Lesage, Alain René

The French novelist and playwright Alain René Lesage (1668-1747) created a vision of his transitional epoch as rich in good humor as in moral failings.

Born in Brittany, Alain René Lesage went to Paris to study and practice law, soon abandoning this first career for a literary vocation which made him entirely dependent on his pen, with the distinction of being perhaps the first French writer to support himself and his family solely by the pursuit of letters. The early years of his career were given over to hackwork and translations from Spanish theater and romance. Lesage was in fact approaching middle age when, in 1707, he experienced his first personal successes with the comedy Crispin rival de son maître and a novel, Le Diable boiteux, inspired by Antonio de Guevara's Diablo conjuelo.

Lesage pushed his satirical bent to the limits of audacity in 1709 in a bitter comedy, Turcaret, which unmasks the moral depravation of a former lackey risen to the equivocal heights of high finance. Clearly out of step with the revered conventions of the Comédie Française, Lesage began a long feud with "respectable" theatrical people of his time and henceforth dedicated his dramatic talents to the production, singly or in collaboration, of more than 100 farcical vaudevilles.

The influence of Lesage on the novel remains far more profound and permanent. Gil Blas, a picaresque romance, began appearing in 1715 and was not completed until 1735. Within the broad lines of a Spanish narrative convention, Lesage gave free rein to a satirical originality founded securely in the French comic genius of Molière and Jean de La Bruyère. Moreover, his picaro was far less soiled than most and, ultimately, was open to improvement, even to the development of a modest wisdom, disillusioned perhaps, but above all conscious of the healing and elevating effects of time and calm reflection. Critics have found in Gil Blas a dual moral significance linked conceptually to the novel's form: on the satirical side, life is seen to be a theater of illusion, pretension, weakness, and deceit, while on the constructive side, man comes into his own - literally becomes himself - only after a series of painful meanderings; yet this often pitiable life is of inestimable value, since its vagaries have as their end product man himself.

Lesage wrote several other novels, all of lesser importance: they include Les Aventures de M. Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchêne (1732), set in French Canada and filled with swashbucklers and Indians, and other experiments in the picaresque such as Don Guzman d'Alfarache (1732) and Le Bachelier de Salamanque (1736). His last years were spent far from Parisian distractions, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, in just the sort of happy retreat among devoted members of his family which had been the reward of his worldly-wise hero Gil Blas.

Further Reading

Full-length studies of Lesage are in French. In English, chapters or partial treatments of him appear in Frederick C. Green, French Novelists, Manners and Ideas: From the Renaissance to the Revolution (1928; rev. ed. 1964); Lester George Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth Century French Thought (1963); and Vivienne Mylne, The Eighteenth-century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion (1965).

For more information on Alain-René Lesage, visit Britannica.com.

Lesage, Alain-René (1668-1747). Novelist and playwright. A Breton by birth, he attended the Jesuit college at Vannes, studies law, and settled in Paris, where he married and had four children. He was a professional writer of a new type, depending partly on patronage, but mainly on earnings from his writings. He used material from many literary sources (Turkish, Italian, above all Spanish), adapting it to the taste of his public. Translation, imitation, and original work are hard to tell apart in his voluminous output. Most of this is now forgotten; Lesage's continuing celebrity is due to two novels and two comedies.

As a novelist, he began with the Lettres galantes d'Aristénète (1695), adapted from the Greek, and Les Nouvelles Aventures de l'admirable Don Quichotte de la Manche (1704), a largely original work inspired by a sequel to Cervantes. Le Diable boiteux (1707, enlarged edn. 1726) was an immense success and was much imitated. Lesage appears to have made a considerable contribution, as ‘rewriter’, to Les Mille et un Jours (1710-12), translated by Pétis de la Croix, a rival publication to Les Mille et une Nuits. His masterpiece, the Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, was published in three instalments between 1715 and 1735, and achieved immediate and lasting success. He used a similar formula, the series of adventures attributed to a single hero, with intercalated stories, in several more novels, but with less success. Among these, Les Aventures de Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchêne (1732) is based on a true story set in Canada, whereas the Histoire de Guzman d'Alfarache (1732) and Le Bachelier de Salamanque (1736) continue to exploit the Spanish vein.

Lesage was also a prolific writer for the theatre. His first success was Crispin rival de son maître, performed at the Comédie-Française in 1707; this entertainingly cynical one-act comedy of errors and intrigue, in the traditional mode, shows the valet Crispin, under a false identity, coming close to supplanting his master in love. The valet actually supplants the master in the next comedy, the brilliant Turcaret (1709); production of this play was delayed and its success compromised by reactions to its fierce satire. Thereafter Lesage broke with the Comédie-Française and worked for the théâtre de la foire, composing or collaborating on dozens of scripts for entertainments, ranging from harlequinades in dumb-show to comic operas. With his colleague d'Orneval, he published ten volumes of Le Théâtre de la foire ou l'Opéra-comique (1721-37), with an interesting preface.

He was a writer for his time, an artisan of letters, and a supporter of the modernes in the Querelle. He wrote for a broad public, and Gil Blas in particular was much appreciated by readers of many countries for two centuries. Critics have sometimes viewed him rather more patronizingly, condemning the diffuse nature of his narratives and the banality or superficiality of his morality and his psychology. Yet he is in many ways a fascinating witness of his period. His writing is sharp and up to date, he has a gift for the dramatic scene and a keen eye for the masks and pretences of a corrupt society. While reusing old literary material, he nevertheless gives a strong sense of life in a real, unidealized world.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• R. Laufer, Lesage ou le Métier de romancier (1971)

Le Sage, Alain René (älăN' rənā' ləsäzh') , 1668–1747, French novelist and dramatist. His masterpiece, Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35, tr. by Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, 1749), is a rambling story in the style of Spanish picaresque romances, though unlike them in conception. It is instead strongly realistic, especially in its incidents; exact description of exterior and physical appearance suffices to show character and to imply moral judgment. Gil Blas was a major influence in the development of the realistic novel. Smollett drew heavily on it, especially in Roderick Random. Of Le Sage's lesser novels, Le Diable boiteux (1707; tr. The Devil upon Two Sticks, 1708) is an adaptation of a Spanish novel, and Le Bachelier de Salamanque (1736, tr. 1737) is an imitation of Gil Blas. Le Sage made his living by writing light pieces for the theaters of Paris; his best dramatic work is Turcaret (1709), a comedy of character, which bitterly satirizes tax farmers and the world of finance in general.

Quotes:

"I wish you all manner of prosperity, with a little more taste."