The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane - Alain René le Sage (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

with

so eminent a character.

 

We then began to pick up our crumbs, and to gnaw the precious

relics of the hare, bestowing such hearty smacks upon the bottle,

as to empty it very shortly. We were all three so deeply engaged

in the great affair of eating, that we said very little till we

had finished, when we resumed our conversation. I wonder, said

the barber to the player, that you should be so much out at

elbows. For a theatrical hero, you have but a needy exterior! I

beg pardon if I speak rather freely. Rather freely! exclaimed the

actor; Ah! by my troth, you are not yet acquainted with Melchior

Zapata. Heaven be praised, I have no mind to see things in a

wrong light. You do me a pleasure by speaking so confidently: for

I love to unbosom myself without reserve. I honestly own I am not

rich. Here, pursued he, showing us his doublet lined with

playbills, this is the common stuff which serves me for linings;

and if you are curious to see my wardrobe, you shall not be

disappointed. At the same time he took out of his knapsack a

dress, laced with tarnished frippery, a shabby head-dress for an

hero, with an old plume of feathers; silk stockings full of

holes, and red morocco shoes a great deal the worse for wear. You

see, said he again, that I am very little better than a beggar.

That is astonishing, replied Diego: then you have neither wife

nor daughter? I have a very handsome young wife, rejoined Zapata,

and yet I might just as well be without her. Look with awe on the

lowering aspect of my horoscope. I married a personable actress,

in the hope that she would not let me die of hunger; and, to my

cost, she is cursed with incorruptible chastity. Who the devil

would not have been taken in as well as myself? There was but one

virtuous princess in a whole strolling company, and she, plague

take her! fell into my hands. It was throwing with bad luck most

undoubtedly, said the barber. But then, why did not you look out

for an actress in the regular theatre at Madrid? You would have

been sure of your mark. You are perfectly in the right, replied

the stroller; but the mischief is, we underlings dare not raise

our thoughts to those illustrious heroines. It is as much as an

actor of the prince’s company can venture on; nay, some of them

are obliged to match with citizens’ daughters. Happily for our

fraternity, citizens’ daughters now-a-days contract theatrical

notions; and you may often meet with characters among them, to

the full as eccentric as any bona roba of the green-room.

 

Well! but have you never thought, said my fellow-traveller, of

getting an engagement in that company? Is it necessary to be a

Roscius for that purpose? That is very well of you! replied

Melchior, you are a wag, with your Roscius! There are twenty

performers. Ask the town what it thinks of them, and you will

hear a pretty character of their acting. More than half of them

deserve to carry a porter’s knot. Yet for all that, it is no easy

matter to get upon the boards. Bribery or interest must make up

for the defect of talent. I ought to know what I say since my

debut at Madrid, where I was hissed and catcalled as if the

devil had got among the grimalkins, though I ought to have been

received with thunders of applause; for I whined, ranted, and

offered all sorts of violence to nature’s modesty: nay, I went so

far as to clench my list at the heroine of the piece; in a word,

I adopted the conceptions of all the great performers; and yet

that same audience condemned by bell, book, and candle in me,

what was thought to be the first style of playing in them. Such

is the force of prejudice! So that, being no favourite with the

pit, and not having wherewithal to insinuate myself into the good

graces of the manager, I am on my return to Zamora. There we

shall all huddle together again, my wife and my fellow-comedians,

who are making but little of the business. I wish we may not be

obliged to beg our way out of town; a catastrophe of too frequent

occurrence!

 

At these words, up rose the stage-struck hero, slung across him

his knapsack and his sword, and made his exit with due theatric

pomp: Farewell, gentlemen; may all the gods shower all their

bounties on your heads! And you, answered Diego with

corresponding emphasis, may you find your wife at Zamora,

softened down in her relentless virtue, and in comfortable

keeping. No sooner had Signor Zapata turned upon his heel, than

he began gesticulating and spouting as he went along. The barber

and myself immediately began hissing, to remind him of his first

appearance at Madrid. The goose grated harsh upon his tympanum;

he took it for a repetition of signals from his old friends. But

looking behind him, and seeing that we were diverting ourselves

at his expense, far from taking offence at this merry conceit of

ours, he joined with good humour in the joke, and went his way

laughing as hard as he could. On our part, we returned the

compliment in kind. After this, we got again into the high road,

and pursued our journey.

 

CH. IX. — The meeting of Diego with his family; their

circumstances in life; great rejoicings on the occasion; the

parting scene between him and Gil Blas.

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 Olm�do. Signor Gil Blas, said my

companion, behold my native place. So natural are these local

attachments, that I can hardly contain myself at the sight of it.

Signor Diego, answered I, a man of so patriotic a soul as you

profess to be, might, methinks, have been a little more florid in

his descriptions. Olm�do looks like a city at this distance, and

you called it a village; it cannot be anything less than a

corporate town. I beg its township’s pardon, replied the barber;

but you are to know that after Madrid, Toledo, Saragossa, and all

the other large cities I have passed through in my tour of Spain,

these little ones are mere villages to me. As we got further on

the plain, there appeared to be a great concourse of people about

Olm�do: so that, when we were near enough to distinguish objects,

we were in no want of food for speculation.

 

There were three tents pitched at some distance from each other;

and hard by, a bevy of cooks and scullions preparing an

entertainment. Here a party was laying covers on long tables set

out under the tents; there a detachment was crowning the pitchers

of Tellus with the gifts of Bacchus. The right wing was making

the pots boil, the left was turning the spits and basting the

meat. But what caught my attention more than all the rest, was a

temporary stage of respectable dimensions. It was furnished with

pasteboard scenes, painted in a tawdry style, and the proscenium

was decorated with Greek and Latin mottoes. No sooner did the

barber spy out these inscriptions, than he said to me — All

these Greek words smell strongly of my uncle Thomas’s lamp. I

would lay a wager he has a hand in them, for between ourselves,

he is a man of parts and learning. He knows all the classics by

heart. If he would keep them to himself it would be very well,

but he is always quoting them in company, and that people do not

like. But then to be sure he has a right, because this uncle of

mine has translated ever so many of the Latin poets and hard

Greek authors with his own hand and pen. He has got all antiquity

at his fingers’ ends, as you may know by his ingenious and

profound criticisms. If it had not been for him, we might never

have learned that the Athenian school boys cried when they were

flogged; we owe that fact in the history of education to his

fundamental knowledge of the subject.

 

After my fellow-traveller and myself had looked about us, we had

a mind to inquire what these preparations were for. Going about

on the hunt, Diego recognized in the manager Signor Thomas de la

Fuenta, to whom we made up with great eagerness. The schoolmaster

did not recollect the young barber at first, such a difference

had ten years made. But when convinced of his being his own flesh

and blood, he gave him a cordial embrace, and said with much

appearance of kindness — Ah! here you are, Diego, my dear

nephew, here you are, restored after your wanderings to your

native land. You come to revisit your household gods, your

Penates, and heaven delivers you back safe and sound into the

bosom of your family. Oh happy day, happy in all the proportions

of arithmetic! A day worthy to be marked with a white stone and

inserted among the Fasti! We have annals in abundance for you, my

friend; your uncle Pedro, the poetaster, has fallen a sacrifice

at the shrine of Pluto: to speak to the comprehension of the

vulgar, he has been dead these three months. That miser, in his

lifetime, was afraid of wanting necessaries — Argenti pallebat

amore. Though the great were heaping wealth upon his head, his

annual expenditure did not amount to ten pistoles. He had but one

miserable attendant, and him he starved. This crazy fellow, more

wrong-headed than the Grecian Aristippus, who ordered his slaves

to leave all their costly baggage in the heart of Lybia, as an

incumbrance on their march, heaped up all the gold and silver he

could scrape together. And to what end? for those very heirs whom

he refused to acknowledge. He died worth thirty thousand ducats,

shared between your father, your uncle Bertrand, and myself. We

shall be able to do very well for our children. My brother

Nicholas has already married off your sister Theresa to the son

of a magistrate in this place — Connubio junxit stabili

propriamque dica vit. These very hymeneals, greeted auspiciously

by all the nuptial powers, have we been celebrating for these two

days with all this pomp and luxury. These tents in the plain are

of our pitching. Pedro’s three heirs have each a booth of his

own, and we defray the expenses of the day alternately. I wish

you had come sooner, you might have seen the whole progress of

our festivities. The day before yesterday, the wedding-day, your

father gave his treat. It was a superb entertainment, succeeded

by running at the ring. Your uncle, the mercer, regaled us

yesterday with a f�te champ�tre, and paid the piper handsomely.

There were ten of the best grown boys, and ten young girls,

dressed out in pastoral weeds; all the frippery in his shop was

brought out to prank them up. This assemblage of Ganymedes and

Houris ran through all the mazes of the dance, and warbled forth

a thousand tender and spirit-stirring lays. And yet, though

nothing was ever more genteel, the effect was not thought

striking; but that must be owing to the bad taste of the

spectators, the simplicity of pastoral is lost upon the present

age.

 

To-day, the wheels are greased by your humble servant, and I mean

to pre sent the burgesses of Olm�do with a pageant of my own

invention — Finis coronabit opus. I have got a stage erected,

on which, God willing, shall be represented by my scholars a

piece of my own composing,