The text of this version is taken from The Adventures of Gil Blas by A.R. LeSage. Translated from the French by Tobias Smollett with an introduction by William Morton Fullerton. George Routledge & Sons [1912] We wish to acknowledge the courtesy and helpfulness of Ms. Sally Sweet of ITPS in clearing copyright for this publication.
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 Phaedrus 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 esta 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 an hundred ducats with a card on which was written these words in Latin: ``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.
WALTER SCOTT, who craved the beatitude - the word is his own - that would attend the perusal of another book as entrancing as Gil Blas, was on the side of the untutored public which knows nothing of technical classifications or of M. Brunetière's theory of the evolution des genres. Lesage's great book, though scarcely answering to the exact technical definition of a picaresque novel - the biography of a picaro or rogue - belongs, nevertheless, by its external form, to the picaresque type of fiction; and Scott would certainly have admitted that its picaresqueness was very good of its kind; that it was in fact as picaresque as could be expected of a Frenchman who was conspicuously an honnê homme and who signed himself bourgeois de Paris. But In all likelihood he would have instantly added that it was not the picaresqueness of Gil Blas which has given that production its fame; and that, if Lesage's masterpiece has lived so long, and if it lives to-day with such a fresh and abundant life, this constant appeal has been made in spite of its resemblance to the Spanish picaresque prototype.
The application of the scientific method to literary criticism during the last generation has steadily tended to define works of art as ``documents'' of their epoch, and at the same time to classify them according to their structural variations rather than to accept them wholly as sources of human pleasure. The novel of Lesage for the purposes of classification, may be viewed as a picaresque novel, and it is interesting and legitimate to note that it is no doubt the best of its kind; yet there is equally little doubt that thousands of readers who do not know what the word ``picaresque'' means have for several generations regarded Gil Blas as simply the best of all novels, and that their reasons have been based on qualities quite independent of the mould into which it happened to be run. This is, in fact, the truth which these brief remarks are meant to set forth. In order to become a classic, and in order to hold its own among the books of the world, Gil Blas has had to live down its picaresqueness. The book has survived, and become one of the great books, notwithstanding the characteristics which seemed destined to confine it to the museum of antique literary forms.
Walter Scott's recognition of the supreme delightfulness of Gil Blas has not been general among the critics; indeed, the sense of its intrinsic value as a definition of life must rather be placed to the credit of the uncritical public. Voltaire, referring to Lesage in his Siècle de Louis XIV, limits his praise to the remark : ``His novel Gil Blas has survived because of the naturalness of the style.'' The curtness and inadequacy of this remark are probably due rather to the fact that Voltaire did not see beyond the superficial traits of this novel, its general picaresque atmosphere, than, as has so often been asserted, to any malicious intent to decry a book in which he supposed himself to have been held up to ridicule. [The traditional view is, however, plausible enough, as Mr. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly has shown in his introduction to the edition of Gil Blas published in the ``World's Classics.'' There can be no doubt as to Lesage having ridiculed Voltaire in two of his plays]. Joubert, whose delicacy was a hothouse fruit grown in the thin subsoil and the devitalised air in which he was compelled to live, corroborates Voltaire, while revealing his own prejudices -after all, is not the main interest of criticism the light it throws upon the critic? - in a characteristic utterance : ``Lesage's novels would appear to have been written in a café by a domino-player, after spending the evening at the play.'' Evidently this is a long way from the ``beatitude'' of Walter Scott, but it is nearer the point of view of Mr. Warner Allen, who, while he notes in his remarkable General Introduction to his edition of Celestine in the Picaresque Section of the ``Library of Early Novelists,'' to which this volume belongs, that Gil Blas ``has a conscience,'' is ingeniously effective in arguing that the spirit of Gil Blas is essentially picaresque - by which he means that realism and materialism are so predominantly its note that it must be classed well below Don Quixote, where the heterogeneous picaresque material is beautifully fused by the imagination of an idealist. ``It is just because Lesage ignores the idealistic side of man,'' Mr. Allen says, ``that Gil Blas misses being a great creation.'' On the other hand, La Harpe, who had read many books, but was no doubt the very opposite of a scientific critic of literature, praises Gil Blas not merely, as did Scott, for its entertainment, its agrément, but also for its moral inspiration; utile dulci, he insists, ought to be the device of this excellent book, forgetting that Lesage has himself written the precept of Horace on its title-page. C'est l'école du monde que Gil Blas, La Harpe continues; and he remarks with singular felicity that Lesage in Gil Blas ``has not fallen into that gratuitous profusion of minute detail which is nowadays taken to be truth.'' This comment suggests the probability that the reproach addressed to Lesage as to his lack of idealism is one that La Harpe would be disinclined to accept; and that they who make it have other standards for judging a work of art than those of the public to whom it is addressed, or indeed than those of the artist himself, especially such an artist as Lesage, who in his ``Declaration'' to the reader says expressly: ``My sole aim has been to represent life as it is'' : ``Je ne me suis proposé que de représenter la vie des hommes telle qu'elle est''.
Certain of Lesage's predecessors had already declared it to be their aim to write books which should be a wholesome reaction against the romanticism of the tales of chivalry that had so long delighted the taste of Europe. The sub-title of Alemán's famous novel, Guzmán de Alfarache, was Atalaya de la Vida which Chapelain translated by ``Image'' or Miroir de la Vie Humaine. And long before Lesage, the author of L'Histoire Comique de Francion used almost the identical terms of Alemán and Lesage in announcing his tale Nous avons dessein de voir une image de la vie humaine, de sorte qu'il nous en faut montrer ici diverses pièces. Francion, less picaresque than the hero of Alemán, was undoubtedly what he has been called by one of Lesage's biographers, M. Lintilhac, a direct precursor of Gil Blas; and there can be no question as to the importance of the influence exercised upon Lesage by Charles Sorel's admirable performance. But, however easily even a little erudition can discover possible prototypes of Gil Blas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century literature of both France and Spain - however picaresque, in a word, Gil Blas may be, and whatever else it may be - its picaresqueness was obviously, for Lesage, not an end in itself, but merely a device for carrying out his main project, which was ``the representation of life''; and the meaning he put into those words was incomparably richer than was their connotation on the lips of an Alemán or even a Sorel. Lesage found ready to his hand one of the most convenient literary forms tint the novel ever assumed for the achievement of the end he had in view. That end was to hold a mirror up to Nature, and to the whole of Nature.
This ambitious project has haunted most observers who have essayed the novel form. It was obviously the end and aim of the author of Anna Karenina. But such is the complexity of human relations, such the variety of the kinds of human plights, such the swift passage of events, such are the endless differences and the fleeting character of the situations presented to the artistic consciousness at any moment of time, that only the most self-confident craftsman would be tempted, in his sane mind, to undertake their complete representation. The mirror in which a writer would seek to converge and to foreshorten the vast spectacle of things must needs be an all-but unmanageable revolving mirror of gigantic dimensions, unless some way he found of dispensing with such machinery altogether. Tolstoi made no attempt to achieve an artistic synthesis of life as a whole. He was content to map life out on a sort of Mercator's projection. Balzac despaired altogether of success, and confined himself to ``doing'' the multitudinous phases of human activity piecemeal. Lesage, on the other hand, hit on the happy idea of using the picaro type, the picaresque tradition in the novel, to facilitate his project. And what device, in fact, could be neater and more rapid? Certainly not the invention of Zola. The author of the series of the Rougon-Macquart set himself the task of describing the whole of French society at the end of the last century. He believed himself to have improved on Balzac's method by conceiving of a family-tree, with branches sufficiently wide-spreading to illustrate every kind of activity of which French men or French women were capable in his time. The unity of his result was to be secured by postulating a family, the sum of the several lives of whose members should be coterminous with the conscious existence of all their essential French fellow-types at a certain historical period. The plan was ingenious but artificially ingenuous.
Lesage, writing at the opening of the eighteenth century, had, it is true, the luck to be free to employ - or, in fact, to have thrust upon him by the literary taste of his time - a simpler trick for the representation of life, The literary air was full of picaresque odours. But, while Lesage came after Sorel and Alemán, and a score of other same story-tellers eager to temper the bombast of the hour by the saving salt of realism, the living models that surrounded him were quite as suggestive as any he might have been led to imitate in the books of his predecessors. Lintilhac, Cherbuliez, Brunetière, ave dwelt in detail on this fact. What need had Lesage of a Guzmán or a Francion, when before his very eyes were such conspicuous models for the study of the valet parvenu as the Cardinals Dubois and Alberoni? And why go farther afield than the memoirs of the famous Gourville, which appeared in 1673, if one really feels impelled at all costs to account for the origin of Gil Blas, and to answer the futile question, ``Where did Lesage get his idea?'' That kind of inquiry explains everything except the essential. Homer and Shakespeare, Walter Scott and Corneille, have been put to the same torture as Lesage; and in the folds of their royal robes whole colonies of industrious parasitic moths are still furiously and often enviously at work. There is a ``Lesage question'' as there is an ``Homeric question.'' But of this the public recks little. It sanely holds the view of M. de Maurepas, who wittily defined an author as ``un homme qui prend aux livres tout ce qui lui passe par la tête''. The public rightly judges the work of art by the criterion of pleasure which it is capable of giving. By that standard Gil Blas was long ago classed among the delightful books of the world. How many of its beauties are plagiarisms, or whether any of them are, are inquiries which the wise are content to leave to the mandarins of literature. [While the oft-reported story of the pillage by Lesage of a lost Spanish manuscript is a myth, it is incontestable that in the last books of Gil Blas he embodied long passages from a French translation of two Italian pamphlets on The Disgrace of Count Olivares, and from a book published in 1683 at Cologne entitled, Le Ministre Parfait ou le Comte-Duc. It is easy to prove also that Lesage had read Lazarilla de Tormes and a great many Spanish tales and plays; but, as M. Lintilhac says, so had Corneille, yet the Cid remains the Cid.]
The representation of life, then, is the avowed object of Lesage. Gil Blas is a microcosm. One might apply to Lesage the words of Balzac in allusion to the Comedie Humaine : ``J'aurai porté une société toute entière dans ma tête''. Gil Blas is a picture, singularly vivid and comprehensive, of the society of France at the close of the reign of Louis XIV and at the beginning of the Regency. Lesage, like St. Simon, sought to reflect the life of his time; but he is greater than St. Simon because of the larger general interest and significance of his literary form. Lesage was a gentleman, serenely, gaily taking notes on the world that surrounded him; but, as it pleased him to publish all his notes in his own lifetime, he adopted the novel form and the device of a Spanish atmosphere. Happily the society that surrounded Lesage in the Paris of the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries was sufficiently complex and representative for an exhaustive picture of that world to assume a typical value.
Gil Blas is an encyclopadia of human types. No other single book contains so rich a collection of specimens of the genus homo. The success with which Lesage has introduced into Gil Blas virtually every form of human character, all sorts and conditions of men, is one of the miracles of literary art. The purely traditional picaro types, the vagabond and the beggar, the unscrupulous highwayman and the cut-throat, have, after all, comparatively small importance in the great comedy of life which Lesage depicts. These picaro types move in and out of the vast throng peopling his pages much as their counterparts in the flesh, the Apaches of the Marais quarter, jostled on the Pont Neuf the honest workman, the country bumpkin, the banker Turcaret, the bourgeois merchant, the strutting soldier, the barefoot monk, the daintily stepping petits maîtres, the authors and the actors, the ministers and the high officials, the servants and the adventurers, the priests, and the précieuses peering from their vinaigrettes. From the brigand cave that sheltered the jail-bird to the drawing-room of the Marquise de Chaves, from the boudoir of the enticing Laure to the cabinet of the Duke of Olivares, we visit every haunt of human activity and every social condition, conversing on the way with comedians, doctors, poets, lawyers, statesmen, valets, judges of the Inquisition, shopkeepers, courtesans, archbishops, and countless other actors of the Human Comedy. The final impression is that we have been in contact with the whole of life and with life as a whole. In this connexion it is pertinent to quote the verdict of Nodier in the Notice prefixed to the famous and now rare edition of Gil Blas containing the woodcuts of Jean Gigoux (Paris 1835) : ``Comme il avait embrassé tout ce qui appartient à l'homme dans sa composition, il osa se prescrire d'embrasser toute la langue dans son travail''. In other words, the grammarian and the lexicographer have in Gil Blas what Nodier is justified in calling ``un monument de la langue''.
We have witnessed the amusing spectacle arm-in-arm with Gil Blas de Santillane, a puppet of circumstance, but the most good-natured of companions. No youth of sprightlier wit, of keener observation, or of more unfailing good humour was ever born of mortal man or immortal writer. Gil Blas is too agreeable a fellow for us to dream of parting company with him merely because of his escapades. Moreover, no one was ever long in his company without discovering that the first fruit of his innate gift of observation is a habit of reflection gradually conducting him to the point of view of the great American pragmatist. For Gil Blas, as for Franklin, whatever else honesty may be, it is at all events the best policy. His ambition to get on, to succeed, is not the ambition of a Julien Sorel. He is not ready and willing to succeed at any price. He would not say cynically with Marie-Caroline of Naples: ``je vois trop que la force seule compte et que la bonne foi ne sert qu'a être dupe''. (Letter to the Marquis de Gallo, July 2, 1800.) In the case of Gil Blas, the habit of reflection has engendered a conscience. As he grows older in experience, the practical promptings of that conscience tend to arrest many an impulse to indulge his petty vices and to reinforce the virtues which he is prudent enough to regard as useful. His efforts to better his lot, while they bring to the fore his harmless vanity, and often indeed a certain less agreeable snobbishness, are after all to his credit. He is the first to laugh at his own mistakes, as he is the first to learn the lesson of his blunders. Here is a characteristic utterance of his:
``I let myself go with the current for three weeks. I gave myself up to every form of voluptuous pleasure. But I will say at the same time that in the midst of it all a sense of remorse often mingled bitterness with my delight. Debauch did not stifle this remorse; my remorse increased, on the contrary, in proportion as I became more and more of a debauchee; and, as a result of my fortunately honest nature, the disorder of the theatrical life began to strike me with horror. Ah, wretch that you are, I said to myself, is it thus that you are fulfilling the expectations of your family? Is it impossible, merely because you are a servant, to be an honest man? Do you really find it worth while to live with such a vicious crew? Envy, anger and avarice dominate some of them; modesty is unknown to others. Some have given themselves up to intemperance and idleness, while in others pride has become insolence. Enough of this! I will dwell no longer with the seven deadly sins.''
From all that we know of Lesage himself, as well as from a comparison of Gil Blas with the author's other Works, it seems legitimate to conclude that the good humour of his most famous hero is merely the expression of his own philosophic gaiety, at all events of his own disabused placidity, his bourgeois moderation and practical sense, his bias toward taking things easily. Life, when viewed at the angle adopted by Lesage, is an endless series of comic situations of a highly diverting and edifying character. Many of its conventions, which are nurtured on hypocrisy and snobbery, form a constant object of his good-humoured raillery, just as they form the subject-matter of the comic verve of his great master, Molière. Both have the most refreshing sense of values and an unimpeachable intellectual honesty.
The most comic incidents of the tale are the series of rebuffs experienced by Lesage's naive hero before he finally reaches the point where discretion becomes second nature. With what touching and respectful candour does Gil Blas fall a prey to the pretensions and foibles of the great! Note the art with which Lesage, juxtaposing his hero with, for instance, an Archbishop of Granada, shows the vain prelate so enamoured of his own productions as to suffer no honest criticism from even the most disinterested of his acolytes. First cajoled by flattery, then infuriated by the naive frankness of Gil Blas, whose opinion he had solicited, he shows the rash youth the door; and Gil Blas returns once again to his life of adventure. It is his rich fund of good sense that saves him here as throughout his career, and that keeps his judgment sane and his heart true amid all the eccentricities and affectations and passing passions, and even the temptations, which surround and beset him during his checkered years. This jolly easy-going boon companion is a long time learning to be canny, but he is never really a fool. He comes out ultimately the poorer for the loss of a good many illusions, but profoundly convinced that straightforwardness in human relations is as desirable a good as simplicity in art.
Watch him with his friend Fabrice, turned writer à la mode, after having been the astute lackey who early in life defined with such cold-blooded cynicism the ideals of a servant:
``le métier de laquais est impossible, je l'avoue, pour un imbecile; mais il a des charmes pour un garçon d'esprit. Un génie supérieur qui se met en condition ne fait pas son servcce matériellement comme un nigaud. Il entre dans une maison pour commander plutôt que pour servir. Il commence par étudier son maître, il se prête à défauts, gagne sa confiance et le mène ensuite par le nez.''
Fabrice, seized by la rage d'écrire, as Gil Blas calls it, and convinced that he has in him the stuff of a great writer, ignores the sage advice of his employer who has warned him that poetry is not all beer and skittles, and comes up to Madrid, the centre of les beaux esprits, ``in order to form his taste.'' He falls under the influence of one of the leaders in a log-rolling literary set, and so adroitly imitates the fashion of the hour that he is regarded as one of the cleverest writers of the younger generation. He and Gil Blas meet, after many years, over a bottle of wine; and Fabrice reads to his friend a sonnet which Gil Blas finds absurdly obscure. ``A poet capable of producing such rubbish as that,'' he says, ``can deceive only his time''; and he adds, ``your sonnet is merely pompous nonsense.'' The tortured, involved, affected style disgusts Gil Blas as such a style always disgusted Lesage, whose one ambition was to be an écrivain naturel qui parle comme le commun des hommes, and who detested le langage précieux which the great ladies and certain wits of his time took to be the mark of genius and a password for immortality. Fabrice becomes angry. ``Tu n'es qu'une bête avec ton style naturel'', he exclaims; and he maliciously reminds Gil Blas of what befell him with the Archbishop of Granada. The allusion makes the two old friends laugh, and they finish the evening over a third bottle.
Yes, Gil Blas, who is a kind of joyous jack-of-all trades, capable, as Fabrice on another occasion puts it, of fulfilling all kinds of employment, since he possesses ``l'outil universel'', is interesting and sympathetic quite as much because of his sound sense and ready wit as because of his amusing adventures. But this good sense and this wit, it should be remembered, are the fruits of his experience. Gil Blas's character is slowly formed by life under the reader's eye. Successively the dupe of the habits and the manners, the prejudices and the ideals of each social condition which he traverses in his advance towards the stable equilibrium of middle age, he is too intelligent ever to remain dazzled by his surroundings for more than a brief period. You constantly hear him, after each fresh round with Fate, saying in his natural French way: ``ca n'est pas ca; there must be some thing better than that in store for me!'' Even the seduction of life at Court ceases eventually to charm him; and one of his most poignant regrets is the fact that he had forgotten under that corrupting influence his father and mother and the old canon, his uncle. He does his best later on to make amends for this neglect. On his way to his country place at Lirias he is suddenly filled with remorse, and he turns aside towards Oviedo, where his parents live. His own dream now is to watch over their last years; and he looks forward, on arriving home, to inscribing in gold letters on the door of his father's house the Latin verses:
``Inveni portum. Spes et Fortuna, valete!
Sat me lusistis; ludite nunc alios!''
Alas! it is almost too late, for he arrives just in time to bury his father. He had previously entered the country inn, where he had been recognised by the inn keeper with lively joy. ``By Saint Anthony of Padua,'' his host had exclaimed, ``here is the son of the good Blas de Santillane''; and his wife had chimed in with, ``Why, yes, so it is. Oh, I recognise him. He is hardly changed. It's that wide-awake little Gil Blas who had more intelligence than inches. I can still see him dropping in here for a bottle of wine for his uncle's supper.'' Gil Blas has changed, nevertheless. Fabrice is too keen not to perceive it some time afterwards when Gil Blas visits him at the hospital. Fabrice remarks upon his modest bearing and observes: ``You haven't the vain and insolent air that prosperity is wont to give.'' Gil Blas explains the reason why: ``Les disgraces ont purifié ma virtu; et j'ai appris a l'école de l'adversité à jouir des richesses sans m'en laisser posséder''. He is now and then to be a backslider still, but we know that he has learned the essential lesson of life. Really, as the Italians say, ``il tempo è galantuomo''.
The rapidity of the narrative enhances the effect of optimism which is so inspiriting throughout the whole book. The transitions from the episodes of bad luck to those of good fortune take place, as Smollett has already pointed out, so suddenly that the reader positively has no time to pity Gil Blas. He is speedily inspired with a firm confidence in Lesage's ingenuity, which somehow manages to extricate his hero from every possible embarrassment. Lesage's point of view, as an observer of life, is thus quickly revealed to be a lively sense of life's chronic succession of ups and downs, and of the merely relative importance of its plights. When Gil Blas loses his place with Count Galiano, he remarks:
``I began to lose courage when I found myself back again in so miserable a case. I had grown accustomed to the conveniences of existence, and I could no longer, as before, regard indigence with cynicism. Yet I will confess I was wrong to indulge in sadness after having so many times discovered that no sooner had Fortune upset me than it put me on my feet again.''
Lesage accepts the stoical ideal of patience in adversity, but he does not accept it in the stoical way. His philosophy is the Christian belief in a Providence upon whom sane mortals may serenely rely. Providence, he knows, can be counted upon to hold the balance true on that Day of Judgment, when all human things will be set right, and when there will be a startling reversal of human verdicts. Convinced, like Bishop Butler, that things will be as they will be, his experience of life has taught him that the best philosophy is to bide one's me, all one's antennae out For Lesage the logical result of having been frequently a fool is to cease being dupe.
It would be possible and amusing to draw a parallel in this connection between the philosophy of Lesage and that of an even more successful French playwright of the present day, M. Alfred Capus - who has not yet, however, written a Gil Blas - and to contrast the manner of the two with that of Beyle in his characterisation of Julien Sorel, Gil Blas is too often, if you like, a genial rascal, as are so many of M. Capus's heroes, but he is never an odiously cynical one like his servant Scipion, and like Julien. While Lesage could say with Philinte, discreetly blaming the vices of mankind:
``Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont,
J'accoutume mon âme à soufirir ce qu'ils font....
Oui, je vois ces défauts dont votre âme murmure
Comme vices unis à l'humaine nature,
Et mon esprit enfin n'est pas plus offensé
De voir un homme fourbe, injuste, intéressé
Que de voir des vautours affamé de carnage,
Des singes malfaisants et des loups pleins de rage''
Beyle did not confine himself to ``accustoming his soul to suffer'' the enormities that men commit, but positively created in Julien Sorel an unscrupulous professor of energy whom he would appear to have regarded as an excellent model. Lesage, on the other hand, must be looked upon as a moralist; a moralist indulgent, no doubt - such indulgence was the finest flower of his inexhaustible knowledge of life -yet a moralist in the same sense in which Shakespeare and Molière are moralists. Moreover, Lesage has no cynical Blas forcing him to confine the subject-matter of his novel to such naturalistic notations as were the stock-in-trade of the Goncourts and, to a large extent, of Zola.
He had notably no such bias, either ``cynical'' or ``moral,'' as has wittingly altered the reports of so many British observers of life, who have regarded the pursuit of literature as a mission, to be accepted with a high and strenuous purpose, for the improvement of their fellows. Thus, even a Thackeray wrote first and foremost for edification. In a recently published letter to his friend Robert Hall, Thackeray refers as follows to Vanity Fair:
``I want to leave everybody dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story - we ought all to be with our own and all other stories. Good God! don't I see (in that maybe cracked and warped looking-glass in which I am always looking) my own weaknesses, wickednesses, lusts, follies, shortcomings? in company, let us hope, with better qualities about which we will pretermit discourse. We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools: so much, at least, has been my endeavour.'' (The Times, July 17, 1911.)
The idea of ``howling to a congregation of fools'' would have struck Lesage as a counsel of impertinent illbreeding, or, at all events, as a grotesque attitude for a self-respecting novelist. Of course, Thackeray was in the tradition of a literature which counts among its chief masterpieces the Pilgrim's Progress; but if the Puritan point of view is good sociology and good Tolstoism, it is not necessarily for that reason good art; and it would even seem to make ``good art'' a more difficult achievement. In the great book just mentioned there is no laugh of Tom Jones to clear the air. Thackeray would have seemed, indeed, in Vanity Fair to have been more of an artist than his pamphleteering preoccupations appeared likely to allow him to become. He himself states his object in that book to have been to indicate in cheerful terms that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people. Incorrigible misanthropist, he sets out to draw up a savage indictment of the society of his time. He is cheerful, as cheerful as he knows how to be; but, as he has resolved to give no one in his book a chance, his cheerfulness fails to produce all its intended effect. Finally, one and all, even Amelia, are branded because foredoomed. But what is the result? Gibbeted for an example, they inspire more pity than horror; and not only does all our sympathy go out to them against the despotic heartlessness of the author, who so unfairly nailed them to the cross, but we fail even to draw the whole of the useful general moral which Thackeray holds to be essential. Thus Thackeray upsets even his own ends; anxious, by the confessed clarion-toned morality of his appeal, to produce the effect aimed at by a prophet in Israel, he nevertheless inspires in his reader a quick and sane recoil before the arbitrary injustice, or, at all events, the incredibility of the author's misanthropy. In literary art, in fact, the only way to convey the illusion of reality is to tell the average truth about the average man.
Lesage, like the Tolstoi of the good period, had the tact and good sense to perceive this. He does not make the unscientific and inartistic blunder of humiliating his heroes. Like a Balzac or a Tolstoi or a Henry James, he gives them their full value, takes them for all they are worth. The pretension that naturalism, because superficially true to a certain aspect of life, is realism in the complete sense of the word, is a view which Lesage in Gil Blas triumphantly repudiates; and he differs from many playwrights of contemporary France, who appear to be so enamoured of caddishness as to regard its manifestations as pre-eminently worthy of presentation in the novel or on the stage. One of the ablest of Lesage's commentators has called him the Homer of naturalism; no neater phrase could be found to define his importance and his manner.
Nor is it the fault of Lesage if his immediate influence upon the literature of his time was perhaps not wholly what he would himself have wished it to be. It is a commonplace to note that Lesage helped to prepare in France that eighteenth century with which he was in so many respects out of sympathy. There was a whole side of Lesage that was out of touch with the modern world surrounding him. M. Faguet seems to me absolutely right as to this point. The spirit, the attitude of Lesage are seventeenth-century - for, after all, the seventeenth century was realist while so eminently moralist; he believes in the superiority of the clear old form of expression; he abominates an affected style; he prefers natural utterance that everybody can understand to individual experiments in ingenious phraseology. Moreover, while not at all the conscious moralist, he is a moralist all the same; he has a certain generalising habit, the liking for large vistas, harmonious inclusive ranges of thought; his thought-scapes have the perfection and the proportions of a garden by Le Nôtre. But it is nevertheless certain that the immense success of Lesage as a realist, the fact that he made realism look so easy, constituted a terrible incentive to imitation; and that, as a matter of fact, his example was just one of those which no writer could afford to follow who had not his marvellous good sense and his mental and moral poise. Without such moral balance and such good sense the would-be realist is almost certain to become addicted to the grosser forms of naturalism, to exercise, that is, his faculty of clear vision on special salient and picturesque, even salacious and perverse cases, rather than upon the types of the average world with which average men are familiar. Thus there can be no doubt that Lesage's unconcern for positive edification, his indifference to matters of conscience, was a trait of the eighteenth century, and a trait for which he may to a certain extent be held responsible. It was inevitable that he should find imitators, and that, in this sense, he may be said to open the way to a Crébillon fils and a Laclos, even to a Louvet, for whom he would have refused to be responsible, and to prepare an eighteenth century with which there is every reason to suppose he would have become utterly out of sympathy, not merely as a man, but as an artist in letters.
It remains to consider Gil Blas as a work of literary art. In style it is one of the most perfect examples of narrative prose in the world, comparable for limpidity, ease, and precision, with that of Cervantes in Don Quixote. With regard to its composition, it is noticeable that the novel begins at the same pitch of calm lucidity which is to characterise it to the end. The reader feels that the promise of the author in his ``Declaration,'' ``I have merely undertaken to represent life as it is,'' is likely to be kept. Lesage speaks with authority. The artists who inspire confidence with their very first stroke are not numerous. They belong to the aristocracy of the masters. What do such certainty and distinction imply? They mean that the product is the fruit of a mature intelligence; that the artist, be he sculptor, writer, or painter, has not undertaken to express until his mind is, as we say, thoroughly made up as to the nature of its content, nor until he is serenely master of the means at his disposal; that, in a word, he knows his business. In the case of Lesage it is peculiarly significant that, when he published the first part of Gil Blas in 1715, he was already forty-seven years of age; that the second part did not appear until 1724, nine years later; and that he was already an old gentleman with a family of boys, one of whom had entered the Church, when he ended his lifework, by the publication of the third part, in 1735. Gil Blas, in short, is the product of the maturity of one of the keenest observers that ever looked out upon the spectacle of things. The broad good-humoured gaiety of the earlier book, which vibrates with a picaresque lilt, is shaded gradually down, in the second volume, into a finer, serener, more intellectual irony. This change betrays the natural evolution in the author's interests and curiosities during the period reaching from his forty-seventh to his sixty-seventh year. The gaiety of the six books of the first part is to be contrasted with the soberer, more reflective spirit of the tale as it proceeds. We seem to be suiting our pace to the increasingly graver temper of a man whose knowledge of life has become richer, his insight keener, his heart more tolerant and generous. With the steady elimination of the picaresque element the novel becomes more and more an inclusive criticism of life. The author seems to be brooding over his pages with a tenderer care, as if he were more and more conscious of the significance, the magnificence even, of his task.
It is one of the results of this long gestation that Gil Blas has become a book of world-wide popularity. In the history of letters it has been an inexhaustible source of energy. It inspired the realistic novel. From Smollett and Marivaux to Dickens and Zola, and even to an Anatole France and to a Pio Baroja, Lesage has been the avowed or unavowed model of those writers who have been passionately enamoured of life, and irrepressibly compelled to express it. The influence of Lesage on the author, for instance, of Le Rouge et le Noir and of La Chartreuse de Parme - perhaps particularly on the Stendhal of the Chartreuse de Parme - seems incontestable. In August 1804, Beyle, writing to his sister Pauline, recommends her to read Gil Blas in order to learn to know the world, and cites the famous anecdote of the Archbishop of Granada's sermons. In April 1805, he promises to bring her the book. In another undated letter to his sister, Beyle writes: ``the most accurate picture of human nature as it is, in the France of the eighteenth century, is still the book of Lesage, Gil Blas. Meditate well this excellent work.'' And finally, in his Journal, under the date of ``10 Floréal, an xiii, 1805,'' Beyle notes his intention to cure himself of romanticism, and to learn to judge men as they are, by re-reading a certain number of books, among which he mentions Beaumarchais, the tales and La Pucelle of Voltaire, Chamfort, and Gil Blas. That is to say, at the most impressionable period of his intellectual life Beyle read and re-read Gil Blas; a fact which a discerning critic might easily guess, as to the truth of which, indeed, such a critic would feel an absolute conviction, and which the documents cited appear to leave beyond a doubt It would perhaps be an exaggeration to pretend that but for Gil Blas, Beyle would not have been Stendhal; but I may be permitted to quote the following passage from a private letter of M. Paul Arbelet, the editor of Stendhal's Journal d'Italie.
``Votre hypothèse me parait très séduisante. Il y a sans aucun doute quelque parenté intellectuelle entre Lesage et Stendhal, tous deux curieux d'observation morale, tous deux juges sans illusions des faiblesses humaines, mais point misanthropes, car ils s'indignent peu des vices ou des ridicules, qui les amusent plutôtou ou les intéressent. D'ailleurs l'un et l'autre manquent d'imagination et de poésie. Je comprends donc très bien que vous ayez eu l'idée d'une influence de Lesage sur Stendhal.''
Furthermore, while Lesage is all this, the fountain-head of a great literary current, he is at the same time, as a moralist, in the sanest Latin and French tradition, that which is marked, in successive epochs, by the serene temper of a Horace, by the gay science, the pantagruelism of a Rabelais, by the irony of a Beaumarchais, who ``se hâta de rire de tout, de peur d'être obligé d'en pleurer'', and finally by the tranquil mansuetude of a Renan: observers, one and all, who, after having told the towers of all the citadels of science, became amusedly aware that the only really absolute truth in the world is that all things are relative.
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 chamber-maid 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 Oviedo, 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 god-father. 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.
HERE I am, then, on the other side of Oviedo, in the road to Pegnaflor, with the world before me, as yet my own master, as well master of a bad mule and forty good ducats, without reckoning on a little supplementary cash purloined from my much-honoured 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, honoured 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 cloakbag with his own hands, swung it across his shoulders, and ushered my Honour 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 favour 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 in difference, 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 horse-flesh, 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 his weak side when I left it to his honour. He was right enough in that! his honour 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 honoured 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 honours 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 be: with all my heart and soul. My fortunate star predominates, now that I have the honour 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 sulky; 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 proved 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 eat 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.
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 out skirts 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 valour 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 neighbourhood 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 parlour, 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 our 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 neighbourhood, 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 briars, to conceal the entrance of a long shelving passage under-ground, to which from habits 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.
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.
We went out of the stable. By the melancholy light of some other lamps, which only served to dress up horror in its native colours, 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 grey; 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 neighbours. Red eyes are no beauty in any animal but a ferret; - hers were purple.
Here, dame Leonard, 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 Leonard, 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 neighbourhood. 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.
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 labours. 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 sideboard, 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 too 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 honour 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 idolised 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; everything 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 be came an 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 endeavours, 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.
Gentle men, 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 favours 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 behaviour; for if they had treated me a little more kindly, I might have been a blackguard butcher at this moment, instead of having the honour 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 neighbourhood 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 chamber-maids; but my prime favourite 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 apostatised. 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 neighbour'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 neighbours. 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.
AFTER the captain of the banditti had thus apologised 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 everything 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 I am to take my leave of daylight! Beside this, as if it were 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 charnelhouse. 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; or 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. Oh, ho! 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 carabines 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.
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 some times 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 humour. 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 honours 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 look-out, 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 honour 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 tomorrow on the king's highway. We will lead him on in the path of honour. 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 side board. 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 cassock 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.
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 birth-day 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 dishonoured, 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, be 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 candour 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.
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 tremour 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 honour, 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 musquetry, 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 horse men 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 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 carcases by the road-side, we carried off with us the lady, the mules, and the horses.
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 an 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 plaister 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 side-board, 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 day-break, 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 mis