Gil Blas. Volumes I & II.

Tan leather half binding with blue and white marbled paper boards. Raised banding with gilt title on the spine. Dimensions are for one volume.

A very clean and readable edition of Gil Blas Gil Blas is a picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage published between 1715 and 1735. It was translated into English by Tobias Smollett. Gil Blas is born in misery to a stable hand and a chambermaid of Santillana in Cantabria and is educated by his uncle. He leaves Oviedo at the age of seventeen to attend the University of Salamanca. His bright future is suddenly interrupted when he is forced to help robbers along the route and is faced with jail. He becomes a valet and, over the course of several years, is able to observe many different classes of society, both lay and clerical. Because of his occupation, he meets many disreputable people and is able to adjust to many situations, thanks to his adaptability and quick wit. He finally finds himself at the royal court as a favourite of the king and secretary to the prime minister. Working his way up through hard work and intelligence, Gil is able to retire to a castle to enjoy a fortune and a hard-earned honest life. Gil Blas is related to Lesage's play Turcaret (1709). In both works, Lesage uses witty valets in the service of thieving masters, women of questionable morals, cuckolded yet happy husbands, gourmands, ridiculous poets, false savants, and dangerously ignorant doctors to make his point. Each class and each occupation becomes an archetype. This work is both universal and French within a Spanish context. However, its originality was questioned. Voltaire was among the first to point out similarities between Gil Blas and Marcos de Obregón by Vicente Espinel, from which Lesage had borrowed several details. Considering Gil Blas to be essentially Spanish, José Francisco de Isla claimed to translate the work from French into Spanish in order to return it to its natural state. Juan Antonio Llorente suggested that Gil Blas was written by the historian Antonio de Solís y Ribadeneyra by arguing that no contemporary writer could have possibly written a work of such detail and accuracy.

Gil Blas, in full Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane, picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage, published in four volumes—the first two in 1715, the third in 1724, and the fourth in 1735. 'Considered one of literature's first realistic novels, Gil Blas takes an ordinary man through a series of adventures in high and low society. The work helped to popularize the picaresque novel, which was already widespread in Spain, though the work's happy ending, in which the hero achieves wealth and respectability, gave a new twist to the picaresque tradition.' The picaresque novel (Spanish: picaresca, from pícaro, for "rogue" or "rascal") is a genre of prose fiction. It depicts the adventures of a roguish, but "appealing hero", usually of low social class, who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt a realistic style. There are often some elements of comedy and satire. While the term "picaresque novel" was only coined in 1810, the picaresque novel originated in Spain during the Spanish Golden Age in 1554. Early contributors included Mateo Alemán and Francisco de Quevedo and flourished throughout Europe for more than 200 years. It continues to influence modern literature.

Why you should read Gil Blas. References and allusions in other works Gil Blas is mentioned in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea. The central character is showing the Autodidact some photos. One of them is of Santillana. The Autodidact responds by asking "the Santillana of Gil Blas?" Gil Blas is referred to by Jonathan Swift in his satirical Directions to Servants, dated 1731, with recommendations for the servants of rich masters to take the most advantage and have the least trouble in their daily tasks. In the chapter aimed at the "House Steward and Land Steward", Swift specifically instructs the reader to look up what Gil Blas has to say on the matter, as a more qualified source thus acknowledged. The 1751 play Gil Blas by the British writer Edward Moore was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane with David Garrick in the title role. Vasily Narezhny imitated Lesage in his 1814 novel A Russian Gil Blas Gil Blas is alluded to in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. The character Wanda von Dunajew ascribes the cause of her own free thinking to an early introduction to classical works; these include Gil Blas, which she read at the age of ten. "Gil Blas" is referred to in Honoré de Balzac's Facino Cane. The protagonist promises to spare the narrator "tales of adventures worthy of Gil Blas". In Oliver Wendell Holmes's The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1857), the Autocrat begins Section IX with the famous quote from Lesage's Preface: "Aqui esta encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcia": "Here is enclosed the soul of the lawyer Pedro Garcia". This signals that his own readers, like the two bachelors of Salamanca who discover Garcia's gravestone, will need to "fix on the moral concealed" beneath the surface of his recollections if they are to receive any benefit from them. In a letter to William Dean Howells (July 5, 1875), Mark Twain tells of just completing the manuscript for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (written in the third person) and deciding against taking Tom into adulthood: to do so, he says, "would be fatal ... in any shape but autobiographically – like Gil Blas". Scholar Walter Blair in Mark Twain and Huck Finn (1960) thus concludes that Twain's new novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which, picaresque-like, "would run In his plan for the novel The Life of a Great Sinner, Dostoyevsky notes that the concision of this work will at times mirror that of Gil Blas. Gil Blas is also mentioned in Chapter III of Dostoyevsky's A Gentle Creature, in which the narrator asks, "Why, didn't she tell me that amusing story about Gil Blas and the Archbishop of Granada herself the day before yesterday? We were discussing books. She was telling me about the books she had been reading that winter, and it was then that she told me about the scene from Gil Blas." its protagonist 'through life', had to be written in the first person; Gil Blas was the model". In A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins the rogue declares, "I am as even-tempered a rogue as you have met with anywhere since the days of Gil Blas." Edgar Allan Poe considered it among "the finest narratives in the world". Also he mentions the archbishop in Gil Blas in the short story "The Angel of the Odd": the angel makes a low bow and departs, wishing, in the language of the archbishop, "beaucoup de bonheur et un peu plus de bon sens." Italo Calvino's main character in The Baron in the Trees reads the book and lends it to a brigand. Gil Blas is mentioned in Thomas Flanagan's 1979 novel The Year of the French, in which poet Owen MacCarthy mentions having it with him "on [his] ramblings, years ago." Flanagan uses the book to connect the poor Irish citizens and their French allies in the 1798 Rebellion, illustrating that the Irish may not all be as simple as Arthur Vincent Broome, the loyalist narrator, presumes. This allusion to Gil Blas also connects the somewhat roguish MacCarthy to the picaresque protagonist Gil Blas. Chapter 7 of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, relates the story of Gil Blas to Steerforth and Traddles. Poor Traddles' teeth chatter and are overheard by the brutish headmaster Creakle who goes on to "handsomely flog" Traddles "for disorderly conduct". Charles Dickens, in American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy," invokes "the mysterious master of Gil Blas" in reference to a pig in New York City. One of Thomas Edison's closest early friends, Milton F. Adams, was referred to as a modern Gil Blas for his life of travel and dissolution as a "tramp operator", roaming from place to place and as far away as Peru as an itinerant telegraph operator. In The House of the Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his description of Holgrave (Chapter XII), says "A romance on the plan of Gil Blas, adapted to American society and manners, would cease to be a romance." His implication is that the normal experiences of a young American, such as Holgrave, are so extraordinary in comparison with those of Gil Blas, that they make the latter's adventures seem ordinary. Hawthorne then writes, "The experience of many individuals among us, who think it hardly worth the telling, would equal the vicissitudes of the Spaniard's earlier life; while their ultimate success ... may be incomparably higher than any that a novelist would imagine for a hero." According to Vincent Cronin's biography, the first thing that the 15-year-old Napoleon did on arriving in Paris was to buy a copy of Gil Blas. In Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr., the author describes the passengers aboard his ship the Alert, as it sailed along the California coast in 1836 from Monterey to Santa Barbara. The author writes: "Among our passengers was a young man who was the best representation of a decayed gentleman I had ever seen. He reminded me much of some of the characters in Gil Blas." Describing Don Juan Bandiniand, he writes: "He was of the aristocracy of the country, his family being of pure Spanish blood, and once of great importance in Mexico ... Don Juan had with him a retainer, who was as much like many of the characters in Gil Blas as his master. He called himself a private secretary, though there was no writing for him to do, and he lived in the steerage with the carpenter and sailmaker". Gil Blas was the name of a nationalist Brazilian literary journal in 1920, reflecting the Gallic leanings of Brazil's literary scene in the early 20th century and the resonance of the picaresque character in Brazilian culture. In the fantasy novel Silverlock by John Myers, the character Lucius Gil Jones is a composite of Lucius in The Golden Ass by Apuleius, Gil Blas, and Tom Jones in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. In The Social History of Bourbon, Gerald Carson notes that the education of young men in antebellum Kentucky meant they "read law with the local judge, studied medicine at the Louisville Medical Institute, wrote stilted verses in the neoclassical fashion, read Gil Blas and books on surveying, farming, and distilling." In his 1954 novel A Fable, William Faulkner has General of Division Gragnon obsessively reading Gil Blas during his house arrest after his front-line division mutinies. A member of his staff had died protecting a car with prominent visitors by forcing them to stop short of where an incoming shell landed. When he was arrested, Gragnon remembered this officer telling him about Gil Blas and located the book among his effects. In his preface to The Ambassadors, Henry James mentions the narration methods of Gil Blas and David Copperfield as alternatives to the narrative technique he himself used in The Ambassadors. Washington Irving's A Tour On The Prairies includes a section describing a wanderer on the American prairie frontier, whom he refers to as a "Gil Blas of the frontier". Thomas Jefferson included Gil Blas in his list of recommendations to Robert Skipwith of books for a general personal library. According to Schopenhauer, it is one of the few novels showing "what is really going on in the world". In "O homem que sabia javanês", a short story by Lima Barreto, written in 1911 and published by Gazeta da Tarde, an allusion is made between the characters of Castelo and Gil Blas. In Chapter 5 of his Education of a Wandering Man, Louis L'Amour describes his "good fortune" in finding an abandoned copy of Gil Blas in a laundry room. He later reads it by firelight in the camp where he worked skinning dead cattle "not once but twice, on the plains of West Texas." In the 1892 novel Ask Mama published by Bradbury, Agnew & Co. the mule of Gil Blas is referred to when, referring to his horses, "as a buyer he [Major Yammerton] made them out to be all faults, as a seller when they suddenly seemed to become the paragons of perfection". Tobias George Smollett (baptised 19 March 1721 – 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for picaresque novels such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), which influenced later novelists, including Charles Dickens. His novels were liberally altered by contemporary printers; an authoritative edition of each was edited by Dr O. M. Brack Jr and others. In 1748 he translated: The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, published anonymously (dated, incorrectly, "1749"), translated from the original L'Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane by Alain-René Le Sage

Alain-René Lesage 6 May 1668 – 17 November 1747; older spelling Le Sage was a French novelist and playwright. Lesage is best known for his comic novel The Devil upon Two Sticks (1707, Le Diable boiteux), his comedy Turcaret (1709), and his picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715–1735). The first two parts of Gil Blas de Santillane were published in 1715, without the popularity of Le Diable boiteux. Lesage worked at it for a long time and did not bring out the third part till 1724, nor the fourth till 1735. During these twenty years he was, however, continually busy. Notwithstanding the great merit and success of Turcaret and Crispin, the Théâtre Français did not welcome him, and in 1715 he began to write for the Théâtre de la foire, the comic opera held in booths at festival time. According to one computation he produced, either alone or with others, about a hundred pieces, varying from strings of songs with no regular dialogues, to comediettas only distinguished from regular plays by the introduction of music. He was also industrious in prose fiction. Besides finishing Gil Blas he translated the Orlando innamorato (1721), rearranged Guzman d'Alfarache (1732), published two more or less original novels, Le Bachelier de Salamanque and Estevanille Gonzalez, and in 1732 produced Les avantures de monsieur Robert Chevalier, dit de Beauchêne, capitaine de flibustiers dans la Nouvelle-France, which resembles certain works of Daniel Defoe. Besides all this, Lesage was also the author of La Valise trouvée, a collection of imaginary letters, and of some minor pieces including Une journée des Parques. He did not retire until 1740, when he was more than seventy years of age; he and his wife went to live with his second son, who was a canon at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Lesage's eldest son, Louis-André, had become an actor, and Lesage had disowned him. Lesage's last work, Mélange amusant de saillies d'esprit et de traits historiques les plus frappants, appeared in 1743.