy light of some other lamps, which only served to dress up horror in its native colors, we arrived at a kitchen where an old harridan was broiling some steaks on the coals, and getting supper ready. The kitchen furniture was better than might be expected, and the pantry provided in a very plentiful manner. The lady of the larder's picture is worth drawing. Considerably on the wrong side of sixty!--In her youth, her hair had been of a fiery red; though she would have called it auburn. Time had indeed given it the fairer tint of gray; but a lock of more youthful hue, interspersed at intervals, produced all the variegated effect of the admired autumnal shades. To say nothing of an olive complexion, she had an enormous chin turning up, an immense nose turning down, with a mouth in the middle, modestly retiring inwards, to make room for its encroaching neighbors. Red eyes are no beauty in any animal but a ferret;--hers were purple.

Here, dame Leonarda, said one of the horsemen as he presented me to this angelic imp of darkness, we have brought you a young lad. Then looking round, and observing me to be miserably pale, Pluck up your spirits, my friend; you shall come to no harm. We want a scullion, and have met with you. You are a lucky dog! We had a boy who died about a fortnight ago: you shall succeed to the preferment. He was rather too delicate for his place. You seem a good stout fellow, and may live a week or two longer. We find you in bed and board, coal and candle; but as for day-light, you will never see that again. Your leisure hours will pass off very agreeably with Leonarda, who is really a very good creature, and tolerably tender-hearted; you will have all your little comforts about you. I flatter myself you have not got among beggars. At this moment, the thief seized a flambeau; and as I feared, "with zeal to destroy;" for he ordered me to follow him.

He took me into a cellar, where I saw a great number of bottles and earthen pots full of excellent wine. He then made me cross several rooms. In some were pieces of cloth piled up; in others, stuffs and silks. As we passed through I could not help casting a sheep's eye at the gold and silver plate peeping out of the different cupboards. After that, I followed him into a great hall illuminated by three copper lustres, and serving as a gallery between the other rooms. Here he put fresh questions to me; asking my name;--why I left Oviedo;--and when I had satisfied his curiosity: Well, Gil Blas, said he, since your only motive for quitting your native place was to get into something snug and eligible, to be sure you must have been born to good luck, or you would not have fallen into our hands. I tell you once for all, you will live here on the fat of the land, and may souse over head and ears in ready money. Besides, you are in a place of perfect safety. The officers of the holy brotherhood might pass through the forest a hundred times without discovering our subterraneous abode. The entrance is only known to myself and my comrades. You may perhaps ask how it came to be contrived, without being perceived by the inhabitants in the neighborhood. But you are to understand, my friend, that it was made long ago, and is no work of ours. After the Moors had made themselves masters of Granada, of Arragon, and nearly the whole of Spain, the Christians, rather than submit to the tyranny of infidels, betook themselves to flight, and lay concealed in this country, in Biscay, and in the Asturias, whither the brave Don Pelagio had withdrawn himself. They lived in a state of exile, on the mountains, or in the woods dispersed in little knots. Some took up their residences in natural caves, others in artificial dwellings under ground, like this we are in. In process of time, when by the blessing of Providence they had driven their enemies out of Spain, they returned to the towns. From that time forth their retreats have served as a rendezvous for the gentlemen of our profession. It is true that several of them have been discovered and destroyed by the holy brotherhood: but there are some yet remaining; and, by great good luck, I have tenanted this without paying any rent for it almost these fifteen years: Captain Rolando, at your service! I am the leader of the band; and the man you saw with me is one of my troopers.

_Chapter V._

_THE ARRIVAL OF THE BANDITTI IN THE SUBTERRANEOUS RETREAT, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR PLEASANT CONVERSATION._

Just as Captain Rolando had finished his speech six new faces made their appearance in the hall; the lieutenant and five privates, returning home with their booty. They were hauling in two great baskets full of sugar, cinnamon, pepper, figs, almonds, and raisins. The lieutenant gave an account of their proceedings to the captain, and told him they had taken these articles, as well as the sumpter-mule, from a grocer of Benavento. An official report having thus been made to the prime-minister, the grocer's contribution was carried to account; and the next step was to regale after their labors. A large table was set out in the hall. They sent me back to the kitchen, where dame Leonarda told me what I had to do. I made the best of a bad bargain, finding the luck ran against me; and, swallowing my grievances, set myself to wait on my noble masters.

I cleaned my plate, set out my side-board, and brought up my wine. As soon as I announced dinner to be on table, consisting of two good black peppery ragouts for the first course, this high and mighty company took their seats. They fell to most voraciously. My place was to wait; and I handed about the glasses with so butler-like an air, as to be not a little complimented on my dexterity. The chief entertained them with a short sketch of my story, and praised my parts. But I had recovered from my mania by this time, and could listen to my own panegyric with the humility of an anchorite or the contempt of a philosopher. They all seemed to take a liking to me, and to think I had dropped from the clouds on purpose to be their cup-bearer. My predecessor was a fool to me. Since his death, the illustrious Leonarda had the honor of presenting nectar to these gods of the lower regions. But she was now degraded, and I had the felicity of being installed in her office. Thus, old Hebe being a little the worse for wear, young Ganymede tripped up her heels.

A substantial joint of meat after the ragouts at length blunted the edge of their appetites. Eating and drinking went together: so that they soon got into a merry pin, and made a roaring noise. Well done, my lads! All talkers and no listeners. One begins a long story, another cuts a joke; here a fellow bawls, there a fellow sings; and they all seem to be at cross-purposes. At last Rolando, tired of a concert in which he could hardly hear the sound of his own voice, let them know that he was maestro di capella, and brought them into better tune. Gentlemen, said he, I have a question to put. Instead of stunning one another with this infernal din, had we not better enjoy a little rational conversation? A thought is just come into my head. Since the happy day that united us we have never had the curiosity to inquire into each other's pedigrees, or by what chain of circumstances we were each of us led to embrace our present way of life. There would be no harm in knowing who and who are together. Let us exchange confidence: we may find some amusement in it. The lieutenant and the rest, like true heroes of romance, accepted the challenge with the utmost courtesy, and the captain told the first story to the following effect:--

Gentlemen, you are to know that I am the only son of a rich citizen in Madrid. The day of my birth was celebrated in the family by rejoicings without end. My father, no chicken, thought it a considerable feat to have got an heir, and my mother was kind enough to suckle me herself. My maternal grandfather was still living: a good old man, who did not trouble himself about other people's concerns, but said his prayers, and fought his campaigns over and over again; for he had been in the army. Of course I was idolized by these three persons; never out of their arms. My early years were passed in the most childish amusements, for fear of hurting my health by application. It will not do, said my father, to hammer much learning into children till time has ripened their understanding. While he waited for this ripening, the season went by. I could neither read nor write: but I made up for that in other ways. My father taught me a thousand different games. I became perfectly acquainted with cards, was no stranger to dice, and my grandfather set me the example of drawing the long bow, while he entertained me with his military exploits. He sung the same songs repeatedly one after another every day; so that when, after saying ten or twelve lines after him for three months together, I got to boggle through them without missing, the whole family were in raptures at my memory. Neither was my wit thought to be at all less extraordinary; for I was suffered to talk at random, and took care to put in my oar in the most impertinent manner possible. O, the pretty little dear! exclaimed my father, as if he had been fascinated. My mother made it up with kisses, and my grandfather's old eyes overflowed. I played all sorts of dirty and indecent tricks before them with impunity; every thing was excusable in so fine a boy: an angel could not do wrong. Going on in this manner, I was already in my twelfth year without ever having a master. It was high time; but then he was to teach me by fair means: he might threaten, but must not flog me. This arrangement did me but little good; for sometimes I laughed when my tutor scolded: at others, I ran with tears in my eyes to my mother or my grandfather, and complained that he had used me ill. The poor devil got nothing by denying it. My word was always taken before his, and he came off with the character of a cruel rascal. One day I scratched myself with my own nails, and set up a howl as if I had been flogged. My mother ran, and turned the master out of doors, though he vowed and protested he had never lifted a finger against me.

Thus did I get rid of all my tutors, till at last I met with one to my mind. He was a bachelor of Alcala. This was the master for a young man of fashion. Women, wine, and gaming were his principal amusements. It was impossible to be in better hands. He hit the right nail on the head: for he let me do what I pleased, and thus got into the good graces of the family, who abandoned me to his conduct. They had no reason to repent. He perfected me betimes in the knowledge of the world. By dint of taking me about to all his haunts, he gave such a finish to my education, that barring literature and science, I became a universal scholar. As soon as he saw that I could go alone in the high road to ruin he went to qualify others for the same journey.

During my childhood I had lived at home just as I liked, and did not sufficiently consider, that now I was beginning to be responsible for my own actions. My father and mother were a standing jest. Yet they were themselves thrown into convulsions at my sallies; and the more ridiculous they were made by them, the more waggish they thought me. In the mean time I got into all manner of scrapes with some young fellows of my own kidney; and, as our relations kept us rather too short of cash for the exigencies of so loose a life, we each of us made free with whatever we could lay our hands on in our own families. Finding this would not raise the supplies, we began to pick pockets in the streets at night. As ill luck would have it, our exploits came to the knowledge of the police. A warrant was out against us; but some good-natured friend, thinking it a pity we should be nipped in the bud, gave us a caution. We took to our heels, and rose in our vocation to the rank of highwaymen. From that time forth, gentlemen, with a blessing on my endeavors, I have gone on till I am almost the father of the profession, in spite of the dangers to which it is exposed.

Here the captain ended, and it came to the turn of the lieutenant. Gentlemen, extremes are said to meet;--and so it will appear from a comparison of our commander's education and mine. My father was a butcher at Toledo. He passed, with reason, for the greatest brute in the town, and my mother's sweet disposition was not mended by the example. In my childhood, they whipped me in emulation of one another; I came in for a thousand lashes of a day! The slightest fault was followed up by the severest punishment. In vain did I beg for mercy with tears in my eyes, and protest that I was sorry for what I had done. They never excused me, and nine times out of ten flogged me for nothing. When I was under my father's lash, my mother, not thinking his arm stout enough, lent her assistance, instead of begging me off. The favors I received at their hands gave me such a disgust, that I quitted their house before I had completed my fourteenth year, took the Arragon road, and begged my way to Saragossa. There I associated with vagrants, who led a merry life enough. They taught me to counterfeit blindness and lameness, to dress up an artificial wound in each of my legs, and to adopt many other methods of imposing on the credulity of the charitable and humane. In the morning, like actors at rehearsal, we cast our characters, and settled the business of the comedy. We had each our exits and our entrances; till in the evening the curtain dropped, and we regaled at the expense of the dupes we had deluded in the day. Wearied however with the company of these wretches, and wishing to live in more worshipful society, I entered into partnership with a gang of sharpers. These fellows taught me some good tricks: but Saragossa soon became too hot to hold us, after we had fallen out with a limb of the law, who had hitherto taken us under his protection. We each of us provided for ourselves, and left the devil to take the hindmost. For my part, I enlisted in a brave and veteran regiment, which had seen abundance of service on the king's highway: and I found myself so comfortable in their quarters, that I had no desire to change my birth. So that you see, gentlemen, I was very much obliged to my relations for their bad behavior; for if they had treated me a little more kindly, I might have been a blackguard butcher at this moment, instead of having the honor to be your lieutenant.

Gentlemen,--interrupted a hopeful young freebooter who sat between the captain and the lieutenant,--the stories we have just heard are neither so complicated nor so curious as mine. I peeped into existence by means of a country-woman in the neighborhood of Seville. Three weeks after she had set me down in this system, a nurse-child was offered her. You are to understand she was yet in her prime, comely in her person, and had a good breast of milk. The young suckling had noble blood in him, and was an only son. My mother accepted the proposal with all her heart, and went to fetch the child. It was entrusted to her care. She had no sooner brought it home, than, fancying a resemblance, she conceived the idea of substituting me for the brat of high birth, in the hope of drawing a handsome commission at some future time for this motherly office in behalf of her infant. My father, whose morals were on a level with those of clodhoppers in general, lent himself very willingly to the cheat: so that with only a change of clouts, the son of Don Rodrigo de Herrera was packed off in my name to another nurse, and my mother suckled her own and her master's child at once in my little person.

They may say what they will of instinct and the force of blood! The little gentleman's parents were very easily taken in. They had not the slightest suspicion of the trick; and were eternally dandling me till I was seven years old. As it was their intention to make me a finished gentleman, they gave me masters of all kinds; but I had very little taste for their lessons, and above all, I detested the sciences. I had at any time rather play with the servants or the stable boys, and was a complete kitchen genius. But tossing up for heads or tails was not my ruling passion. Before seventeen I had an itch for getting drunk. I played the devil among the chambermaids; but my prime favorite was a kitchen girl, who had infinite merit in my eyes. She was a great bloated horse-god-mother, whose good case and easy morals suited me exactly. I boarded her with so little circumspection that Don Rodrigo took notice of it. He took me to task pretty sharply; twitted me with my low taste; and, for fear the presence of my charmer should counteract his sage counsels, showed the goddess of my devotions the outside of the door.

This proceeding was rather offensive; and I determined, to be even with him. I stole his wife's jewels; and ravishing my Helen from a laundress of her acquaintance, went off with her in open day, that the transaction might lose nothing in point of notoriety. But this was not all. I carried her among her relations, where I married her according to the rites of the church, as much from the personal motive of mortifying Herrera, as from the patriotic enthusiasm of encouraging our young nobility to mend the breed. Three months after marriage, I heard that Don Rodrigo had gone the way of all flesh. The intelligence was not lost upon me. I was at Seville in a twinkling, to administer in due form and order to his effects; but the tables were turned. My mother had paid the debt of nature, and in her last agonies had been so much off her guard as to confess the whole affair to the curate of the village and other competent witnesses. Don Rodrigo's son had already taken my place, or rather his own, and his popularity was increased by the deficiency of mine; so that as the trumps were all out in that hand, and I had no particular wish for the present my wife was likely to make me, I joined issue with some desperate blades, with whom I began my trading ventures.

The young cut-purse having finished his story, another told us that he was the son of a merchant at Burgos; that, in his youth, prompted more by piety than wit, he had taken the religious habit and professed in a very strict order, and that a few years afterwards he had apostatized. In short, the eight robbers told their tale one after another, and when I had heard them all, I did not wonder that the destinies had brought them together. The conversation now took a different turn. They brought several schemes upon the carpet for the next campaign; and after having laid down their plan of operations, rose from table and went to bed. They lighted their night candles, and withdrew to their apartments. I attended Captain Rolando to his. While I was fiddling about him as he undressed: Well! Gil Blas, said he, you see how we live! We are always merry; hatred and envy have no footing here; we have not the least difference, but hang together just like monks. You are sure, my good lad, to lead a pleasant life here; for I do not think you are fool enough to make any bones about consorting with gentlemen of the road. In what does ours differ from many a more reputable trade? Depend on it, my friend, all men love two hands in their neighbor's purse, though only one in their own. Men's principles are all alike; the only difference lies in the mode of carrying them into effect. Conquerors, for instance, make free with the territories of their neighbors. People of fashion borrow, and do not pay. Bankers, treasurers, brokers, clerks, and traders of all kinds, wholesale and retail, give ample liberty to their wants to overdraw on their consciences. I shall not mention the hangers-on of the law; we all know how it goes with them. At the same time it must be allowed that they have more humanity than we have; for as it is often our vocation to take away the life of the innocent for plunder, it is sometimes theirs for fee and reward to save the guilty.

_Chapter VI._

_The Attempt Of Gil Blas To Escape, And Its Success._

After the captain of the banditti had thus apologized for adopting such a line of life, he went to bed. For my part, I returned to the hall, where I cleared the table, and set every thing to rights. Then I went to the kitchen, where Domingo, the old negro, and dame Leonarda had been expecting me at supper. Though entirely without appetite, I had the good manners to sit down with them. Not a morsel could I eat; and, as I scarcely felt more miserable than I looked, this pair so justly formed to meet by nature, undertook to give me a little comfort. Why do you take on so, my good lad? said the old dowager: you ought rather to bless your stars for your good luck. You are young, and seem a little soft; you would have a fine kettle of fish of it in the busy world. You might have fallen into bad hands, and then your morals would have been corrupted; whereas here your innocence is insured to its full value. Dame Leonarda is in the right, put in the old negro gravely, the world is but a troublesome place. Be thankful, my friend, for being so early relieved from the dangers, the difficulties, and the afflictions of this miserable life.

I bore this prosing very quietly, because I should have got no good by putting myself in a passion about it. At length Domingo, after playing a good knife and fork, and getting gloriously muddled, took himself off to the stable. Leonarda, by the glimmering of a lamp, showed me the way to a vault which served as a last home to those of the corps who died a natural death. Here I stumbled upon something more like a grave than a bed. This is your room, said she. Your predecessor lay here as long as he was among us, and here he lies to this day. He suffered himself to be hurried out of life in his prime: do not you be so foolish as to follow his example. With this kind advice, she left me with the lamp for my companion and returned to the kitchen. I threw myself on the little bed, not so much for rest as meditation. O Heaven! exclaimed I, was there ever a fate so dreadful as mine! It is determined then that I am to take my leave of daylight! Beside this, as if it was not enough to be buried alive at eighteen, my misery is to be aggravated by being in the service of a banditti; by passing the day with highwaymen, and the night in a charnel-house. These reflections, which seemed to me very dismal, and were indeed no better than they seemed, set me crying most bitterly. I could not conceive what cursed maggot my uncle had got in his head to send me to Salamanca; repented running away from Cacabelos, and would have compounded for the torture. But, considering how vain it was to shut the door when the steed was stolen, I determined, instead of lamenting the past, to hit upon some expedient for making my escape. What! thought I, is it impossible to get off? The cut-throats are asleep; cooky and the black will be snoring ere long. Why cannot I, by the help of this lamp, find the passage by which I descended into these infernal regions? I am afraid indeed my strength is not equal to lifting the trap at the entrance. However, let us see. Faint heart never won fair lady. Despair will lend me new force, and who knows but I may succeed?

Thus was the train laid for a grand attempt. I got up, as soon as Leonarda and Domingo were likely to be asleep. With the lamp in my hand, I stole out of the vault, putting up my prayers to all the spirits in paradise, and ten miles round. It was with no small difficulty that I threaded all the windings of this new labyrinth. At length I found myself at the stable door, and perceived the passage which was the object of my search. Pushing on I made my way towards the trap with a light pair of heels and a beating heart: but, alas! in the middle of my career I ran against a cursed iron grate locked fast, with bars so close as not to admit a hand between them. I looked rather foolish at the occurrence of this new difficulty, which I had not been aware of at my entrance, because the grate was then open. However, I tried what I could do by fumbling at the bars. Then for a peep at the lock; of whether it could not be forced! When all at once my poor shoulders were saluted with five or six good strokes of a bull's pizzle. I set up such a shrill alarum, that the den of Cacus rang with it; when looking round, who should it be but the old negro in his shirt, holding a dark lanthorn in one hand, and the instrument of my punishment in the other, O, O! quoth he, my merry little fellow, you will run away, will you? No, no! you must not think to set your wits against mine. I heard you all the while. You thought you should find the grate open, did not you? You may take it for granted, my friend, that henceforth it will always be shut. When we keep any one here against his will, he must be a cleverer fellow than you to make his escape.

In the mean time, at the howl I had set up, two or three of the robbers waked suddenly; and not knowing but the holy brotherhood might be falling upon them, they got up and called their comrades. Without the loss of a moment all were on the alert. Swords and carbines were put in requisition, and the whole posse advanced forward almost in a state of nature to the place where I was parleying with Domingo. But as soon as they learned the cause of the uproar, their alarm resolved itself into a peal of laughter. How now, Gil Blas, said the apostate son of the church, you have not been a good six hours with us, and are you tired of our company already? You must have a great objection to retirement. Why, what would you do if you were a Carthusian friar! Get along with you, and go to bed. This time you shall get off with Domingo's discipline; but if you are ever caught in a second attempt of the same kind, by Saint Bartholomew! we will flay you alive. With this hint he retired, and the rest of the party went back to their rooms. The old negro, taking credit to himself for his vigilance, returned to his stable: and I found my way back to my charnel-house, where I passed the remainder of the night in weeping and wailing.

_Chapter VII._

_Gil Blas, Not Being Able To Do What He Likes, Does What He Can._

For the first few days, I thought I should have given up the ghost for very spite and vexation. The lingering life I led was nearly akin to death itself; but in the end my good genius whispered me to play the hypocrite. I aimed at looking a little more cheerful; began to laugh and sing, though it was sometimes on the wrong side of my mouth; in a word, I put so good a face on the matter, that Leonarda and Domingo were completely taken in. They thought the bird was reconciled to his cage. The robbers entertained the same notion. I looked as brisk as the beverage I poured out, and put in my oar whenever I thought I could say a good thing. My freedom, far from offending, was taken in good part. Gil Blas, quoth the captain one evening, while I was playing the buffoon, you have done well, my friend, to banish melancholy. I am delighted with your wit and humor. Some people wear a mask at first acquaintance; I had no notion what a jovial fellow you were.

My praises now seemed to run from mouth to mouth. They were all so partial to me, that, not to miss my opportunity;--Gentlemen, quoth I, allow me to tell you a piece of my mind. Since I have been your guest, a new light breaks in upon me. I have bid adieu to vulgar prejudices, and caught a ray at the fountain of your illumination. I feel that I was born to be your knight companion. I languish to make one among you, and will stand my chance of a halter with the best. All the company cried Hear!--I was considered as a promising member of the senate. It was then determined unanimously to give me a trial in some inferior department; afterwards to bespeak me a good desperate encounter in which I might show my prowess; and if I answered expectation to give me a high and responsible employment in the commonwealth.

It was necessary therefore to go on exhibiting a copy of my countenance, and doing my best in my office of cup-bearer. I was impatient beyond measure; for I only aspired after the honors of the sitting, to obtain the liberty of going abroad with the rest; and I was in hopes that by running the risk of getting my neck into one noose I might get it out of another. This was my only chance. The time nevertheless seemed long to wait, and I kept my eye on Domingo, with the hope of outwitting him: but the thing was not feasible; he was always on the watch. Orpheus as leader of the band, with a complete orchestra of performers as good as himself, could not have soothed the savage breast of this Cerberus. The truth is, by the by, that for fear of exciting his suspicion, I did not set my wits against him so much as I might have done. He was on the lookout, and I was obliged to play the prude, or my virtue might have come into disgrace. I therefore stopped proceedings till the time of my probation should expire, to which I looked forward with impatience, just as if I was waiting for a place under government.

Heaven be praised, in about six months I gained my end. The commandant Rolando addressing his regiment, said: Comrades, we must stand upon honor with Gil Blas. I have no bad opinion of our young candidate; we shall make something of him. If you will take my advice, let him go and reap his first harvest with us to-morrow on the king's highway. We will lead him on in the path of honor. The robbers applauded the sentiments of the captain with a thunder of acclamation; and to show me how much I was considered as one of the gang, from that moment they dispensed with my attendance at the sideboard. Dame Leonarda was reinstated in the office from which she had been discharged to make room for me. They made me change my dress, which consisted in a plain short cossack a good deal the worse for wear, and tricked me out in the spoils of a gentleman lately robbed. After this inauguration, I made my arrangements for my first campaign.

_Chapter VIII._

_Gil Blas Goes Out With The Gang, And Performs An Exploit On The Highway._

It was past midnight in the month of September, when I issued from the subterraneous abode as one of the fraternity. I was armed, like them, with a carabine, two pistols, a sword and a bayonet, and was mounted on a very good horse, the property of the gentleman in whose costume I appeared. I had lived so long like a mole under ground, that the daybreak could not fail of dazzling me: but my eyes got reconciled to it by degrees.

We passed close by Pontferrada, and were determined to lie in ambush behind a small wood skirting the road to Leon. There we were waiting for whatever fortune might please to throw in our way, when we espied a Dominican friar, mounted, contrary to the rubric of those pious fathers, on a shabby mule. God be praised, exclaimed the captain with a sneer, this is a noble beginning for Gil Blas. Let him go and trounce that monk: we will bear witness to his qualifications. The connoisseurs were all of opinion that this commission suited my talents to a hair, and exhorted me to do my best. Gentlemen, quoth I, you shall have no reason to complain. I will strip this holy father to his birthday suit, and give you complete right and title to his mule. No, no, said Rolando, the beast would not be worth its fodder: only bring us our reverend pastor's purse; that is all we require. Hereupon I issued from the wood and pushed up to the man of God, doing penance all the time in my own breast for the sin I was committing. I could have liked to have turned my back upon my fellows at that moment; but most of them had the advantage of better horses than mine: had they seen me making off, they would have been at my heels, and would soon have caught me, or perhaps would have fired a volley, for which I was not sufficiently case-hardened. I could not therefore venture on so perilous an alternative; so that claiming acquaintance with the reverend father, I asked to look at his purse, and just put out the end of a pistol. He stopped short to gaze upon me; and, without seeming much frightened, said, My child, you are very young; this is an early apprenticeship to a bad trade. Father, replied I, bad as it is, I wish I had begun it sooner. What! my son, rejoined the good friar, who did not understand the real meaning of what I said, how say you? What blindness! give me leave to place before your eyes the unhappy condition. Come, come, father! interrupted I with impatience, a truce to your morality, if you please. My business on the high road is not to hear sermons. Money makes my mare to go. Money! said he, with a look of surprise; you have a poor opinion of Spanish charity, if you think that people of my stamp have any occasion for such trash upon their travels. Let me undeceive you. We are made welcome wherever we go, and pay for our board and lodgings by our prayers. In short, we carry no cash with us on the road; but draw drafts upon Providence. That is all very well, replied I; yet for fear your drafts should be dishonored, you take care to keep about you a little supply for present need. But come, father, let us make an end: my comrades in the wood are in a hurry; so your money or your life. At these words, which I pronounced with a determined air, the friar began to think the business grew serious. Since needs must, said he, there is wherewithal to satisfy your craving. A word and a blow is the only rhetoric with you gentlemen. As he said this, he drew a large leathern purse from under his gown, and threw it on the ground. I then told him he might make the best of his way: and he did not wait for a second bidding, but stuck his heels into the mule, which, giving the lie to my opinion, for I thought it on a par with my uncle's, set off at a good round pace. While he was riding for his life, I dismounted. The purse was none of the lightest. I mounted again, and got back to the wood, where those nice observers were waiting with impatience to congratulate me on my success. I could hardly get my foot out of the stirrup, so eager were they to shake hands with me. Courage, Gil Blas, said Rolando; you have done wonders. I have had my eyes on you during your whole performance, and have watched your countenance. I have no hesitation in predicting that you will become in time a very accomplished highwayman. The lieutenant and the rest chimed in with the prophecy, and assured me that I could not fail of fulfilling it hereafter. I thanked them for the elevated idea they had formed of my talents, and promised to do all in my power not to discredit their penetration.

After they had lavished praises, the effect rather of their candor than of my merit, they took it into their heads to examine the booty I had brought under my convoy. Let us see, said they, let us see how a friar's purse is lined. It should be fat and flourishing, continued one of them, for these good fathers do not mortify the flesh when they travel. The captain untied the purse, opened it, and took out two or three handfuls of little copper coins, an Agnus-Dei here and there, and some scapularies. At sight of so novel a prize, all the privates burst into an immoderate fit of laughter. God be praised! cried the lieutenant, we are very much obliged to Gil Blas: his first attack has produced a supply, very seasonable to our fraternity. One joke brought on another. These rascals, especially the fellow who had retired from the church to our subterraneous hermitage, began to make themselves merry on the subject. They said a thousand good things, such as showed at once the sharpness of their wits and the profligacy of their morals. They were all on the broad grin except myself. It was impossible to be butt and marksman too. They each of them shot their bolt at me, and the captain said: Faith, Gil Blas, I would advise you as a friend not to set your wit a second time against the church: the biter may be bit; for you must live some time longer among us, before you are a match for them.

_Chapter IX._

_A More Serious Incident._

We lounged about the wood for the greater part of the day, without lighting on any traveller to pay toll for the friar. At length we were beginning to wear our homeward way, as if confining the feats of the day to this laughable adventure, which furnished a plentiful fund of conversation, when we got intelligence of a carriage on the road drawn by four mules. They were coming at a hard gallop, with three outriders, who seemed to be well armed. Rolando ordered the troop to halt, and hold a council, the result of whose deliberations was to attack the enemy. We were regularly drawn up in battle array, and marched to meet the caravan. In spite of the applause I had gained in the wood, I felt an oozing sort of a tremor come over me, with a chill in my veins and a chattering in my teeth that seemed to bode me no good. As it never rains but it pours, I was in the front of the battle, hemmed in between the captain and the lieutenant, who had given me that post of honor, that I might lose no time in learning to stand fire. Rolando, observing the low ebb of my animal spirits, looked askew at me, and muttered in a tone more resolute than courtly: Hark ye! Gil Blas, look sharp about you! I give you fair notice, that if you play the recreant, I shall lodge a couple of bullets in your brain. I believed him as firmly as my catechism, and thought it high time not to neglect the hint; so that I was obliged to lay an embargo on the expression of my fears, and to think only of recommending my soul to God in silence.

While all this was going on, the carriage and horsemen drew near. They suspected what sort of gentry we were; and guessing our trade by our badge, stopped within gun-shot. They had carabines and pistols as well as ourselves. While they were preparing to give us a brisk reception, there jumped out of the coach a well-looking gentleman richly dressed. He mounted a led horse, and put himself at the head of his party. Though they were but four against nine, for the coachman kept his seat on the box, they advanced towards us with a confidence calculated to redouble my terror. Yet I did not forget, though trembling in every joint, to hold myself in readiness for a shot: but, to give a candid relation of the affair, I blinked and looked the other way in letting off my piece; so that from the harmlessness of my fire, I was sure not to have murder to answer for in another world.

I shall not give the particulars of the engagement; though present, I was no eye-witness; and my fear, while it laid hold of my imagination, drew a veil over the anticipated horror of the sight. All I know about the matter is, that after a grand discharge of musketry, I heard my companions hallooing Victory! Victory! as if their lungs were made of leather. At this shout the terror which had made a forcible entry on my senses was ejected, and I beheld the four horsemen stretched lifeless on the field of battle. On our side, we had only one man killed. This was the renegade parson, who had now filled the measure of his apostasy, and paid for jesting with scapularies and such sacred things. The lieutenant received a slight wound in the arm; but the bullet did little more than graze the skin.

Master Rolando was the first at the coach-door. Within was a lady of from four to five-and-twenty, beautiful as an angel in his eyes, in spite of her sad condition. She had fainted during the conflict, and her swoon still continued. While he was fixed like a statue on her charms, the rest of us were in profound meditation on the plunder. We began by securing the horses of the defunct; for these animals, frightened at the report of our pieces, had got to a little distance, after the loss of their riders. For the mules, they had not wagged a hair, though the coachman had jumped from his box during the engagement to make his escape. We dismounted for the purpose of unharnessing and loading them with some trunks tied before and behind the carriage. This settled, the captain ordered the lady, who had not yet recovered her faculties, to be set on horseback before the best mounted of the robbers; then, leaving the carriage and the uncased carcasses by the roadside, we carried off with us the lady, the mules, and the horses.

_Chapter X._

_THE LADY'S TREATMENT FROM THE ROBBERS. THE EVENT OF THE GREAT DESIGN, CONCEIVED BY GIL BLAS._

The night had another hour to run, when we arrived at our subterraneous mansion. The first thing we did was to lead our cavalry to the stable, where we were obliged to groom them ourselves, as the old negro had been confined to his bed for three days, with a violent fit of the gout, and a universal rheumatism. He had no member supple but his tongue; and that he employed in testifying his indignation by the most horrible impieties. Leaving this wretch to curse and swear by himself, we went to the kitchen to look after the lady. So successful were our attentions, that we succeeded in recovering her from her fit. But when she had once more the use of her senses, and saw herself encompassed by strangers, she knew the extent of her misfortune, and shuddered at the thought. All that grief and despair together could present, of images the most distressing, appeared depicted in her eyes, which she lifted up to Heaven, as if in reproach for the indignities she was threatened with. Then, giving way at once to these dreadful apprehensions, she fell again into a swoon, her eyelids closed once more, and the robbers thought that death was going to snatch from them their prey. The captain, therefore, judging it more to the purpose to leave her to herself than to torment her with any more of their assistance, ordered her to be laid on Leonarda's bed, and at all events to let nature take its course.

We went into the hall, where one of the robbers, who had been bred a surgeon, looked at the lieutenant's arm and put a plaster to it. After this scientific operation, it was thought expedient to examine the baggage. Some of the trunks were filled with laces and linen, others with various articles of wearing apparel: but the last contained some bags of coin; a circumstance highly approved by the receivers-general of the estate. After this investigation, the cook set out the sideboard, laid the cloth, and served up supper. Our conversation ran first on the great victory we had achieved. On this subject, said Rolando, directing himself to me, confess the truth, Gil Blas: you cannot deny that you were devilishly frightened. I candidly admitted the fact; but promised to fight like a crusader, after my second or third campaign. Hereupon all the company took my part, alleging the sharpness of the action in my excuse, and that it was very well for a novice, not yet accustomed to the smell of powder.

We next talked of the mules and horses just added to our subterraneous stud. It was determined to set off the next morning before daybreak, and sell them at Mansilla, before there was any chance of our expedition having got wind. This resolution taken, we finished our supper, and returned to the kitchen to pay our respects to the lady. We found her in the same condition. Nevertheless, though the dregs of life seemed almost exhausted, some of these poachers could not help casting a wicked leer at her, and giving visible signs of a motion within them, which would have broken out into overt act, had not Rolando put a spoke in their wheel, by representing that they ought at least to wait till the lady had got rid of her terrors and squeamishness, and could come in for her share of the amusement. Their respect for the captain operated as a check to the incontinence of their passions. Nothing else could have saved the lady; nor would death itself probably have secured her from violation.

Again therefore did we leave this unhappy female to her melancholy fate. Rolando contented himself with charging Leonarda to take care of her, and we all separated for the night. For my part, when I went to bed, instead of courting sleep, my thoughts were wholly taken up with the lady's misfortunes. I had no doubt of her being a woman of quality, and thought her lot on that account so much the more piteous. I could not paint to myself, without shuddering, the horrors which awaited her; and felt myself as sensibly affected by them, as if united to her by the ties of blood or friendship. At length, after having sufficiently bewailed her destiny, I mused on the means of preserving her honor from its present danger, and myself from a longer abode in this dungeon. I considered that the old negro could not stir, and recollected that since his illness the cook had the key of the grate. That thought warmed my fancy, and gave birth to a project not to be hazarded lightly: the stages of its execution were the following:--

I pretended to have the colic. A lad in the colic cannot help whining and groaning; but I went further, and cried out lustily, as loud as my lungs would let me. This roused my gentle friends, and brought them about me, to know what the deuce was the matter. I informed