.... I therefore went in search of Doctor Sangrado,
and brought him to the house. He was a tall, meagre, pale man, who had kept the
shears of Clotho employed during forty years at least. This learned physician
had a very solemn appearance, weighed his discourse, and gave an emphasis to
his expressions: his reasoning was geometrical, and his opinions extremely
singular.
After having observed the symptoms of my master’s
disease, he said to him with a very physical air: “The business here is to
supply the defect of perspiration, which is obstructed: others, in my place,
would doubtless prescribe saline draughts, diuretics, diaphoretics, and such
medicines as abound with mercury and sulphur; but cathartics and sudorifics are
pernicious drugs, and all the preparations of chymistry are only calculated to
do mischief: for my own part I practice a method more simple, and more sure.
Pray, what is your ordinary diet?” – “My usual food,” replied the canon, “is
broth and juicy meat.” –“Broth and juicy meat!” cried the doctor, surprised,
“truly, I do not wonder to find you sick: such delicious victuals are poisoned
pleasures and snares, which luxury spreads for mankind in order to ruin them
the more effectually. You must renounce all palateable food: the most salutary
is that which is most insipid: for as the blood is insipid, it requires such
victuals as partake the most of its own nature. And do you drink wine?” added
he. “Yes,” said the licentiate, “wine diluted.” –“O! diluted as much as you
please,” replied the physician, “what an irregularity is here! what a frightful
regimen! you ought to have been dead long ago. How old are you, pray?” –“I am
going in my sixty-ninth year,” replied the canon. “Right,” said the physician,
“an early old age is always the fruit of intemperance. If you had drunk nothing
else than pure water all your life, and had been satisfied with simple
nourishment, such as boiled apples, for example, you would not now be tormented
with the gout, and all your limbs would perform their functions with ease. I do
not despair, however, of setting you to rights again, provided you be wholly
resigned to my directions.”
The licentiate having promised to obey him in all
things, Sangrado sent me for a surgeon, whom he named, and ordered him to take
from my master six good porringers of blood, as the first effort, in order to
supply the want of perspiration. Then he said to the surgeon: “Master Martin
Omnez, return in three hours, and take as much more: and repeat the same
evacuation to-morrow. It is a gross error to think that blood is necessary for
the preservation of life; a patient cannot be blooded too much; for as he is
obliged to perform no considerable motion or exercise, but just only to
breathe, he has no more occasion for blood than a man who is asleep; life, in
both, consisting in the pulse and respiration only.” The doctor having ordered
frequent and copious evacuations of this kind, told us, that we must make the
canon drink warm water incessantly; assuring us that water drunk in abundance,
was the true specific in all distempers whatever. And when he went away he told
Dame Jacinta and me, with an air of confidence, that he would answer for the
patient’s life, provided we would treat him in the manner he had prescribed.
The governante, who possibly thought otherwise of this method, protested that
it should be followed with the utmost exactness. Accordingly we set about
warming water with all dispatch; and as the physician had recommended to us,
above all things, not to be too sparing of it, we made my master drink for the
first dose two or three pints, at as many draughts. An hour after we repeated
it, and returning to the charge, from time to time, overwhelmed his stomach
with a deluge of water: the surgeon seconding us, on the other hand, by the
quantity of blood which he drew from him, in less than two days the old canon
was reduced to extremity. (Book II Ch
II)
Dame Jacinta and Gil Blas, not ill-pleased by the event,
barely have time to bring a notary so that a will can be made out in their
favour. As the poor old man expires, Doctor Sangrado returns,
and looked very foolishly, notwithstanding his long
practice of dispatching patients. Nevertheless, far from imputing the canon’s
death to his watery draughts and evacuations, he observed as he went out, with
an air of indifference, that the patient had not lost blood enough, nor drank a
sufficient quantity of warm water...
I have quoted this, one of the most arresting passages in Gil
Blas, on the assumption that few English-speaking readers will have encountered
it. For
though the name of Gil Blas is familiar to anyone who has studied the
English novel (Scott, Dickens and so on being fervent readers of Le Sage), the
book is now barely available. And in France it never really acquired the reputation that it once had in Britain.
Things would be different, no doubt, if Gil Blas were
always, or often, as fiercely vigorous as this. Doctor Sangrado, perhaps an
invention of sheer fancy, is a satire so generalized that it works equally well
as a critique of conventional and of alternative medicine; you might say as a
critique of all the professions whatever, inasmuch as all of them presume that
one can validly be in a position to advise others on how to live their lives
and solve their problems, a presumption whose successes are rarely demonstrable
and whose unrelieved failure, even, is so well bolstered by a conspiracy of
discourse that it usually escapes notice.
[I
might add, though, that I was caught up short by a sentence in Bruce Chatwin’s Utz
(1988): “The Doctor would kill his patient in order to rid him of
his disease.” This is implied to have been a familiar motif of the Commedia
dell’ Arte, but I am unable to confirm it – on the contrary, the Dottore
of the Commedia was a lawyer. Anyway, the death-dealing Doctor is a
stock joke, e.g. in Molière’s L’Amour médecin – I am so ignorant, I have no business writing
this... There’s also Barrabas’s autobiography in The Jew of Malta:
Being young, I studied physic, and
began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with
burials... (II.3)
This,
however, is but one in a list of murderous professions. Later, in Scott’s The
Abbot, we see the joke mutating gently into Dr Lundin’s ridiculous concern
for his professional prestige and his “honorarium”, his respectful attitude
towards chronically enfeebled potion-takers and his disgust at the rudely
healthy who never employ his services.
The
seventeenth chapter of Richard Ford’s lively Gatherings from Spain (1846)
is devoted to a discussion of the wretchedness of Spanish doctors, who are
“dangerous like a rattlesnake”. Among the causes that Ford proposes are 1. an
indifference to science resulting from Philip III’s law, motioned by
universities led by ecclesiastics, “prohibiting the study of any new
system of medicine, and requiring Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna”; 2.
the low status of the calling, in a land where status and the pundonor are of
such high account; 3. “the philosophy of the general indifference to life in Spain,
which almost amounts to Oriental fatalism, in the number of executions and
general resignation to bloodshed”.
But
in 17th c. Protestant Europe things were not much better. Quinine, which was so
effective in the treatment of malaria (then a disease that infested Europe), was vehemently condemned. “At this time, the profession was still in
the thrall of Galen’s dictum laid down in the 2nd century AD, which strongly
promoted bleeding as a way to expel corrupt humours. Even when the efficacy of
the Jesuits’ powder was demonstrated, the medical profession shunned it, using
the excuse of its religious connections. A more likely reason for its rejection
was that bleeding was more profitable. For instead of a short course of
efficacious bark infusions, several expensive bleedings would have been
administered, and since this was no cure the fevers would return, requiring
further, costly treatment” (Toby and Will Musgrave, An Empire of Plants, 2000).
]
Whatever its literary provenance, Le Sage’s stock joke about
doctors has a plain relevance to his book, in which health, like destiny,
cannot be explained and is therefore portrayed as a matter of chance.
Gil Blas gains from its lack of ambition. Passing
blithely from story to story, its common framework is the hero (or sometimes
another person) being involved in some means of getting by. This might not
necessarily mean a job; it might mean involvement in some scam or temporarily
important affair. Most of the jobs that Gil Blas tries his hand at are
singularly useless, by modern standards; they do not produce economic issue.
For the most part they are in service. Jobs are easily found, and not long
retained; usually, we find ourselves sharing those formative early days when a
servant is forming impressions of his milieu. If you like a steadiness of moral
vision, Gil Blas admirably supplies the steadiness, at the expense of
the morality.
The hero’s shallowness of character is important. In Book
III Chapter I he begins work for a new master: “He was a man turned of fifty,
seemed to be serious and reserved, though good-natured withal; so I conceived
no bad opinion of him.” Since the master has no obvious place in society,
however, scandal begins to circulate, and Gil Blas is infected by this
immediately. He thinks that his master is a spy: “I saw him walking in the
street with an air of assurance that at first confounded my penetration: but,
far from being duped by those appearances, I distrusted them, having no
favourable opinion of the man.” In fact, the corregidor’s visit reveals that
the master is merely well-off and outstandingly lazy; his way of life is a
philosophical proposition. Gil Blas swings with the tide again: “After this
conversation, which the alguazil and I overheard at the closet-door, the
corregidor took his leave of Don Bernard, who could not enough express his
gratitude; while I, to second my master, and assist him in doing the honours of
the house, overwhelmed the alguazil with civilities, making a thousand profound
bows, though in the bottom of my soul, I harboured that disdain and aversion
which every man of honour has for one of his occupation.” The bottom of his
soul is only two inches beneath its surface, but the presentation is all the better for it.
By the time we reach Book III we might think that a pattern
is emerging. Book III Chapter IV finds Gil Blas in service with a beau. “Well”,
says a fellow servant pretty soon after, “don’t you begin to get rid of your
rust?” Such remarks are irresistible, and soon Gil Blas confesses that “though it (this way of life) was quite new
to me as yet, I did not despair of being reconciled to it in time.” After Don
Matthias has been killed in a duel (an affair of no great gravity), Gil Blas
switches seamlessly, and even more entertainingly, into service with an
actress, in the company of the delightful Laura. But at this point there is an
unexpected check. Gil Blas reminds himself (what we have long forgotten) that
he originally set out to be a tutor, and under the temporary influence of moral
remorse he withdraws from this lively circle. (Fairly obviously, he can’t keep up the pace.)
What follows in Book IV dispels any simple pattern. He finds himself in service
to one Aurora,
and after pleasingly mistaking her advances and making himself ridiculous, gets
involved in a good-natured plot to entrap a rakish lover. But in the midst of
this, we are treated to a highflown tragedy about mistaken purposes in Sicily (“The Baleful
Marriage – A Novel”, as the translation has it). Le Sage may have been one of those
authors, like John Ashbery, who prefer to think that they write to no program.
We are bound to read these early novels from the perspective
of later ones, and at first to characterize the “picaresque novel” by its
emptinesses – for instance, the lack of signification that is signified by the
word “episode”. This makes the book easy to put down (not many people now could read Gil
Blas day after day). What makes it easy to take up again is, to us though
not to contemporary readers, a more elusive matter. No doubt it’s true that
much of this elusive attractiveness is what Le Sage and his readers would be
surprised by; the insouciance that was always a component in the book itself is
magnified by its distance from us, by the weight and spaciousness of the
crumbling brown volume, its appallingly interesting engravings, the translator's meaty prose, and other reassuring reminders that the book is secure in an
untroublesome category of our existence.
In Book IV Chapter IX Gil Blas, “having seen everything that
was curious in Toledo”
(an unexpected foreshortening) is on his travels again. He overtakes a stranger
whom he recognizes as the man being sought by the party of soldiers he has just
passed by at the inn, and in view of this pursuit and the imminent onset of a
storm, they decide to take leave of the high road and to seek shelter with a
“holy hermit”, who welcomes them. The storm breaks fearsomely; “The hermit fell
on his knees before an image of St Pacomo, which was glued to the wall, and we
followed his example.” Soon a frugal though wholesome meal is supplied, but Don
Alphonso (the travelling companion) is too distracted to eat. The hermit
observes: “I perceive that you are accustomed to better tables than mine, or
rather, that sensuality has corrupted your natural taste. I have been in the
world, as you are now: the most delicate viands, the most exquisite ragouts,
were not too good for my palate: but since I have lived in solitude, I have
retrieved the former purity of my taste, and at present can relish nothing but
roots, fruits, milk; in a word, that which composed the nourishment of our
first parents.” It’s a speech that appeals to us, despite the faint tincture of
Dr Sangrado. Don Alphonso is persuaded to tell his story; then a fellow of the
hermit returns to the grotto, and they confide that their holy appearance is a
disguise; in fact they turn out to be two scoundrels who have already fleeced
Gil Blas in an earlier chapter. They too
have now discovered that they are being pursued, and urge Gil Blas and Don
Alphonso to join them: “You cannot do better than to join your fortune to ours;
you shall want nothing: and we will baffle all the search of your enemies. We
know almost every inch of Spain
having travelled over it; and are acquainted with the woods, mountains, and
every place proper for an asylum against the brutality of justice.” So the four
hastily abandon the grotto, though it is now nightfall, “leaving as a prey to
justice the two hermit’s robes, with the white and red beards, two pallets, a
table, a rotten chest, two old straw-bottomed chairs, and the image of St. Pacomo.”
The transformation in our attitude to that image is of
course very funny. At the same time Don Raphael, both as hermit and robber,
focuses a sense of pastoral liberation, though we now recognize the malicious
amusement in his unctuous remarks about diet. This sense of liberation persists
all the while the four are together, though it won’t be long before Gil Blas
and Don Alphonso will part amicably from the others (for once again, the pace
is a bit too hot). As they hide in a pleasant glade, drinking wine and eating
slices of roasted meat, Don Raphael gives us a splendidly colourful account of
his adventures, which include a long captivity in Algiers. It makes a long chapter, and the
next one begins: “When Don Raphael had ended his narration, which I thought
very tedious, Don Alphonso was so polite as to say it had diverted him very
much indeed.” Thus Gil Blas is able to take a small literary revenge for Don
Raphael’s dominance (and for the loss of his purse); Le Sage knows that the
story is far from tedious.
I am sorry to say that “the brutality of justice” eventually
catches up with Don Raphael and Lamela, in the form of an Auto da Fe in which
they are the principal luminescences. Gil Blas witnesses the ceremony with
horror, with swooning, with self-congratulation on his own good sense in
separating from them, and, in the space of one sentence, with oblivion: “but
these afflicting images, which disturbed my imagination, dispersed
insensibly...” (Book XII Chapter I).
Liberation and insouciance are natural themes of the
picaresque novel, if you compare it with the claustrophobically taut plotting
of later novels – the High Victorian and most of its successors. In these
books, everything signifies. Human beings are in thrall to chains of event developing
from their own characters, their family and acquaintance, their society. The novelist sees a mission in drawing out
the logic that entraps them: El destino de un pueblo es como el destino de
un hombre. Su carácter
es su destino (J. Wassermann, quoted as the epigraph to Los Bravos
(1954) by Jesús Fernández Santos).
In Gil Blas this business of destiny is less well understood.
Destiny might exist (Gil Blas mentions it sanctimoniously on a number of
occasions), but its operations are just as invisible to the reader as to the
hero; the visible procession consists of chances, good and ill luck. Just
deserts are rarely apparent. (Two typical instances: the tutor who is not
allowed to punish the stupidity of Don Raphael’s noble schoolmate has the
clever idea of whipping Don Raphael instead; and Gil Blas, tentatively
producing the honest literary criticism that his employer the archbishop has
urged on him, is of course instantly dismissed.)
Prose fiction is always a mimesis of experience; at least,
it always is when it’s read. The mimesis interposes, however, a contrast
between experience and the literary monument that mirrors it. The picaresque
novel, by comparison with the forms that spring from Scott and Balzac, omits
the element of explanation. The book lives alongside the reader’s own progress
through the days; it does not, so to speak, turn to confront it with
annihilating intelligence. Both its hero and its reader live from hand to
mouth.
[“Camille
Pissarro died in Paris
on 13th November 1903 of blood poisoning caused by an abscess of the prostate:
his homeopathic doctor had attempted to cure it without operation.” Perhaps one
may conclude, with Dr Sangrado in mind, that any form of medicine is blighted
by a doctrinaire spirit.]
[Gil Blas was published, in two volumes, in 1715. A third volume appeared in 1724, and a fourth in 1735.]
(2003)
*
Another post, focusing on the geography of Gil Blas:
*
NOTE (2026)
Gil Blas was popular reading throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In Britain its reputation steadily grew. Le Sage was of all French authors the dearest to British hearts. Comparisons with Shakespeare were not wanting. And then, virtually overnight you might think, Gil Blas was forgotten.
Smollett's translation (the one I've been quoting) was published in 1749. For some reason it came to be thought -- incorrectly, it seems -- that Smollett hadn't actually written the translation himself but only directed it. (Perhaps because of dubious shenanigans around his later translation of Don Quixote.) At any rate, Smollett's translation was often reprinted but was apt to be disparaged, e.g. for coarseness.
Accordingly Benjamin Heath Malkin produced a new translation in 1809. Both translations sold many copies. But to the confusion of future generations of readers, reprints of Malkin's translation often had Smollett's name on the title page. Lexicographers, for instance, noticing an 1809 word like "quiz" in Malkin (Bk IV, Ch 7), recorded it as first used by Smollett in 1749.
Both translations are good reading, but Malkin's is the more practical for online reading. It lacks some of Smollett's pungency, but it's swift, slangy, and never misses an opportunity to repurpose lines from Shakespeare.
Tobias Smollett's translation
It begins:
My father, Blas of Santillane, after having carried arms many years in the service of the Spanish Monarchy, retired to the town in which he was born ... (Book I Ch 1)
There is no fully digitized text online, only Google Books page images.
Recommended: This American edition from 1854, complete in one volume. As a bonus, you also get to see the numerous lively engravings that appeared in nineteenth-century editions.
(Other online editions are often in cramped double columns, or are orphaned volumes from a multi-volume set.)
Benjamin Heath Malkin's translation
It begins:
My father, Blas of Santillane, after having borne arms for a long time in the Spanish service, retired to his native place. (Book I Ch 1)
Malkin's translation [incorrectly attributed to Smollett] has been fully digitized on Project Gutenberg, in three volumes:
Volume 1 (Book I to Book IV Ch 6):
Volume 2 (Book IV Ch 7 to Book VIII Ch 7):
Volume 3 (Book VIII Ch 8 to Book XII Ch 14):
Aside from Smollett and Malkin, there have been several other translations of Gil Blas.
I couldn't find Volume 2 of van Laun's translation, but here's Volume 3:
Labels: Alain-René Le Sage, Camille Pissarro, Specimens of the literature of France, Tobias Smollett
