by Steven Moore
Presumably that’s where we would have been introduced to the fourth Facardin. It’s unclear whether Hamilton abandoned the project—he had certainly made his point that a Western writer could match if not outperform the Eastern storytellers French readers were gaga over—or whether the sequel was lost. (The licentious writer Crébillon fils claims to have seen a sequel [Clark, 264n2].) At any rate, what survives is a dazzling display of imagination, a little silly at times, but a refreshing cocktail of medieval romance, Oriental fantasy, and fairytale motifs. (One of F1’s tasks entails finding the right female foot for a beautiful slipper.) Hamilton’s tales left their stamp on the more daring French writers that followed (Crébillon, Voltaire, Diderot) as well as the English Gothicists mentioned earlier, and form an Anglo-French link, as Saintsbury suggests (321) between Rabelais and Sterne.
But Hamilton is best known, and deservedly so, for a wickedly entertaining historical novel entitled Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont (1713), based on the life of his older brother-in-law, Philibert de Gramont (1621–1707). Hamilton selected and shaped his material to create the novelistic story of a caddish, reckless aristocrat who straightens out at the court of King Charles II of England during the swinging ’60s with the help of a good woman—Hamilton’s sister Elizabeth—with whom he falls in love at first sight and whom he marries, in proper storybook fashion, on the last page of the book. In real life, Gramont married la Hamilton much earlier during the events depicted, but Hamilton found it more amusing to organize his work along the lines of the romans prétendus historiques of previous decades by novelist/historians like Villedieu and d’Aulnoy (who likewise wrote a book on Charles II). In Cyril Hugh Hartmann’s extensive commentary on the Quennell translation, where he meticulously separates fact from fiction, there are several variants of notes like this one: “If the book were pure fiction the chevalier’s departure comes just where it ought to come in order to sustain the reader’s interest in his wooing of Miss Hamilton. But, as a matter of fact, he left early in September 1662, long before most of the events related in the preceding chapters.”85 Hamilton plays with the older conventions of the roman héroïque as well, such as the beginning of chapter 3 when young Gramont volunteers to tell a friend of a disastrous card game:
“Here is a situation,” said Matta, “which smells suspiciously of romance, except that it ought to be your squire who was telling me the story.” “Very true,” said the chevalier, “still, I can retail these earlier adventures of mine without doing any undue violence to my modesty; besides, my squire has a turn of speech rather less bombastic than would accord with the present heroic theme.
“Know, then, that on arriving in Lyons―” “Is this the way to begin a story,” Matta interrupted him. “Pick up your narrative a little further back; the smallest particularities of a life such as yours are worth relating.” (3)
In the following chapter, “They set forth then, as it might have been Amadis or Don Galaor after having received the order of knighthood, seeking adventures and in pursuit of love, war and sorcery” (4). Near the end, tracking Gramont’s thoughts as he returns to France from England, Hamilton writes: “Such, on a journey, are the amusements of a lover’s heart; or such, to speak more exactly, are the devices by which a frivolous writer abuses his reader’s patience, either to display his own sentiments or to spin out some tedious narrative” (11). All of this is just to say the Memoirs should be regarded as the French do, as a historical novel, not as the British do, as a work of history.86
For students of history, the Memoirs is a treasure-trove of tabloid revelations about the affairs and adulteries of Charles II’s dissolute court. For students of literature, however, Hamilton introduced into the French novel a tone of playful irony, smug sarcasm, smiling malice, and hilariously euphemistic sexual innuendo. Here he is speaking of a newly married young woman willing to have sex with a former suitor in exchange for social advancement:
The Duke of York had latterly somewhat neglected her, but the circumstances of this ill-sorted marriage caused him to renew his assiduities. She, on her side, permitted him to nourish hopes of a not very remote happiness which, before her marriage, a thousand considerations had made impracticable. She wished to be one of the Court; and, in return for the promise which she exacted that she should become Lady of the Bedchamber to the Duchess, she was on the point either of making him a promise herself or, so to speak, of paying him in ready money . . . (8)
Here’s how a petite maid of honor sizes up a huge, potential husband: “He was one of the tallest men in England and, if appearances were to be credited, one of the most robust; however, she made it sufficiently obvious that she was willing to commit the delicacy of a constitution such as hers to all possible hazards, in order to become his wife . . .” (10). And here’s how the wife of a scholar justifies her plans to take a lover: “since her husband preferred to put his back into his studies rather than into the duties of the married state, to pour [sic] over ancient tomes rather than over her youthful attractions, in short, to care for his own amusements rather than those of his wife, it would be excusable if she gave ear, from motives of reciprocal charity, to some desperate lover . . .” (10). This knowing tone can be heard in some predecessors like Sorel and Subligny, but Hamilton tuned it to perfection. Nor does he limit his sarcasm to aristocrats; Gramont witnesses a country wedding near the end: “Never had countrified grandeur been so aptly displayed,” Hamilton sneers; “there were tarnished tinsel, shabby lace, striped taffeta, little piggy eyes and bursting bodices brilliantly apparent wherever one looked” (11).
Throughout, Hamilton exercises a novelist’s art of selection, leaving out important events of the time (like the Great Fire of London in 1666) to keep the focus on the love lives of his characters, contrasting their promiscuity with Gramont’s constancy to add luster to his brother-in-law. Hamilton’s irony is more subtle here, trusting his reader to pick up on the contrast between his restrained treatment of his sister and brother-in-law (a real “bounder,” as Hartmann calls him [11]) and his Truman Capotic exposure of the caprices of the upper classes. These warts-and-all portraits added to the growing tendency toward realism in the 18th century novel, something not appreciated by all readers: Lord Byron wrote, “I never knew a woman who did not hate De Gramont’s Memoirs . . . women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment” (quoted in Clark, 218). Hamilton’s worldliness, savoir faire, and condescension toward religion (he often adds the phrase “as it pleased God” to his characters’ scandalous activities) appealed to dandies and libertines as well as to sardonic writers from Voltaire to Thackeray and beyond. I hear echoes of Hamilton in Ronald Firbank, W. M. Spackman—both of whom undoubtedly read the Memoirs—and William Gaddis.
But one mustn’t try too hard to enlist Count Hamilton in the ranks of French novelists, a commission he would have declined. He wrote the Memoirs between The Ram and his Arabian pastiches (i.e., 1705–10) solely for the benefit of his friends, some of whom made copies of the manuscript, which led to its anonymous publication in 1713, against his wishes. The reading public loved it, but, as Clark notes, “it could hardly please Hamilton to contribute to the amusement of the bourgeoisie by a work that was not intended for it and to have his family affairs discussed by a class for whom he had always entertained a profound contempt” (204). Pardon, Monsieur.
In 1707, the year the Comte de Gramont died, a writer who willingly contributed to the amusement of the bourgeoisie published the first of two novels that would make him one of the most famous authors in Europe for the next two centuries, though he’s largely forgotten today. A student of Spanish literature, Alain René Lesage (1668–1747), after failing to attract much attention with his translations and imitations of classic Spanish plays, reworked Luis Vélez de Guevara’s 1641 novel El Diablo cojuelo as The Devil upon Crutches (Le Diable boiteux), a damning indictment of human folly that went through three editions in its first year and was so popular that two cavaliers reportedly drew swords and fo
ught over the last copy in a bookshop.
The original edition of 1707 takes place in Madrid over the course of one October night. A college student named Cleofas Zambullo escapes from a woman’s apartment, eludes some thugs the women hired to either kill him or force him to marry her, and hides in an absent astrologer’s garret. The demon Asmodeus—aka the limping devil (the literal meaning of diable boiteux)—trapped in a phial, begs Zambullo to break the vessel and release him; after Zambullo does so, Asmodeus rewards him by whisking him away to the top of a church steeple to show him “ ‘all that is passing in Madrid;’ . . . As he spoke, he extended his right arm, the roofs disappeared, and the Student’s astonished sight penetrated the interior of the surrounding dwellings as plainly as if the noon-day sun shone over them.”87 With his supernatural insight into the lives of the people thus uncovered, Asmodeus offers quick character sketches and anecdotes of numerous madrileños. The pair go to a prison for more anecdotes, then to a madhouse, then to a cemetery, then back to the city to reveal the dreams of sleepers. There the 1707 edition ended, but in the expanded 1726 edition Asmodeus and his auditor go on to discuss the gradually waking world of fakes, phonies, and fools, witness the return of some captives from Algiers, then part ways as Zambullo prepares to marry a rich girl he had rescued from a fire the night before—actually, Asmodeus in the student’s form.
As though realizing his heartless sketches could grow monotonous, Asmodeus sprinkles some longer stories into his nightlong narrative, which, like the overall plan for the novel, were pilfered from other Spanish sources.88 One of them, the novella-length “Force of Friendship” (chaps. 13 and 15), features a few honorable, trustworthy characters; but the hundred or so other characters that populate Lesage’s novel display every form of folly and vice: greed, dishonesty, selfishness, ingratitude, infidelity, hypocrisy, pettiness, arrogance, vindictiveness, jealousy, stinginess, self-deception, vanity—a Noah’s Ark of human failings. Lesage gives only a few examples of outright criminal behavior; he’s more concerned with legal but reprehensible acts like hoarding money, kissing up to superiors, leaving a devoted servant out of a will, forbidding one’s daughters to marry to avoid providing dowries, or thoughtless behavior like that of an old painter who “left home at seven o’clock this morning in search of a confessor, as his wife was at the point of death; but happening to meet with a boon companion, he went with him to a tavern, and forgot his wife until ten this evening, when he returned to find she had died unshriven” (8). The madhouse and cemetery scenes are especially grim, and especially effective because structurally they occur in the middle, so that the novel descends to this low point, then gradually ascends to the happy ending. But that conclusion isn’t enough to lift the thick and sullen air of human folly and futility that hangs over the novel, similar to that in Samuel Johnson’s lugubrious “Vanity of Human Wishes” (1749), where likewise readers “Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, / And watch the busy scenes of crowded life.” Lesage envisioned a comic novel, but this is black humor.
The Devil upon Crutches isn’t a particularly original work; as noted, it’s an assemblage of earlier Spanish works, and I assume Lesage was being self-deprecatory when Asmodeus points out an author who “is surrounded by a thousand volumes, and is composing one, on Natural History, in which there will not be a line of his own. He pillages these books and manuscripts without mercy; and, although he does nothing but arrange and connect his larcenies, he has more vanity than the most original writer upon earth” (6). (In fact, authors of all stripes are mocked in the novel; Lesage had no illusions about his profession.) Nonetheless, the communal overview is an attractive concept, and anticipates such novels as Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, and Ryman’s 253 (not to mention Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Wilder’s Our Town, and Thomas’s Under Milk Wood). But more intriguingly, The Devil upon Crutches literalizes the turn toward interiority the novel was taking at this time, even anticipating Proust’s X-ray vision; like Asmodeus, the novelist no longer confines himself to the public actions of his characters but now explores their private, secret lives: “To unlock for you the secret chambers of the human heart,” the devil/novelist boasts, “I will explain in what all these persons that you see are engaged. All shall be open to you; I will discover the hidden motives of their deeds, and reveal to you their unbidden thoughts” (3). The new novelist possesses superior powers of observation, a seemingly supernatural ability to see through walls, to read people’s dreams even—or at least the diabolical illusion of doing so. Summarizing his demonic job description, Asmodeus states: “I make absurd matches; I marry greybeards with minors, masters with servants, girls with small fortunes with tender lovers who have none. It is I who introduced into this world luxury, debauchery, games of chance, and chemistry. I am the author of the first cookery book, the inventor of festivals, of dancing, music, plays, and of the newest fashions” (1)—in other words, the stuff of fiction. Our author isn’t much to look at—he’s only two and a half feet high, a caped Cupid on crutches—and as he narrates his stories he is often interrupted by the student—sometimes to ask a question, to criticize a point, or because distracted by something—which comically but accurately dramatizes the author–reader relationship. However, Lesage demonizes (but in a good way) the novelist’s omniscience; henceforth, the novelist will be a betrayer of secrets, a psychologist of the hidden motives that drive people. In a famous homage to The Devil upon Crutches, Charles Dickens suggests novelists should use their omniscience not to expose people to ridicule (as Lesage does) but to inspire them to become better:
Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and, from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker! Bright and blest the morning that should rise on such a night: for men, delayed no more by stumbling-blocks of their own making, which are but specks of dust upon the path between them and eternity, would then apply themselves, like creatures of one common origin, owning one duty to the Father of one family, and tending to the one common end, to make the world a better place! (Dombey and Son, chap. 47)
Lesage probably wasn’t that optimistic or noble about the novelist’s role, and in fact may have aimed more for the lurid shock value that a disgusted Dickens, in another reference to The Devil upon Crutches, later observed in American tabloid newspapers “dealing in round abuse and blackguard names; pulling off the roofs of private houses, as the Halting Devil did in Spain; pimping and pandering for all degrees of vicious taste, and gorging with coined lies the most voracious maw; imputing to every man in public life the coarsest and the vilest motives; scaring away from the stabbed and prostrate body-politic every Samaritan of clear conscience and good deeds; and setting on, with yell and whistle and the clapping of foul hands, the vilest vermin and worst birds of prey.”89 A new manifesto for fiction, or trashy entertainment? The Devil upon Crutches swings both ways.
In 1886, Henri Van Laun introduced his new translation of Lesage’s next novel thus: “With the exception of Don Quixote, Lesage’s masterpiece, The History of Gil Blas of Santillana, is the most widely known of all European works of fiction.”90 That was the last time the novel was translated into English, and while today it may not quite be the least known of all European works of fiction, there is no better example of the changing winds of literary fashion. Published over a 20-year period in three installments (books 1–6, 1715; 7–9, 1724; 10–12, 1735), Gil Blas’s popularity is easily accounted for: it’s an entertaining rags-to-riches story of an affable young man of average morals—fairly honest but not above petty crimes and, later, the temptations of money and
power—who leaves home at age 17 and undergoes a variety of adventures in Spain at the beginning of the 17th century, which Gil narrates at a good clip. No sooner does he leave home then he is robbed, then taken prisoner by some highwaymen, whom he serves in their underground hideout for a while before making a daring escape. In modified picaresque form—Gil is called a pícaro at one point (8.2), but Lesage romanticizes the genre—he is fleeced by grifters and serves a number of masters, none of whom lasts very long, and eventually stumbles his way up the social ladder until he becomes the confidant of two successive prime ministers of Spain. At this point, Lesage switches genres from the picaresque to the fictional memoir. Around the age 40 Gil marries for money, loses her 14 months later, gets embroiled in Spanish politics, is thrown in jail, eventually receives a patent for nobility and marries again around age 60 (to a woman of 19 or 20), then retires to write these memoirs. Aside from some sexual innuendo and knowing observations on the promiscuity of actresses, Gil Blas is fairly chaste, and except for an attempted enema that backfires, the humor is clean. Like Scarron’s Comic Novel, Gil Blas has much to do about theater life, and there are several “all the world’s a stage” metaphors throughout.91 The novel promotes an optimistic, roll-with-it attitude toward life’s ups and downs, and is narrated in a style that is “light and easy” (8.2), “concise and even elegant” (11.5), as Gil’s employers say about his own writing style. Lesage made sure to give him a classical education so that he could indulge in occasional literary allusions and learned wit, as when Gil refers to some physicians as “notable servants of the goddess Libitina” (9.8), the Roman goddess of funerals. It’s often funny, is populated with colorful characters from all walks of life, and its 700 pages fly by painlessly. A textbook bildungsroman, Gil Blas earned and deserved its popularity.