jolly hill of grapes

 

and moreover wasps and bees are born as worms and when the lion steps on a stone-oak leaf his whole body turns to stone and the beaver bites off its testicles when it is hunted and the hyena is sometimes male sometimes female and is sometimes impregnated by others and sometimes impregnates others and therefore that creature is impure because its nature is mixed and changeable and when the hedgehog enters a garden he lies on his side under the grapes and spears the grapes on his spines and heads back home like a jolly hill of grapes and the elephant feels no desire for marriage so she wanders east where Paradise lies and tears a mandrake from the ground with her trunk which exudes a seductive scent and makes her pregnant and funniest of all is of course the unicorn which is caught by a virgin baring her breast and letting it suckle and then the hunters come and tie him up and life is finite for anyone who comes into being through reproduction and the parrotfish is the only fish that chews the cud

and moreover our life is the wasps nest or swallows nest that we build for ourselves and everything is different in different places because in Florence Savonarola has forced the servants to spy on their masters and the children on their parents and on bonfires they throw masquerade costumes and books by Boccaccio and Petrarch and perfume and mirrors and musical instruments and chessboards and all the paintings depicting naked female beauty and the moral children dance in a ring round the bonfire in triple rings moreover and chant Savonarolas words about the Church of Prostitution whose poisonous stinking breath rises up to despairing Heaven and the Pope sits sullenly in Rome and curses the tumult

but in Bologna it is the exact opposite because there a doctor can blaspheme against the underhand Christ who deserved his death on the cross and still be let off after a simple expression of regret

and in the worlds heart Rome the Popes eldest son is murdered by his younger son and his corpse is found in the Tiber with nine stab wounds in his throat and is carried in a torchlight procession to his resting place while the Pope cries and refuses to eat for three days and it is the first fast the Pope has submitted to and everyone whispers that his murderer son Cesare loves his sister Lucrezia passionately and that her eldest brother was murdered out of jealousy because he also loved her and for the first time in my life I heard about the disease

(pp 10-11)

someone told me that Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India around the southern tip of Africa and when the Portuguese reached the equator the astrolabe stopped working

the nearer you got to the equator the nearer the North Star approached the horizon and when you crossed the line the star disappeared entirely

there is thus a place where all instruments fail and it became a peculiar point in my mind and the point became a dream hall where I could send all dangerous thoughts and bizarre sounds and secret tones and the order of words and amidst the tempting mythology surrounding the wild carnival in Rome and the fratricide Cesare Borgias feats as a newlywed lover with eight orgasms a day in front of an open curtain I found myself sitting with Double Vigilance before Priscian's Latin grammar and enjoying the images of the initials and listening to the expositions of Thomas Aquinas about everything that "God" is not

he is not moved and simultaneously he is not still

and he is like a human being?

no

he is his own essence and his own existence and he lacks a body because he is not composed.

for a body consists of parts

but if we are his parts?

no

we are divided into Essence and Existence while He is Essence and Existence simultaneously and forever

while we change existence now and then

we did not understand the meaning of this and I know that even today an old woman sits a few houses away from here pouring oil into a cup of water and watching with staring eyes the shapes of the oil on the surface of the water

(pp. 12-13)

*

These are two extracts from the early pages of Molza, älskaren (Molza, the lover), a 1988 novel by Torbjörn Säfve.

The Italian poet Francesco Molza (1489 - 1544) lies dying of syphilis. In these extracts he recalls his childhood in Modena (c. 1500), his education and the sensational stories that reached him even then.

stone-oak: the Holm Oak.

parrotfish: this ancient observation (e.g. by Aristotle) identified the fish's constant mechanical grinding of dead corals with cows chewing the cud.

the shapes of the oil: a type of divination called lecanomancy. 

Inquiry of bowl divination and necromancy: Whenever you want to inquire about matters, take a bronze vessel, either a bowl or a saucer, whichever you prefer. Pour water into it—rainwater, if you call on the heavenly gods, seawater, if [you call] on the gods of the earth, river water, if you call on Osiris or Sarapis, spring water, if you call on the dead. Holding the vessel on your knees, pour green olive oil into it. Bend over the vessel and recite the prescribed spell. Address any god you desire and ask him any questions you wish. He will reply and tell you everything. After he has spoken to you, dismiss him with the dismissal formula. Having used this spell, you will be amazed. 

Spell to be recited over the water: amoun auantau riptou mantauiimantou .... etc

Translated from the Egyptian magical text PGM IV, aka the Great Magical Papyrus of Paris, copy of c. 4th century CE but probably much older.

From Yvette Hunt, "Exploring Ancient Lecanomancy", University of Queensland, 2019.

https://www.academia.edu/39640230/Exploring_Ancient_Lecanomancy

*

Here's a Google Translate of what Swedish Wikipedia says about Torbjörn Säfve (omitting references, links, etc):

Lars Torbjörn Säfve, also known as Ali Touba, born 6 July 1941 in Jukkasjärvi parish, Norrbotten County, is a Swedish author and debater. Säfve lives in Haddebo in Närke.

Biography

Torbjörn Säfve was born in Kiruna, but the family moved to Luleå and the Malmudden district when he was two years old. After graduating from Luleå Higher General Education in 1962, he moved south, settling first in Uppsala, then in Stockholm. Säfve studied literature and philosophy at Uppsala University from 1963 to 1966 and from 1968 to 1971. During his time as an active member of the Norrland Nation at Uppsala University, where he has been an honorary member since 2001, he was chairman of the Debating Society. In his youth, Säfve was also an active Maoist as well as describing himself as an "anarcho-Stalinist".

He was a directing student at the Stockholm Film School from 1966 to 1968 and made the film Masturbationsdrama and the short film Montebello in 1967, in which, among others, the actress Ulla-Britt Norrman made her film debut. Säfve then returned to Norrbotten and lived for a number of years in Luleå before moving south again. Säfve is very interested in boxing, and boxing is also the theme of several of his books. Siki (1977), Gorilla (1986) and Druidparken (1996) are three novels on the theme. In 1973 he competed in the New 10,000-Kronor Question on the subject of professional boxing.

He has converted to Islam and professes Sufism, and there is a statue in the Örnäset district of Luleå. Säfve regularly contributes to the Islamic cultural magazine Minaret. His Islamic name is Ali Touba.

Norrland Nation: Uppsala University has a number of student "Nations" relating to regions of Sweden. Membership of a Nation was formerly obligatory for students. Uppsala's Nations are loosely comparable to Oxbridge colleges, or Durham ones anyway. 

Debating Society: The Norrland Nation's Talförening was once famous, and the post of chairman was considered quite prestigious. It existed from c. 1900 until 1972. 

New 10,000-Kronor Question: This was the name of a relaunch of the long-running Swedish TV quiz show Double Or Quits, based on the US show The 64,000 Dollar Question. 

Omar Khayaam

Rubā‘ī C 134 from the Calcutta MS

[Image source: from Edward Heron-Allen (2), link below.]

AWAKE! for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

    And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859)

WAKE! For the Sun who scatter'd into flight

The Stars before him from the Field of Night,

   Drives Night along with them from Heav'n,                                                                    and strikes

The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

(Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

The Sun casts the noose of morning upon the roofs,

Kai Khosrū of the day, he throws a stone into the bowl:

Drink wine! for the Herald of the Day, rising up,

Hurls into the days the cry of "Drink ye!"

(Edward Heron-Allen's literal translation of Rubā‘ī C 134, 1899)

While Dawn, Day's herald straddling the whole sky,

Offers the drowsy world a toast 'To Wine',

The Sun spills early gold on city roofs –

Day's regal Host, replenishing his jug.

(Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967)

*

Kai Khosrū or Kay Khosrow, a legendary king of Iran whose story is told in the Shahnahmeh. He was brought up in exile in the desert. He avenged the murder of his father Siavash, ruled for sixty years, and finally disappeared mysteriously into the mountains. He is named later (Fitzgerald 1st edition 9, Graves/Shah 9)

Throwing a stone in the bowl. According to Heron-Allen it was a Bedouin signal to strike camp. No more drinking, so to speak? But the Calcutta MS is anomalous: most other texts of this Rubā‘ī throw "wine" (badeh) rather than a "stone" (sakhareh) into the bowl, which is a better fit with the lines that come next. (Though personally I think the stone is more exciting.) Anyway, maybe that's why Fitzgerald rejigged his opening stanza (while making it even less of a translation). 

[Image source: from Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (1967), p. 72. This is the same rubā‘ī as C 134, but with the word "wine" (badeh) instead of "stone" (sakhareh). They don't specify the manuscript that's reproduced here.]

*

Omar Khayyam (or "Khayaam", in Graves and Ali-Shah), 1048 - 1131, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, from Nishapur (NE Iran, not far from the borders with Turkmenistan and Afghanistan). 

In his 1174 anthology of Arabic poetry Kharidat al-qasr (Pearl Pendant of the Palace), Imad al-Din al-Isfahani describes Omar as a poet and quotes four short Arabic poems. 

But the poems with which Omar is associated all over the world are quatrains in Persian (Rubā‘iyāt). These Rubā‘iyāt were independent, pithy, memorable poems that were at first orally shared. It was a popular form, I suppose, somewhat comparable to haiku in Japan or bayati in Azerbaijan. Over time a good many Rubā‘iyāt were attributed to Omar. Perhaps they were the ones especially characterized by a sceptical flavour, appropriate to a renowned philosopher in the Greek tradition. The upshot is an "Omarian" literature, around 1200 quatrains in all. The main manuscripts are diwans, implying the collected work of a single author (what's more, one who constantly refers to himself by name), but their contents vary enormously. It's possible that the historical mathematician Omar didn't write a single one of these poems. But supposing he did, was it half a dozen, thirty-five, a hundred, 250? Readers and scholars have had many different impressions of a more authentic or central core.

What many have sought, Omar Ali-Shah claimed to possess. A twelfth-century manuscript of "uncontradictable authority" containing 111 Rubā‘iyāt. Reading his words (p. 32), you have the feeling that Ali-Shah hardly expected anyone to believe this, noting that at any rate the chosen 111 quatrains were all in one or more of the older manuscripts in  libraries (manuscripts, in other words, that actually exist). Whether his co-translator Robert Graves fully grasped the rules of the game is rather an open question.  But both translators wanted to fashion Omar anew, that is, to reclaim the poetry from what they saw as Edward Fitzgerald's imposition of 19th-century scepticism and hedonism. The idea that Fitzgerald had misrepresented Omar had been around a long time. Fitzgerald himself remarked (preface to Third Edition): 

While the second Edition of this version of Omar was preparing, Monsieur Nicolas, French Consul at Resht, published a very careful and very good Edition of the Text, from a lithograph copy at Teheran, comprising 464 Rubaiyat, with translation and notes of his own.

Mons. Nicolas, whose Edition has reminded me of several things, and instructed me in others, does not consider Omar to be the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a Mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine, Wine-bearer, &c., as Hafiz is supposed to do; in short, a Sufi Poet like Hafiz and the rest.

I cannot see reason to alter my opinion. . .

(Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam (1867), link below.)

A great deal depends on whether the Omarian poems came from a wine-drinking culture or a teetotal one. A simple question, not so easy to answer conclusively. If nobody drank wine but everyone wrote about it, then yes, it probably signified something else.  

It's a kind of debate that I recognize from my student days, when I was navigating the literature of medieval Christendom. Our favourite poets (Chaucer, Gottfried, Chrétien, Marie de France, Guillaume de Lorris) so often seemed daring, heterodox, rebellious... We were thrilled and a bit taken aback by their seeming failure to comply with the orthodoxy of a very authoritarian age. But were we hopelessly deluded, selectively picking out what spoke to our own Age of Faithlessness, grossly ignorant of the tremendous sophistication of a very different culture, profoundly addicted to literalism and averse to allegory, the most fundamental tool of the imaginative artist in that era of the Ovide Moralisé? Those were the questions raised by D.W. Robertson, Jr and his colleagues. Whether their own interpretations were any better than ours was a moot point, but the methodological issue couldn't be dodged. Since it was medieval poetry we were reading, what did that mean for how we go about reading it? We lived in a time when intuitive common sense was constantly being proved wrong: in psychology, biology, economics, to name but three glaring examples. So why would we continue to trust our common-sense intuitions when reading the poetry of a very different culture? 

Graves and Ali-Shah were offering a counter-Fitzgerald, but their poem owes a lot to his. Most real Persian manuscripts present their quatrains in Diwan order (that is, alphabetical order of the final letter of the end-rhyme of lines 1, 2 and 4). It was Fitzgerald himself who chose to begin with a quatrain about the dawn that he picked out of the Calcutta manuscript (C 134 in Heron-Allen's numbering). Fitzgerald was constructing an elegy that would begin in the hopeful dawn, wander through a garden, and reserve its most searching and desolate summations for dusk. But Ali-Shah's purported 800-year-old manuscript turned out to be in more or less the same sequence as the one Fitzgerald himself had constructed; dawn at the beginning, the garden, the musings of the pots, the fall of night... 

*

Except they don't end with the starkness of Khayyam's empty glass, but in a more pious state of fragile hope. 

LXXV

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
   And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!

TAMÁM SHUD.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 1st edition, 1859.)

CI.

 And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass
 Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
   And in your joyous errand reach the spot
 Where I made One--turn down an empty Glass!

TAMAM.

(Final stanza of Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 4th edition, 1879. Unchanged in the posthumous 5th edition.)

107

Sweet friends, in joy assembled here together,

Never forget us, once your sweetest friends.

Before you greet the jug, Khayaam adjures you:

When his turn comes, turn down his empty bowl.

108

Khayaam, who stitched the hides for Wisdom's tent

Has tumbled in Grief's clutches. He lies burning;

The shears of Death have closed upon his guys

And Hope the Broker sells him for a song.

109

Fools, with damnation as your destiny,

Sentenced to fuel the eternal fires of Hell, 

How long will you still plead for Omar's pardon,

Nudging his mercy from the Merciful?

110

Though pearls in praise of God I never strung,

Though dust of sin lies clotted on my brow,

Yet will I not despair of mercy. When

Did Omar argue that the One was Two?

111

The palace with huge walls soaring to Heaven,

Where prostrate Kings did reverence at the gate –

A ring-dove perches on its battlements;

'Where, where?' it coos, 'where, where?'

(Final five stanzas of Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam, 1967.)

TAMÁM SHUD, TAMAM: FINIS.

Though pearls in praise of God...  This is the first rubā‘ī in the 15th-century Ouseley MS in the Bodleian Library; like some other diwan collections, the Ouseley MS starts with a couple of praise poems that are not in diwan sequence. (See Edward Heron-Allen (1), linked below.) The Ouseley MS was Fitzgerald's main source of rubā‘iyāt, but he made no use of this one; evidently he thought it was spurious (see his Preface to the 5th edition). Graves and Ali-Shah, on the other hand, deployed its firm monotheism to ring in the departing reader's ears. 

The palace with huge walls... Fitzgerald translated this in his 2nd edition (quatrain 20), but then dropped the idea. 

*

The five editions of Edward Fitzgerald's poem, on Wikisource.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald)

The first and fifth editions, on Project Gutenberg.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm

Jean-Baptiste Nicolas, Les Quatrains de Khèyam, 1867. His 464 quatrains don't include a parallel to C 134, as far as I can see. 

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Quatrains_de_Kh%C3%A8yam

Edward Heron-Allen (1), The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyām: Being A Facsimile of the Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, with a Transcript into Modern Persian Characters; Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, and Some Sidelights upon Edward Fitzgerald's Poem, by Edward Heron-Allen (2nd Edition, 1898).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pqNfHgsRvHEC&pg=PR22&dq=edward+heron-allen+ouseley&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjcitG_z7GWAxUsR0EAHdubLLIQuwV6BAgLEAg#v=onepage&q=edward%20heron-allen%20ouseley&f=false

Edward Heron-Allen (2), Edward Fitzgerald's Rubâ‘iyât of Omar Khayyâm, With their Original Persian Sources Collated from his Own MSS., and Literally Translated (1899).

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ahe95OSJZ1MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=edward+heron-allen+rubaiyat&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

*

On the Rubā‘ī form in Persian literature:

https://kamaustine.com/2025/08/19/what-are-persian-quatrains-rubaiyat/

*

Medieval European literature: exegetical methodologies, contrasted with new critical methodology.

I found a lively outline of this debate in Paul A. Olson's 2017 Foreword to D.W Robertson Jr's Uncollected Essays.  

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&context=englishfacpubs

The three friends

The three friends. 20 November, 2025.

One evening last November I was walking up the alley and noticed that someone had chucked out some bedding plants. They lay on the gravel, out of their pots and with very little soil on their roots, but in the November gloom you could still see a flower or two, like a lost bead.  

After a couple of days I took it into my head to try and rescue them. There were two geraniums (pelargoniums I mean), one of which had shut up shop, but the other was still making a gallant effort to produce new flowers. There was also a begonia with dark red leaves, but it was so tiny and bedraggled I didn't expect much from it.

Anyway, they were company. Back home in Swindon, I potted them up and sat them on a recycling bin in my porch, where the sun sometimes reached them. 

The three friends indoors. 11 December, 2025.

Nothing much changed through the winter. They didn't die, was about the best you could say. It was a mild winter and there was little danger of frost in the back of the porch. All the same there were a few nights when I brought them inside. The induction hob seemed like the perfect spot to plonk them.

Then in April I moved back to Frome, so I passed them on to a friend with a garden. She took care of them, potted them on, kept them watered through the long dry summer. Here's what they looked like last week.

The two pelargoniums, 6 August 

Pelargonium is a southern hemisphere genus, mostly southern Africa (some in Australia). The ancestors of our garden hybrids are predominantly South African. 

Classifying the garden types is phenomenally complicated. Typical schemes involve up to twenty categories. I think both of my plants would fall into the zonal category, though only one of them shows the zonal marking on the leaves. 

It's become a blur already. The one fact I'll retain is that in Pelargonium each bunch of flower buds is considered a pseudoumbel, because the flowers don't all bloom at the same time. 

The begonia, 2 August 2026.

Begonia is one of the largest plant families. Aside from its 2,000 wild species there are endless hybrids and cultivars. 

I think this is what they call a wax begonia: plants of many different colours but all with rounded gleaming fleshy leaves and small cheerful flowers. They are grown as bedding annuals (though as my plant demonstrates they are not actually annuals).

The wax begonias (Begonia x sempervirens-cultorum) are cultivars with several species in their makeup. One of them is Begonia cucullata, native to Argentina, Brazil, etc. -- The Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

When I did some image matching on my plant I kept hitting references to Begonia sparreana. Frustratingly, I still can't decide if there's any substance to this. 

Begonia sparreana is a plant endemic to Ecuador, rather threatened in its native habitat (moist tropical lowland forest on the Amazonian side of the Andes). From the invaluable Missouri Botanical Garden site (it's free to use, but you have to create an account) I downloaded Jorgensen and Léon-Yánez's Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Ecuador, which is fascinating about Ecuador plant life in general, but it doesn't describe individual species, and as far as B. sparreana was concerned I wasn't much the wiser (it's on p. 318). 

Much of the internet fluff derived from the English and Spanish Wikipedia entries for B. sparreana, which both appear to show an image of a standard wax begonia just like mine, snapped in a British garden. (I couldn't find any images of B. sparreana in its native habitat.)

Do wax begonias with burgundy leaves and pink flowers have B. sparreana in their ancestry? It's tempting to dismiss it as a simple error replicated dozens of times, but I found just enough variation in my search hits to leave the matter in doubt. 

For example Casey Elizabeth Dennis has a post showing B. sparreana as a hanging basket type of begonia with small pink flowers on bright red stems (there's a picture). Different from my plant, but not so different as to rule out any connection.  Yet her lengthy post has a naggingly synthetic feel, suggesting it's mostly computer-generated. So is B. sparreana really a thing, in the horticulture world? I still don't know. 

https://plantophiles.com/plant-care/begonia-sparreana/

Afterwards I had a nightmare vision of a future in which human beings can no longer find anything out from the internet, because truth and falsehood have become inextricably tangled. Only Al can work the internet. Al can't tell the difference between true and false, but it can chew through so much data that the truth mostly lands uppermost. And true or not, there's no means of questioning it.

My SF dystopian fiction has begun!

The two pelargoniums, 10 August 2026.

 

the sitters

Ikegobo to the Iyoba (Hand Altar to the Queen Mother). By an unrecorded Edo artist, Benin, c. 1800.

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/unknown-west-african-artist/ .]

I decided to read some poetry by Claire Crowther, a name I bookmarked and have been meaning to follow up for far too long.  

Anyway, I arrived at this poem which appeared with five others on Peter Philpott's long-dormant GreatWorks site (which in case you don't know is an absolute treasure house.)

ALTAR OF THE HAND

To claim your inheritance:

Birmingham.
Soft shape of black dots.
Ignore its green rivulets where trams rode,
its village making chocolate, the Rotunda.

Concentrate on:

the sitters for Rubens, Tintoretto, Ghisi,
those immigrant paintings.
That lugubrious man in his feathered cap
and peplum. Beccafumi's Venus covered in blusher,
even her knees, the goddess of the hand altar,
thumbs up, stuck in a pattern of palms and fingers.

To become Mistress of the Legend:

See that view of a landscape near Malines,
its blue wings of wood, lake, grey sky?
There is nothing for you in such a healthy grave,
the classical skyline.
Only the sitters, left at home, hold their myth,
St Catherine propped by a wheel,
St Ursula sensing the suburbs as it would be.

Old woman:

Here are your lines, your red eyelids.

[Poem source: https://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/cc1.html .]

*

Altar of the hand: A literal translation of ikegobo, a type of Edo royal artefact. There's one at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham (see the image at the head of this post). At least there is for now; I imagine it might go back to Benin pretty soon.  

Unusually this ikegobo celebrates a woman, or rather a woman's role (the iyoma or queen mother). In Edo religion -- this is a hasty impression from probably non-authoritative sources -- the hand relates to actual achievements, wealth and prosperity (in contrast to inner personality, represented by the head). As the poem says, the queen mother is doing a thumbs-up with both hands. 

In a way the Barber Institute itself is a hand altar, endowed by Lady Barber to celebrate the achievements of her late husband, a property developer who made his fortune building the suburbs of Birmingham.  

The poem's other artworks are also in the Barber Institute. 

green rivulets: For such a large city Birmingham is notable for the smallness of its rivers (the Tame, Rea and Cole).

where trams rode: Birmingham's tram system began to decline from the 1930s and ceased altogether in 1953. (It began again on a small scale in 1999, and has since expanded; it's called the West Midlands Metro.)

village making chocolate: Bournville, originally a model village, now a residential area of SW Birmingham. 

Rotunda: Cylindrical high-rise building in central Birmingham. 

Rubens, A Portrait of a Carmelite Prior. 

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/peter-paul-rubens-1577-1640-2/ .]

Rubens:

Peter Paul Rubens' Portrait of a Carmelite Prior (c. 1616). The sitter has not been identified. 

Tintoretto's Portrait of a Young Man (1554).

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/jacopo-robusti-called-tintoretto-1518-1594/ .]

Tintoretto:

Tintoretto's Portrait of a Young Man (1554). The sitter has not been identified. 

"That lugubrious man in his feathered cap and peplum" also seems to refer to this painting. (Peplum in modern clothing design = a short or false overskirt at the waist line.)

Giorgio Ghisi's An Allegory of Life (The Dream of Raphael), 1561.

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/giorgio-ghisi-1520-4-1582/ .]

Ghisi:

Giorgio Ghisi's enigmatic engraving An Allegory of Life (it claims to be after Raphael, though scholars doubt this). 

There's more information here:

https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5755214 .

It's hardly a portrait! Ghisi's "sitter", you'd think, is nothing short of Life itself. 

Venus and Cupid, painting (c. 1519) by Domenico Beccafumi. 

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/domenico-beccafumi-1484-1551/ .]

Beccafumi's Venus covered in blusher, even her knees: Domenico Beccafumi (1486 - 1551) was a Sienese painter. His painting Venus and Cupid (also known as Reclining Nymph, c. 1519) is in the Barber Institute. In the painting Venus and Cupid have rosy cheeks and her knees are a bit red too. This painting was originally a headboard, part of the bedroom decoration for Francesco Petrucci and Caterina Piccolomini, celebrating marriage, fertility and virtuous women. 

[Not to be confused with Beccafumi's later painting Venus and Cupid with Vulcan, which is in the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA). Obviously I'm saying this precisely because I did confuse them!]

Rubens' Landscape in Flanders, c. 1635-1640.

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/peter-paul-rubens-1577-1640/ .]

landscape near Malines: Peter Paul Rubens' Landscape in Flanders, painted c. 1635-1640. (Malines = Mechelen.)

Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Catherine of Alexandria, late 1640s.

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/bernardo-cavallino-1616-1656/ .]

St Catherine propped by a wheel: Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Catherine of Alexandria (late 1640s). 

This is the St Catherine at the Barber Institute.  Cavallino painted another St Catherine, which is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam:

https://www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/4185/saint-catherine-of-alexandria

Bernardo Cavallino's Saint Ursula, c. 1650.

[Image source: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/saint-ursula-4484 .]

St Ursula sensing the suburbs as it would be: Basically I can't find a St Ursula at the Barber Institute. The details in Claire Crowther's poem suggest an intimate interior portrait of the saint, much like Cavallino's Saint Catherine. Well, that was Cavallino's speciality. So my first thought is that the poem is talking about his Saint Ursula, which is at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Maybe it was loaned to the Barber for a while, though I've found no evidence. Anyway, this St Ursula is caught in the very act of sensing something, the suburbs of Cologne maybe, or Birmingham. 

But there's another possibility. After all, the poem doesn't say that the saints themselves are at home, but that the sitters have been "left at home" (in contrast to the "immigrant paintings" that, by one means or another, have fetched up in Birmingham). So perhaps I shouldn't be looking for an interior. 

Christ on the Cross, with a Donor (Bruges, 1480s?)

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/the-circle-of-hans-memling-about-1430-1494/ .]

Here's a painting that is in the Barber Institute, titled Christ on the Cross, with a Donor. It's currently just "circle of Hans Memling", but is sometimes credited to the Master of the Legend of Saint Ursula (a cycle of scenes produced for the convent of the Black Sisters in Bruges, though now dispersed to museums elsewhere). Well, overlooking the total absence of St Ursula from this particular painting, could the scene behind the two figures be envisaged as a kind of prophetic vision of the leafy suburbs of SW Birmingham and its university? That's my second thought. It doesn't really add up, I know. On the other hand, the poem's "Mistress of the Legend" also seems to gesture in this direction.

Bernardo Strozzi's The Head of an Old Woman, 1620s.

[Image source: https://barber.org.uk/bernardo-strozzi-1581-1644/ .]

Old woman: Bernardo Strozzi's The Head of an Old Woman (1620s). The sitter has not been identified. (Given the tenderness of the portrait, some have wondered if it's Strozzi's mother.)

*

Claire Crowther's poem covers a lot of ground in small compass, and it doesn't waste words. A poem to inhabit rather than interpret, maybe. 

My abiding impression is of the protagonist essaying a "light touch", and coming away with paint on her fingers. Ignore that, concentrate on this, the protagonist instructs herself, but it turns out that things aren't so easily partitioned, they are characterized by what printers call bleed. An artwork is like a face, it both conceals and reveals, and there can be a shock of communication. You hover between admiration, cool amusement, alienation, appraisal, but sometimes the artwork breaks through, and then you're confronted with the personal preoccupations you intended to leave with your backpack. 

The unidentified sitters are important to the poem. The artwork can be transported away from them, it usually will be, but it can't wholly leave them behind, no matter how much distance and centuries and sumptuous presentation seem to assure its transcendence. 

The poem keeps tripping over intrusions, oppressions, insecurities, worries... It's anxiously and perhaps distractedly searching, but not for "a healthy grave". Life won't be kept out. As an artwork itself, it lets us see its smudgy hands.

Journeys of Gil Blas

 

When I first read Gil Blas, thirty years ago, I took no great notice of its geography. I had never been to Spain then, and the place-names were just names. My experience this time around was very different. I'd now done quite a bit of travelling around inner Spain, and I found with delight that the journeys of Gil Blas and the other characters often brought them to places I had some sort of nodding acquaintance with: Burgos, Valladolid, Salamanca, Toledo, Ávila, Aranjuez, Coria, Valencia...

Which is more acquaintance than Alain-René Le Sage (1668 - 1747) ever had. He was a Breton who was scraping a living in Paris; he never went to Spain in his life. But he knew a lot of Spanish romances and novels and plays; he read all the accounts of French travellers; and, thanks especially to the Sanson family of geographers, he had maps. 

Boy, did Le Sage love those maps! Most novelists, setting their story in a land they didn't know, would try to limit it to as few locations as possible, but Le Sage did the opposite. His fictional Spaniard's autobiography visits or references hundreds of Spanish locations. Gil Blas himself travels widely, especially in his younger days. And the narratives of the other characters seem almost designed to fill in the gaps on the map: for instance Don Raphael and Don Gaston on the borders of Portugal, Laura and Scipio in Seville, Don Roger de Rada on the south coast... Gil Blas himself never leaves Spain, and though he was born in Santillana del Mar shows no interest in the sea. At one point he thinks of going to Valencia to get a ship (VI.3), but when he finally does go there (X.4-6) he doesn't mention the coast and just treats it as an inland town. There's something landlocked about our hero, not just physically but psychologically. 

*

We slept at Duengnas the first night, and reached Valladolid on the following day, about four o'clock in the afternoon. We alighted at the inn of the most respectable appearance in the town. (Bk I Ch 16 -- Malkin's translation*)

We stopped for the night at a little village between Moyados and Valpuesta; I have forgotten the name: and the next morning, about eleven, we reached the plain of Olmédo. (Bk II, Ch 9)

We all four agreed to set off in a body, and never to part company. The question was put whether we should sound a retreat on the instant, or first give a peremptory summons to a flagon of excellent wine, which brother Antony had invested by regular approaches at Cuença the day before; but Raphael, a more experienced general than any of us, represented that the first thing to be done was to render our own camp impregnable, for which purpose he proposed that we should march all night, to gain a very thick wood between Villardesa and Almodabar, where we should halt, as in a friendly country, and recruit after the fatigues of the campaign. These general orders were approved of in council. (Bk IV Ch 11)

It will be very soon four years since I left Madrid to go and see my aunt Donna Eleonora de Laxarilla at Coria: she is one of the richest dowagers in Old Castile, with myself for her only heir. ... I gave a splendid party at my aunt's country-house, in the suburbs on the side of Manroi. ... (Bk IX Ch 6)

*

These are typical examples of how locations are treated in Gil Blas; their names are tossed out unhesitatingly, but without any description or amplification. The effect is curiously convincing; it's exactly the way, we feel, that a well-travelled Spaniard might address an audience of other well-travelled Spaniards, people for whom these are everyday places that require no introduction. 

In fact it was so convincing that in the era when Gil Blas was admired all through Europe a vocal minority (both Spaniards and non-Spaniards) argued that Le Sage couldn't possibly have made this up: he must have translated and then suppressed an unknown Spanish manuscript. (In much the same spirit as those who argue that a commoner from Stratford-upon-Avon couldn't possibly turn out something like Hamlet.)

The shade of Le Sage must have been delighted: he did want Gil Blas to seem like a Spanish novel. Though perhaps its very freedom with place-names should arouse the reader’s suspicion. (Think of Cervantes' famous opening words: En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme... )

And Le Sage over-eggs the name-dropping, a bit. It's all very well not describing a big place like Valladolid that everyone knows about, whether they've been there or not. But Coria is a bit more of a stretch, and probably not one in a hundred Spaniards would know where Manroi (Monroy) is -- not very near Coria -- or Villardesa (Villar del Saz de Arcas) or Almodabar (Almodóvar del Pinar)...

*

In truth the world of Gil Blas is a never-never-land inhabited by author and reader alike. 

It isn't exactly idealized, though. Like its hero, the land and its places are characterized by a certain mundanity; Gil Blas accepts the petty corruption and occasional beauty with about the same amount of reflection, i.e. hardly any.  It's just what it is. 

Yet for the reader, if not for the imperturbable hero, it's a land full of promise, a land sparking endless curiosity. Nowhere was Gil Blas more eagerly devoured than in Britain, where knowledge of inner Spain was minimal. It had a profound influence on e.g. Ann Radcliffe, who set her novels in southern lands she had never seen. Her heroines were constantly trapped, but her readers were liberated. 

*

Gil Blas isn't purely a picaresque novel; it's also a life story. But focusing on the journeying aspect brings some things to the fore. 

In that context, we can see that the most momentous event in Gil Blas's life is his casual meeting with the unfortunate Don Alphonso in Bk IV Ch 9. It's this chance encounter and the growing attachment of the pair that in hindsight decisively shift Gil Blas's adventures and misadventures onto a higher social plane. 

By the same token, their temporary alliance with the rascally Don Raphael and Ambrose de Lamela (it begins a few paragraphs later) represents a road not taken. Gil Blas has knocked about Spain a bit, but Raphael and Lamela are another level. "Those who are always on the scamper see a great deal of the country," Don Raphael sagely remarks. They travel by night and off road, in the wild country that really exists behind the appearances of civilisation. 

When Don Alphonso and Gil Blas determine to separate from them (Bk VI Ch 2), we applaud morally (it's Don Alphonso's initiative, of course, not Gil Blas's) but not without a pang. It's in a beautiful spot outside Segorba (one of Le Sage's rare descriptions). Never again will our hero travel quite so freely and with such openness to the world. 

Like most ordinary people within a society, Gil Blas is going to settle down. He doesn't know it yet, and there are many ups and downs in store, but this is the decisive moment, and in this moment Gil Blas's story becomes representative and stirs some pretty deep questions. 

*

Here follows a more detailed account of the locations in Gil Blas. As always, if you think I've got something wrong, post a comment or send me an email (michaelpeverett AT live.co.uk).

Key locations in Gil Blas's own journeys are in bold. 

A "league" is about three miles. 

It seems that Le Sage took most of his place-names from the maps in Sanson's Atlas (1674) [abbreviated below as SA1674]; see the 1863 article by Thomas Keightley.  There was an improved edition in 1696, more accurate and marking the roads, but Le Sage apparently didn't use it. My comments on this 1674 atlas are all derived from Keightley: I wasn't able to find it online. But I did find Nicolas Sanson's maps of Spain from 1652 [abbreviated below as SM1652]; they must be pretty similar to the maps in the 1674 atlas, and I certainly found them illuminating. 

I've tried to match the place-names of Le Sage / Sanson to actual places on Google Maps: not always successfully.

Map of northern Spain by Nicolas Sanson, 1652.

[Image source: https://sanderusmaps.com/our-catalogue/antique-maps/europe/spain-and-portugal/northern-spain-by-nicolas-sanson-29660?srsltid=AfmBOootmcR-jDgplWmrug5W7dQhS_TNZd1-BC_9Esnhv7SKBhM4a6lM . If you follow this link you'll be able to zoom in and examine the map in detail.]

Map of southern Spain by Nicolas Sanson, 1652.

[Image source:  https://sanderusmaps.com/our-catalogue/antique-maps/europe/spain-and-portugal/northern-spain-by-nicolas-sanson-29661?srsltid=AfmBOoq_PZ0lYXOT-6A5kRoZXNGpyBJXq6MLEiJTLEeBVEg9xQeD2Do_ . If you follow the link you can zoom in and examine the map in detail.]

Book I

Ch 1: GB is born at Santillane (Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, a little to the west of Santander), and grows up in Oviedo (Asturias).

Ch 2: Peñaflor (de Grado), west of Oviedo. In Sanson's maps the route GB takes from Oviedo to Astorga was shown as more direct than it really is. In fact it's an extremely circuitous route, avoiding the Cantabrian mountains.)

Ch 3: Cacabelos. 

Ch 4. The thieves' cave. Their leader is Captain Rolando.

Ch 5. The cave. [Stories of the gang members. Madrid, Toledo, Seville.]

Chs 6-7 The cave. GB is confined there for six months.

Ch 8. Ponferrada. GB's first expedition with the gang.

Ch 9. Ponferrada. They detain Donna Mencia.

Ch 10. Back to the cave. GB and Donna Mencia escape to Astorga.

Ch 11. [Donna Mencia's story. Valladolid, and the castle of the Marquis de la Guardia "near Burgos, between Grajal and Rodillas". These names are both in SA1674. In SM1652, "M de Rodillas" is shown almost due north of Burgos; this is Monasterio de Rodilla, which is actually NE of Burgos on the Briviesca road).  Pace Henri van Laun, this "Rodillas" definitely isn't the same as the one that Scipio walks to from Toledo in Bk X Ch 12.]

Ch 12. Astorga. GB is jailed. 

Ch 13. Astorga. GB is released and takes the road to Burgos, via Ponte de Mula. ("Ponte de Mula" is shown in SM1652, on the river Pisuerga. It's basically Melgar de Fernamental.)  

Ch 14. Burgos. GB finds Donna Mencia.

Ch 15. Burgos. GB meets Ambrose de Lamela and sets off with him for Madrid.

Ch 16. Dueñas, Valladolid. GB robbed by Don Raphael and Lamela.

Ch 17. Valladolid. GB meets his old schoolfellow Fabricio. [Fabricio's story: Oviedo, Galicia, Palencia, Valladolid.] Fabricio introduces GB to Signor Arias de Londona. 

Book II

Ch 1. Valladolid. GB in service to the Licentiate Sédillo. 

Ch 2. Valladolid. Doctor Sangrado, and the canon's death.

Ch 3-5. Valladolid. GB in service to Doctor Sangrado. 

Ch 6. GB flees Valladolid (and the enraged Don Roderic), takes the road for Madrid. Meets the journeyman barber Signor Diego de la Fuenta.

Ch 7. [Signor Diego's story: Olmedo, Madrid.]

Ch 8. They reach Ponte de Duero (Puente Duero), and soon afterwards meet the actor Melchior Zapata. 

Ch 9. They spend the night at a village between Moyados [Mojados, but SM1652 places it on the Douro, not the Cega] and Valpuesta [SM1652 -- probably Valbuena de Duero]. They then proceed to Olmedo, where GB stays for a while with Signor Diego.

Book III

Ch 1. GB proceeds via Segovia to Madrid. GB in service to Don Bernard de Castil Blazo.

Ch 2. Madrid, where he meets Captain Rolando again (cf Bk I Ch 4). [Captain Rolando's story: Mansilla, Leon, Madrid. "Luceno", mentioned as the home of the peasant who discovers the thieves' cave, is shown in SM1652 to the north-east of Ponferrada. It probably means Bárcena, an old village that has now been submerged under a reservoir and replaced by Bárcena del Bierzo.]

Ch 3-6. Madrid. GB in service to Don Matthias de Silva.

Ch 7. [Don Pompeyo de Castro's story: Portugal.]

Ch 8. Madrid. Death of Don Matthias.

Ch 9-12. Madrid. GB in service to the actress Arsenia.

Book IV 

Ch 1: Madrid. GB in service to Aurora.

Ch 2. Madrid.

Ch3. Madrid, then Aurora's "castle on the Tagus, between Sacedon and Buendia." (Sacedón and Buendía, to the east of Madrid.) Then Madrid again, then their journey towards Salamanca: Donna Elvira's castle between Ávila and Villaflor.

Ch 4. [Donna Elvira's story: The Fatal Marriage, set in Sicily.]

Ch 5. Leaving Donna Elvira. Salamanca. Aurora and Don Lewis Pacheco. 

Ch 6. Salamanca, then back to Madrid. 

Ch 7. Madrid. Don Gonzalez Pacheco.

Ch 8. Madrid. The Marchioness of Chaves. 

Ch 9. GB leaves service in Madrid and goes first to Toledo (his intention is to make a tour of Spain), then heads for Cuença (Cuenca, intending to go on to Aragon); on the second day he meets Don Alphonso; they seek shelter at a hermitage near Cuenca (meeting Don Raphael and Lamela, cf Bk I Ch 15-16).

Ch 10. [Don Alphonso's story: Madrid, then the Toledo road, Seraphina's house two leagues beyond Illescas, Toledo and then back to Seraphina's, Toledo and then setting off in a  random direction, when he meets GB.]

Ch 11. "Those who are always on the scamper see a great deal of the country", says Don Raphael. GB, Don Alphonso, Don Raphael and Lamela decamp to a spot in "a very thick wood between Villardesa and Almodabar" (Two places south of Cuenca: Villardesa = Villar del Saz de Arcas, Almodabar = Almodóvar del Pinar.)

Book V

Ch 1. [Don Raphael’s story. Madrid, then Toledo, then Alcántara (in Extremadura), where he meets two naïve youths from Plasencia on a jaunt to Portugal. (When he suggests travelling with them to Almeria, I suppose he means Almeirim near Lisbon.) He robs them and heads towards Mérida. On the way he meets Moralez, who is fleeing Portalegre (in Portugal near the Spanish border); they attempt a swindle at Mérida, then they make for Trujillo but happen on Moralez' brother on the way and join up with his party, who are going to serve a newly appointed governor of Mallorca. They embark at Alicante, but a storm means they have to land on the desert island of Cabrera (south of Mallorca). Don Raphael is captured by corsairs and taken to Algiers, where he lives for more than seven years and has many adventures, including meeting his mother Lucinda. [[ Lucinda's story: Madrid, Valencia. ]] He escapes, landing at Leghorn (Livorno in Tuscany); adventures in Florence, then by ship to Barcelona; Madrid, Valladolid where he makes the acquaintance of Ambrose de Lamela and they rob GB (cf Bk I Ch 16). They leave intending to go to Madrid, then change their mind and go via Zebreros (Cebreros) to Toledo, where he kills a husband and leaves. At Villarubia (Villarrubio, west of Cuenca) they hear the aftermath from a merchant on his way to Segorba (Segorbe, north of Valencia) and decide to leave the highway and go cross-country, finding the hermitage and the dying hermit (cf. Bk IV Ch 9). They take over the hermitage, Lamela sells the mules at Toralva (Torralba) and they strike up with some like-minded women (pretended religionists) at Cuenca, until a jealous rival reports their whereabouts to the authorities (hence their sudden departure from the hermitage in Bk IV Ch 11).]

Ch 2. GB and the others plan to head for Valencia via Requena, but then they rescue two noble captives from bandidos; the people they have freed prove to be Seraphina and her father the Count de Polan (cf Bk IV Ch 10). They all retire to an inn (which, contrary to Lamela's assurance that it's nearby, proves to be over two hours away).

Book VI

Ch 1. The Count de Polan and Seraphina proceed, heading for Turis (west of Valencia). GB's party, following Lamela and travelling by night, get near to Campillo (Campillo de Altobuey), rest and at nightfall continue, reaching the Valencian region the next morning, where they halt in a delightful spot with a rivulet, but stocks are low: Lamela, reprovisioning in Xelva, hears about Samuel Simon and recruits the others to fleece him. They rob him and head for Segorba (Segorbe), still travelling by night. 

Ch 2. They halt in the shade of some willows near a village two leagues from Segorba. Here Don Alphonso and GB determine to part company with Don Raphael and Lamela. 

Ch 3. GB and Don Alphonso head for Valencia, intending to sail for Italy and serve the Venetian republic. At Bunol (Buñol, modern-day home of La Tomatina) Don Alphonso has a fever and is nursed by GB. Passing the nearby castle of Leyva Don Alphonso encounters his foster-father and meets his real father, Don Caesar da Leyva, whose castle this is, and also Seraphina's party. Don Alphonso marries her and GB becomes his steward. [The unexpected prominence of Segorbe in Gil Blas is matched by its name being written in rather large letters in SM1652; larger than anywhere else in the area except Valencia itself. Maybe Segorbe was more important back then (cf. Coria in Bk IX Ch 6). It would be almost impossible to travel from Segorbe to Buñol without passing through Valencia first, but Le Sage didn't know that, because his maps didn't show the roads. NB There really is a Castillo de Leiva, but it isn't near Valencia; it's to the east of Burgos.]

Book VII

Ch 1. GB goes to Xelva (Chelva) and restores the stolen money to Samuel Simon (cf. Bk VI Ch 2) and then returns to the castle of Leyva, but soon reluctantly leaves his post (because of trouble with Lorenza Sephora, Seraphina's servant). 

Ch 2. GB (who has a horse at this point) takes the Almansa road and travels without incident via Murcia to Grenada (Granada). He becomes literary secretary to the archbishop. 

Ch 3. Grenada (Granada).

Ch 4. Grenada (Granada). GB dismissed by the archbishop.

Ch 5. Grenada (Granada).

Ch 6. Grenada (Granada). GB meets Laura again  (Arsenia's maid, cf Bk III Ch 9-12). To her lover (the Marquis de Marialva) she passes him off as her brother. 

Ch 7. [Laura's story. Arsenia retires to her estate in Zamora. Laura is arrested and then taken under the wing of the Biscayan Pedro Zendono; they flee to Braganza (Bragança in Portugal), then Coimbra. Abandoned by Pedro Zendono, Laura befriends the elderly Dorothea and travels with her to Seville, meets Phenicia there and becomes an acclaimed actress, then moves on to Granada.]

Ch 8-10. Grenada (Granada). GB now in service to the Marquis de Marialva.

Ch 11. Warned of imminent exposure GB flees Granada with a muleteer, stays at Ubeda (Úbeda) the first night, and on the fourth day reaches Toledo, where however he learns that the Count de Polan is absent, having gone to the Castle of Leyva because his daughter Seraphina is dangerously ill. GB moves on to Madrid, thinking he might try his hand at the court. 

Ch 12. Madrid. Don Annibal de Chinchilla.

Ch 13. Madrid. GB meets Fabricio, cf. Bk I Ch 17.

Ch 14-15. Madrid. GB in service to Count Galiano. 

Ch 16. Madrid. GB falls ill. When he recovers, he finds his master has gone back to Sicily, and most of his goods were robbed, the rest being eaten up in medical expenses.

Book VIII

Ch 1. Madrid and elsewhere. GB has a post collecting farm rents on behalf of the prime minister, the Duke of Lerma. He visits the duke's farms, and also the castle of Lerma itself when it burns down (Lerma is to the south of Burgos). Six months later GB becomes one of the duke's secretaries. 

Ch 2-5. Madrid. Life at court. 

Ch 6. El Escorial (45km NW of Madrid).

Ch 7. Madrid.

Ch 8. [Don Roger de Rada's story. Antequera (N of Málaga), Málaga, the isle of Alborán, Punta de Helena (E of Adra, approximately ≈ Punta Sabinar), Adra, Antequera, Madrid, Antequera.]

Ch 9. Madrid. Fabricio.

Ch 10-12. Madrid. Catalina.

Ch 13. Madrid. GB hears of his family in Oviedo, ignores them, and quarrels with Fabricio.

Book IX

Ch 1-2. Madrid. GB nearly married.

Ch 3 Madrid. GB is arrested, and taken via Mancanarez and Colmenar to prison in Segovia. "Mancanarez" means the banks of the river Manzanares. "Colmenar" is shown on SM1652, slightly NE of Guadarrama on the way to Segovia; I assume this means Collado Mediano. (It doesn't mean Colmenar Viejo, because SM1652 shows that too.)

Ch 4-5. Segovia. GB in prison. (He has a view of the river Eresma and the vale of Coca.)

Ch 6. [History of Don Gaston de Cogollos and Donna Helena de Galisteo. Madrid, Coria, Plasencia, Italy, Coria, Madrid. Coria is an ancient town, now in northern Extremadura but in SM1652 the area around Coria and Plasencia is shown as part of Old Castile, as Don Gaston says. SM1652 puts the name Coria in capital letters, as if it's on a par with Salamanca and Plasencia, and more significant than Cáceres. Maybe that was true at the time, though it seems a bit unlikely.]

Ch 7-8. Segovia. Scipio and GB's fever.

Ch 9. Segovia. GB is released; he travels towards Madrid with Scipio. In a month GB will be exiled from the Castiles; they plan to go to Aragon.

Ch 10. Madrid. GB meets Don Alphonso, who gives him an estate at Lirias (Llíria, NW of Valencia). GB is delighted, but says he must first travel to Asturias to see his family.

Book X

Ch 1. GB and Scipio leave Madrid, initially for Valladolid via Alcalá de Henares, Segovia, Peñafiel. (As many have pointed out, Alcalá de Henares, NE of Madrid on the Zaragoza road, is in the wrong direction for getting to Segovia. Seemingly Le Sage misunderstood the map in SA1674, and thought Alcalá was where El Pardo is.) In Valladolid they meet Dr Sangrado and Signor Manuel Ordonnez (Fabricio's former master). 

Ch 2. They travel without incident to Oviedo (in four days). GB arrives just in time to witness the death of his father, is condemned by the townsfolk for his neglect of his family, and finds his mother unwilling to leave Oviedo. 

Ch 3. GB and Scipio leave, taking the Leon road, then heading for Valencia, arriving at Segorba (Segorbe) on the tenth day, then "three leagues" to Lirias (Llíria). They arrive at GB's estate, which is beside the river Guadalaviar (another name for the river Turia). [Presumably their journey is via Burgos and Zaragoza. It would take them right across Old Castile, even though GB's banishment from the Castiles is surely in force by now. It's a trespass they could have avoided, though not easily, by travelling through Biscaya, Navarra, etc.: but if they were planning to do that there was no point in going to Leon. Le Sage's idea that it's only "three leagues" from Segorbe to Llíria is highly optimistic. It's fully 30 miles (10 leagues), and that's only if you go straight over the Serra Calderona!] 

Ch 4. GB goes to Valencia to thank Don Alphonso (now governor of Valencia).

Ch 5. Valencia. GB goes to the theatre.

Ch 6. Valencia. GB meets Lamela and Don Raphael as Carthusian monks; soon after, they abscond with the monastery's money. 

Ch 7. GB returns to Lirias (Llíria). GB discovers the library, and slims down his household staff.

Ch 8. Lirias (Llíria). GB falls in love with Antonia.

Ch 9. Lirias (Llíria) and briefly Valencia. GB's wedding. 

Ch 10. Lirias (Llíria). [Scipio's story. Toledo, Galves (Gálvez), back to Obisa (garbled rendering of Cobisa), Toledo, Seville, via Carmona to Cordova (Córdoba).]

Ch 11. [Scipio's story. Cordova (Córdoba), the mountains of Fesira, supposedly on the road to Mérida. (SM1652 shows "Fesira" in the mountains to the north of Córdoba: somewhere near Obeja, maybe. In the Crónica of Francisco de Rades y Andrada (d. 1599), "Fesira" is recorded as the name of a Moorish fortress in the Córdoba area, destroyed in 1209.)]

Ch 12. [Scipio's story. Córdoba, Toledo, then via Rodillas (garbled rendering of Caudilla?) and Maqueda (on foot) and then Illescas (by mule) to Madrid. (Pace Henri van Laun, this is clearly a different Rodillas from the one "near Burgos" in Bk I Ch 11.)]

Book XI

Ch 1. Lirias (Llíria), Valencia. Death of GB's wife Antonia and his son Alphonso.

Ch 2. GB and Scipio travel to Madrid, taking less than eight days on two good horses. GB attempts to gain favour with the new king and new prime minister, the Count d'Olivarez.

Ch 3. Madrid. GB is in service to Olivarez.

Ch 4-12. Madrid.

Ch 13. Madrid. [Don Gaston's story (cf Bk IX Ch 6). He leaves Madrid intending to go to Coria. After leaving Colmenar, in the mountains, he gets into a fight and is seriously wounded near Villarejo. After recovering, he proceeds to Coria. (SM1652 shows "Colmenar" and "El Villar" side by side in the mountains, not very far apart. Colmenar is roughly south of Ávila and El Villar north of Plasencia. It's a perfect fit for Le Sage's narrative, but Sanson's rendering of this mountain region (the Sierra de Gredos) is all to pot. If he meant Colmenar del Arroyo and Villarejo del Valle respectively, they are actually a mighty long way apart. Whatever, this Colmenar isn't the same one as in Bk IX Ch 3.)]

Ch 14. Madrid.

Book XII

Ch 1. GB sent to Toledo. The end of Don Raphael and Ambrose de Lamela; GB meets Laura again, with her "niece" Lucretia.

Ch 2-7. Madrid. 

Ch 8. Madrid. [Includes an account of the king's journey via Aranjuez, Cuenca, and Molina de Aragon to Zaragoza, with Olivarez' delaying tactics.]

Ch 9. GB travels with the disgraced Olivarez to Loeches (a little to the east of Madrid).

Ch 10-11. Loeches. Death of Olivarez.

Ch 12. Loeches, then Madrid, then via Cuenca to Lirias (Llíria).

Ch 13. Lirias (Llíria). Visits to Jutella, only a mile away (this seems to be a fictional location).

Ch 14. Lirias (Llíria) and Jutella. 

*

I can't resist an idle speculation. The two Sanson maps that I've reproduced happen to cover all the parts of Spain where Gil Blas goes into any sort of detail about geography. But they don't cover the whole of Spain. Nicolas Sanson produced a third map showing NE Spain: Aragon, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. 

My speculation is that Le Sage had the above two maps readily to hand, but not the third one. And this explains why his book is so profligate with place-names from the rest of Spain, yet the reader is never taken to Zaragoza or Barcelona except in the sketchiest way. Twice Gil Blas plans to go to Aragon (Bk IV Ch 9, Bk IX Ch 9), but both times his plans change. We can infer that he does go there eventually (Bk X Ch 3), but the narrative is blanked. 

What additional adventures might Gil Blas have had, if only Le Sage had possessed the third map? 

Of course I'm being silly, he probably did have the third map, and if he didn't he could easily have got it. But it may well be that the boundaries of Sanson's maps influenced the distinctive geography of Gil Blas, the places where it lingers and the places where it doesn't.

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* Benjamin Heath Malkin's translation of Gil Blas, in three volumes, is available on Project Gutenberg, where it's incorrectly credited to Tobias Smollett. Smollett did make a translation of Gil Blas, but this isn't it. You can read more about that in my previous post on Gil Blas:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/10/alain-rene-lesage-1668-1747-gil-blas-de.html

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A few weeks after writing this I caught the name Colmenar del Arroyo (cf. XI.13) in the news. It was being evacuated, threatened by one of the huge wildfires of this dry summer. 

These days we can't stop thinking about weather, and it's one of the remarkable things about older books that they mention it so rarely. In the land of Gil Blas there's basically no weather at all. The only exception is the brief storm in IV.9. (Storms, since they advance the plot, are much the most frequent weather event in older literature.) There are no seasons in Gil Blas either; the burning Castilian summer, and the freezing Castilian winter, are alike absent. When the author looks around (rarely) it's a land of flowers and green glades. A sort of permanent May.