Le Sage, ALAIN-RENÉ, was born in 1668 at Sarzean in Brittany. His father died in 1682, leaving him to the care of an uncle, who so mismanaged his affairs that he began life with little more capital than genius and an education received at the Jesuit school at Vannes. In 1692 he went to Paris to study law, but an early marriage drove him to seek a less tardy livelihood in literature. His first work was a translation of the letters of Aristænetus in 1695, and about the same time he made the friendship of the Abbé de Lionne, who was owner of a good Spanish library collected by his father the ambassador, of which he made Le Sage free, with a pension of 600 livres to enable him to profit by it. The first fruit was the project of a Théâtre Espagnol; but all that came of it was one volume in 1700 containing two plays, the Traître puni and Don Félix de Mendoze, imitated from Rojas and Lope de Vega. In 1702 Le point d'honneur, from No hay amigo para amigo of Rojas, failed on the stage. His next venture (1704) was a rifacimento of Avellaneda's Don Quixote. The year 1707 was the turning-point in his fortunes. Don César Ursin, from Calderon's Pear está que estaba, was played with success at court, and Crispin rival de son maître in the city; and more successful than either was the Diable Boiteux, the framework, title, and first chapter of which he took from the Diablo Cojuelo of Guevara. In 1708 he offered the Théâtre Français two plays; La Tontine was accepted, but shelved, and not produced until 1732; Les Étrénnes was rejected, as rules did not allow one-act pieces before Easter. Le Sage took it back, and altered and expanded it into Turcaret; but the financiers it satirised, after an attempt to buy him off with 100,000 livres, organised such an opposition against it that it was saved only by an order from the Dauphin. Le Sage was not a man to submit to caprice. It is told of him that when the Duchesse de Bonillon, at whose house he was to have read Turcaret, received him with a haughty reprimand for keeping her waiting, he replied, 'Very well, madame, if I have made you lose an hour I will make you gain two,' and with a bow walked out; and it was no doubt the same spirit of independence that made him go over in 1709 from the Théâtre Français to the opposition Théâtre de la Foire. Unless the Amands Jaloux of 1736 be his, he made no attempt after this to return to the regular drama, but continued to supply the Foire stage with slight pieces of the kind it was restricted to, which he published from time to time in the volumes composing the Théâtre de la Foire. For these the Persian tales which he helped his friend Pétis de la Croix to put into shape in the Mille et un jours were of great service to him. But the success of the Diable Boiteux was too encouraging to allow him to neglect the Spanish. In 1715 Gil Blas (vols. i. and ii.) came out, followed in 1717-21 by an attempt at an Orlando. In 1724 came the third and, as it seemed, last vol. of Gil Blas, and in 1726 a new edition of the Diable Boiteux, doubled in bulk by additions of his own and from Santos. In 1732 he gave his Guzman de Alfarache, 'purged of superfluous moralities,' and Robert Chevalier de Beauchêne, the life of a buccaneer whose widow, he says, furnished the memoirs. In 1734 he took the title of Estebanillo Gonzalez, but very little else, from the original Spanish. In 1735 the fourth vol. of Gil Blas appeared, and also the Journée des Parques; in 1736-38 the Bachelier de Salamangue, the 'remainder biscuit' of Gil Blas; in 1739 his plays, in two vols.; in 1740 La Valise trouvée, a volume of letters; and in 1743 the Mélange Amusant, a collection of facetie from his memory or his notebook. That year brought his first sorrow, the death of his eldest son René, otherwise Montménil the comedian. Le Sage had a contempt for actors and their calling, and when his son adopted it he disowned him. But in time, brought round to see him in Turcaret, he was conquered by his own creation alive in the genius of his son, and the estrangement ended in their being drawn together more closely than ever. The death of his son and his own increasing infirmities, particularly his deafness, made him abandon Paris and literary life, and retreat with his wife and daughter to Boulogne, where his second son, Julien, held a canonry in the cathedral; and there, in the Rue du Château, he died in 1747, in his eightieth year. Of himself, personally, there is very little on record. He was withdrawn from society by his deafness, from which he was a sufferer as early as 1709, and lived a quiet, retired, industrious life, surrounded by his family; and perhaps their devotion and the loving care with which they tended him in his last days are more eloquent than any eulogy of his character and virtues that preacher could pronounce.
Le Sage's reputation as a dramatist and as a novelist rests in each case on one work. The author of Turcaret might, under favouring circumstances, have done anything in comedy short of dethroning Molière, but as it is he has no claim to a place in the first order of dramatists. But whatever severe critics may say, the author of Gil Blas stands in the front rank of the novelists by the common consent of the great mass of readers of all nations. On the other hand there are some who deny originality to one who borrowed ideas, incidents, and tales from others—Espinel, Rojas, Mendoza, Quevedo—as Le Sage did; and some who go still further, and deny that the author of Gil Blas was anything more than a translator. The question of what constitutes originality would be out of place here, but the other is simply a question of evidence which may be briefly summed up. It was primarily Voltaire who raised the issue. Le Sage had put him into Gil Blas as Don Gabriel Triaquero, and he in return said in his Siècle de Louis XIV. that Gil Blas was 'entirely taken from La Vida de lo Escudiero Dom Marcos d'Obregó,' showing that he had never seen the book he quoted, and could not read it if he had. Backed by his name, the figment had a wide circulation, especially in Spain, and the Padre Isla was set on to develop it, which he did in his own peculiar fashion (see ISLA). The Comte de Nucuchâteau having taken up Isla seriously, was replied to by Llorente, who maintained that though Isla was in jest he had truth on his side. His own theory was that in the Lionne library Le Sage found a MS. novel, called the Bachelor of Salamanga, written, probably by Solis the historian, in 1655, and that out of this he carved Gil Blas, serving up the remainder afterwards under the original title. The argument, in brief, is that
Gil Blas is crowded with details of a kind that Le Sage, who never was in Spain, could have had no knowledge of, and could not have got from books. Of these details, however, a good many need not have had any more recondite source than Don Quixote; and for the rest Le Sage would have said that he only wondered at his own moderation, for he could have taken ten times as many from the plays and picaresque novels in the abbé's library, and from books of travellers like Aarssens van Sommelsdyck, Bertaut, and Mme D'Aulnoy. But Llorente points out that over a hundred places, often obscure hamlets that few Spaniards even ever heard of, are named, in general correctly, which is a proof of some exceptional source of information; but sometimes incorrectly, a proof that the source was a MS. not a printed one. But a plain tale will put him down; the names are in old French maps. Of a score picked out as manifest misreadings from a MS.—Grajal, Rodillas, Luceno, Castil Blazo, &c., all but one are in the map of Spain printed in Paris by Jaillot circa 1695, and all the notable ones in that of 1713, just two years before Gil Blas appeared. From maps, too, come Le Sage's blunders in topography—e.g. putting Peñaflor on the road to Salamanca, Alcalá between Madrid and Segovia, Peñaflor between Segovia and Valladolid, Liria 'sur les bords du Guadalaviar.' Finally he urges Le Sage's familiarity with secret history and the private affairs of Olivares, his daughter's marriage (xi. 9), and his adoption of Margarita Spinola's son (xii. 4); and asks how could he have known matters and names not to be found in print, save from a contemporary MS.; which, as before, his misreadings, Niebles for Niebla, Abrados for Abiados, Valeasar for Valcarcel, bear witness to? But again the answer is simple. He found 'Niebles' and 'Abrados,' as well as the marriage story in the translated Aneecdotes du ministère d'Olivares (Paris, 1722), and put the very words of the book into the mouth of Olivares, whose portrait (xi. 2) is word for word from the Aneecdotes. 'Valeasar' he found in the Relation de ce qui s'est passé à la disgrace d'Olivares (Paris, 1650), from which he took the Count Duke's curious 'confidence' to Gil Blas, and, also, sundry names cited by Llorente. One by one, in short, the supports give way, and the MS. theory falls to the ground. Nevertheless, in the absence of rebutting evidence, its plausibility imposed upon some good critics, the author of 'Who Wrote Gil Blas?' in Blackwood (1844), A. H. Everett, and Ford, among others. All admit, however, that the translator has left the stamp of his nationality indelibly impressed upon the work; the mystery lies in its wealth of detail. Llorente puts the matter in a nutshell when he asks why did Le Sage, if he was the original author, give himself so much needless trouble? Why so particular to name 'Toralva,' when it would have done just as well to say 'a village near Cuenca?' The answer is that Le Sage was before all things an artist, and knew the value of details in producing the verisimilitude he aimed at. In this respect and many others he was like his great contemporary Defoe. He spared no pains to make his conception a reality to his reader. When he sent Gil Blas on a journey he was not content to generalise his road, but looked up the villages he had to pass through on the best map he could find. When he brought him to an inn, he went to the novels and plays for inn furniture and company and conversation. This is the rationale of his borrowings, and it is this, as much as his delightful style, that makes him the prince of raconteurs. He was the first to perceive the capabilities of the picaresque novel, and with the culinary genius of his nation (by no means confined to artists like him who could make a savoury ragout out of an old boot) he got rid of its crudities, brought out its flavour, and served it up with a sauce piquante of his own. In so doing he advanced the novel of real life an important stage, and, to his honour be it said, no abuse of realism can be laid to his charge. In the words of Scott, 'His muse moved with an unpolluted step, even where the path was somewhat miry.'