What do I think so far of The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, the French comic novel written by Alain-René Lesage between the years 1715 and 1735? It’s diabolically entertaining. (Not to be unexpected from an author whose first novel was titled The Devil on Two Sticks, though Book II brings out more of the comedy’s diabolical side; more on that in a moment.) The action follows Gil Blas, a young man in Spain who is turned out of his home upon coming of age and told to make his own way in the world by his parents. The character begins the novel with some amount of the reader’s good will freely given on account of his being young and inexperienced in the world. Book I, as we saw, showed Gil Blas repeatedly made the dupe of others more wily and experienced than himself; he gets taken in by bandits, gets into some terrifying encounters with the authorities, and rescues the rich noblewoman Donna Mencia, who in turn rescues him from the authorities and gives him ample gold and a valuable diamond ring as a reward for saving her; which he loses in the final chapter of Book I (titled, in Smollett’s translation, “Showing That Prosperity Will Slip Through a Man’s Fingers”) by falling victim to an elaborate con perpetrated by Don Rafael and Camilla, two supposed noble relations of Donna Mencia at Vallodolid who disappear with Gil Blas’s money and the ring he foolishly trades for a worthless one. The chapter ends with Gil Blas meeting his old schoolmate Fabricio, who tells Gil Blas he will help get him set up with employment as a servant in livery.
If Book I shows Gil Blas falling victim to his own inexperience, in Book II it is often other people who turn out to be victims (with Gil Blas being the—at times witting, at times unwitting—beneficiary.) The first of these victims is the old Licentiate Sedillo, in whose house Gil Blas gets placed as a servant. There’s some slight suggestion that working for the licentiate is tedious—”Puffing myself off for a servant who was not afraid of work, I got through my business as cheerfully as I could” (80), and the reader may infer that such menial labor was not what our young hero, shortly before the suddenly rich dreamer of a glamorous life in Madrid, had envisioned for himself; that doesn’t make the next part less macabre.
Sedillo falls ill. Gil Blas is sent to fetch Doctor Sangrado, who is described as:
A tall, withered, wan executioner of the sisters three, who had done all their justice for at least these forty years, this learned forerunner of the undertaker had an aspect suited to his office; his words were weighed to a scruple, and his jargon sounded grand in the ears of the uninitiated. His arguments were mathematical demonstrations, and his opinions had the merit of originality.
One of the things Gil Blas has been praised for by French critics is the degree to which so many different aspects of the daily life of its time are depicted and parodied; the running joke here about doctors-as-executioners probably resonated much more strongly in a time when medical science was hardly considered a reliable way to prolong one’s life. What’s also great is how Lesage inhabits the ways of thinking and speech patterns of these parodic archetypes, the self-confident and moralizing manner with which he has Doctor Sangrado interact with his patient:
“The question here is, to remedy an obstructed perspiration. Ordinary practitioners, in this case, would follow the old routine of salines, diuretics, volatile salts, sulphur, and mercury; but purges and sudorifics are a deadly practice. Chemical preparations are edged tools in the hands of the ignorant. My methods are more simple and efficacious [Ed. note: LOL!]. What is your usual diet?”
“I live pretty much upon soups,” replied the canon, “and eat my meat with a good deal of gravy.”
“Soups and gravy!” exclaimed the petrified doctor. “Upon my word, it is no wonder you are ill. High living is a poisoned bait—a trap set by sensuality to cut short the days of wretched man.”
He goes on to lay out his medical philosophy, which is that there is no illness known to man that cannot be cured by ingesting copious amounts of water while bleeding the patient of copious amounts of blood. (Reminds me of this.)
Sangrado then sent me for a surgeon of his own choosing, and took from [Sedillo] six good porringers of blood, by way of beginning, to remedy this obstinate obstruction. He then said to the surgeon: “Master Martin Onez, you will take as much more three hours hence, and to-morrow you will repeat the operation. It is a mere vulgar error that the blood is of any use to the system; [ed. note: heh!] the faster you draw it off, the better. A patient has nothing to do but to keep himself quiet; with him, to live is merely not to die; he has no more occasion for blood than a man in a trance; in both cases, life consists exclusively in pulsation and respiration.”
The doctor’s prescriptions, followed to the letter, lead to this grim punchline:
The surgeon, on the other hand, taking out the blood as we poured in the water, we reduced the old canon to death’s door in less than two days.
Part of the strength of the writing here, what makes it comic, is that Lesage adopts the voices, low, high, stentorian, moralizing, jargon-laced, of whichever character he is parodying at the moment. (It’s no wonder this book was a favorite with Mikhail Bakhtin.) But he then magnifies the individual horror by having Gil Blas subsequently apprentice himself to this medical quack, who trains him in the art of bleeding and hydration-based medicine, and at first has him manage the list of patients to be healed/murdered:
There had indeed been a register for this purpose, kept by an old domestic; but she had not the gift of spelling accurately, and wrote a most perplexing hand. This account I was to keep. It might truly be called a bill of mortality, for my members all went from bad to worse during the short time they continued in this system. I was a sort of bookkeeper for the other world, to take places in the stage, and to see that the first come were the first served.
As Ferdinand Brunetiere commented, “How would it be possible to set forth the medical theories of Doctor Sangrado in stately and eloquent periods?” Lesage delights in making the good Doctor sound delightfully bonkers, self-contradictory, and yet entirely consistent in abiding by the grand unifying theory of medicine his whole profession existence rests on:
“Drink, my children; health consists in the pliability and moisture of the parts. Drink water by pailfuls—it is a universal dissolvent; water liquefies all the salts. Is the course of the blood a little sluggish? this grand princple sets it forward; too rapid? its career is checked.” Our doctor was so orthodox on this head, that he drank nothing himself but water, though advanced in years. He defined old age to be a natural consumption which dries us up and wastes us away; on this this principle, he deplored the ignorance of those who call wine old men’s milk. He maintained that wine wears them out and corrodes them, and pleaded with all the force of eloquence against that liquor, fatal in common both to the young and old, that friend with a serpent in its bosom, that pleasure with a dagger under its girdle.
Also notable are the flashes of indirect speech here, one of the most potent tools of comedic fiction.
One observation I would make about Gil Blas so far—which seems to have escaped most 19th century critics of the novel, with one intriguing exception—is that the book is morally purblind. From the beginning, we are asked to root for our hero and desire good fortune to come to young Gil Blas. This was easy in Book I when he was rescuing a noble lady from bandits or being made the victim of various thieves and con artists; less easy is it to maintain this sympathy for the character as he becomes a willing participant in the medical murder of his own employer, or numerous other patients of Doctor Sangrado once apprenticed to him; going so far, in one particularly inspired part of this grim episode, to rush over the notary to get Sedillo to finish writing his will, and then holding off the surgeon from his treatments until it’s finished:
At the name of Doctor Sangrado, hurrying on his cloak and hat: “For mercy’s sake,” cried [the notary], “let us set off with all possible speed; for this doctor despatches business so fast, that our fraternity cannot keep pace with him. That fellow spoils half my jobs.”
Hilarious!—and totally immoral. And throughout Book II of Gil Blas, we see the character fending for his own interests at the expense of other people. So when he and Fabricio encounter Camilla, the con artist who cheated Gil Blas out of his fortune in Book I, their only concern is to stage an elaborate ruse to exact payback and regain Gil Blas’s lost property.
The spirit of the book at this point is perhaps best embodied in the words of the “saracen in petticoats” who—as part of a narrative told to Gil Blas by Don Diego, a Madrid barber who he meets on the road—is set up as a preceptress by a jealous husband to guard the honor of his wife, particularly the pursuit of Don Diego, who she is in love with. This Dame Melancia turns out to be quite the opposite of a strict nun, as she tells the wife:
There was never a creature more fortified against moral prejudices! My inducement for getting into the service of jealous husbands is to lend myself to the enjoyments of their pretty wives. Long have I trodden the stage of life in masquerade; and I may call myself double happy, in the spiritual rewards of virtue, and the temporal indulgences of the opposite side.
The “temporal indulgence” she is describing is adultery, of course, but her attitude of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too mirrors the moral posture of Lesage in how he mines the trail of bodies Gil Blas and Sangrado leave behind for its humor, never once calling into question whether Gil Blas’s complicity makes him, if not evil, then at least the unwitting participant in a horror requiring moral reflection. Thus far, Gil Blas never engages in that sort of reflection; he just continues on, with only his own advancement in mind. He is also an obvious jerk at certain points, such as when he and Diego laugh at (not with, but explicitly behind his back) the beggarly actor who they meet on the road.
At least one other critic seems to agree with this assessment of the character’s amorality, one Paul Saint-Victor, whose view of the book is summarized in this critical bibliography as:
Maintains that Gil Blas is sordid book at fifth reading. Analysis of Gil Blas’ character to demonstrate egotistical, self-centered nature, unrelieved by any virtue except good humor.
I think it’s true that good humor allows readers to forgive a lot, an observation you could apply to a range of examples from your standard racist, sexist uncles to the classic character of Falstaff, who is a really awful, narcissistic person (when you look at it) who gets a lot of mileage out of his outsized personality and wit. Here the forgiveness derives from the embedding of Gil Blas’s callous behavior into the naturally sympathetic framework of the bildungsroman. We can see how this framework can take in unwary critics in Sainte-Beuve’s description of the character in Causeries de Lundi, v. 2:
Gil Blas is at bottom simple and honest enough, credulous, vain, easily caught, tricked at first in every way, by a parasite he meets casually, who lauds him to the skies, by a sanctimonious valet, by women; he is the dupe of his defects and sometimes of his virtues. He is schooled in every sense, and we serve our apprenticeship with him. An excellent subject for moral experiments, we may say that Gil Blas allows himself to be led by circumstances; he does not forestall experiences, he receives them.
This is a rather rosy way to depict the behavior of knowing your master is being killed by his doctor, having enough presence of mind to get a notary to suggest you be inserted into the master’s will, and then allowing the final treatments to go forward only once you know the will has been signed. But like Donald Trump, Gil Blas is a functional nincompoop who Sainte-Beuve would have us still sympathize with because, well, he’s learning.
He is not a man of genius, nor a man of great talent, nor one who has very much in him: he is a sound and shrewd mind [Ed. note: So is he smart or stupid? Which is it?], easy-going, active, essentially docile, with every aptitude. It is only a question of applying them well; which he does in the end: he becomes apt for anything, and at last deserves the eulogy which his friend Fabrice gives him: You have the universal tool.
This reminds me a bit of the defense some movie fans (myself among them) were making of the movie Man of Steel: sure, he left 6 million people dead in that epic fight with Zod, but he’s learning! It wasn’t exactly persuasive then, either.
Addendum: I’m still finishing captioning these, but here are the illustrations by Jean Gigoux from Book II of Gil Blas.
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