Alain René Lesage Biography

Dromo's Den

LESAGE, Alain René (1668–1747). A French novelist and dramatist, born in Sarzeau, Brittany, May 8, 1668, famous for his Gil Blas. Left an orphan at 14 and despoiled by his uncles of his patrimony, he went to Paris in 1690, studied for the law, married in 1694, gave up law for letters, won the patronage of the Abbé de Lyonne, from whom he received a pension of 600 livres, and supported himself by hack work in not always faithful translations from the Spanish (Théâtre Espagnol, 1700; Avellaneda's unauthorized New Adventures of Don Quixote, 1704; etc.). Lesage's original work in both fiction and drama begins with 1707 with the comedy Crispin, rival de son maître, and the novel Le diable boîteux, the idea for which was borrowed from Guevara's Diablo Cojuelo (1641) and the details from other sources, though none could question the originality of its wit and spirit. Then followed Lesage's greatest comedy, Turcaret (1709). In this play Lesage fiercely assailed the taxgatherers or traitants. Such was their power that they could keep this play off the stage for a while, but the Dauphin took sides with Lesage and Turcaret was put on. His trouble with the Théâtre Français led him to work thereafter for the rival and inferior Théâtre de la Foire, for which Lesage wrote a host of farces and light operettas, once popular but now forgotten, giving his ripest thought meantime to Gil Blas, his greatest novel, begun in 1715, continued in 1724, completed in 1735, and revised in 1747. Gil Blas is derived in part from the following works: Disgrazia del conte d'Olivare, in a French translation; from a French work founded on the Anecdotes du comte-duc d'Olivares, by M. de Valdory; from the Histoire du comte-duc avec des réflexions politiques et curieuses (Cologne, 1683). Lesage also borrowed from the life of Obregon and from a number of Spanish narratives or plays. The Lazarillo de Tormes is a prototype of Gil Blas. The borrowed episodes of Gil Blas constitute about one-fifth of the whole. It tells the story of a young rogue who is cast upon the world and has innumerable adventures which he recounts in a light, satirical, low, and often cynical vein. Lesage wrote also a French adaptation of the Spanish Guzman d'Alfarache (1732), a picaroon novel, and the similar though more independent picaroon stories, Estevanille Gonzales (1734) and Le bachelier de Salamanque (1736), as well as Les aventures du chevalier de Beauchesne (1732), founded on contemporary memoirs, all works little read, and not likely to be much read, but not without interest as experiments in realistic fiction.

Lesage's domestic life was happy and uneventful. He lived respectably, on the borderland of Bohemia, and if he died poor it was rather because he was independent than because he was reckless, his good humor being always restrained by a sane judgment. In his lifetime, though always popular, he was enjoyed rather than appreciated, for, though not a creative genius, he was so keen an observer and so remarkable an assimilator as to be in several ways an innovator; not the father of realism, but its prophet. Le diable boîteux is a satire on contemporary Parisian society, under a Spanish veil, owing more to La Bruyère's Caractères than to Guevara. Keys were soon provided in abundance, and even now the allusions to Fontenelle, Ninon de l’Enclos, Voltaire, and others are unmistakable. Crispin and Turcaret, too, are prose pictures of Parisian life, the former farcical, the latter a cruelly realistic satire on mercantile pettiness, provincial narrowness, and most of all on the new plutocracy. This satiric realism finds its final expression in Gil Blas, the story of a self-made man and studied more from French life than from any Spanish romance. At least four men were then living in France—Dubois, Alberoni, Barjac, and Gourville—valets or favorites, whose adventures might have suggested those of Lesage's Spanish hero. The story aims, through the experiences of a checkered life, to show how character is formed by environment, how impressions rouse reflection, reflection stirs conscience, and both react on conduct so as gradually to transform it. That is the moral, and to draw it Lesage paints the world as he finds it with keen understanding and the charity of wisdom. So Gil Blas has endured for nearly two centuries as a gospel of a worldly-wise man's common sense. Lesage's permanence in French literature seems more assured today than at any time since his death, which occurred in Paris, Nov. 17, 1747.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920)