by Steven Moore
But it’s also easy to see why its popularity has faded. In “The Author’s Declaration” Lesage promises “to represent human life such as it really is”—a bold declaration in 1715 when realism was still a novelty—but he pulls his punches throughout, as he admits in the very next paragraph: “those who are acquainted with the disorderly lives of the actresses in Madrid may reproach me with having described their irregularities too indulgently; but I thought it necessary to soften them slightly, that they might be the more conformable to the manners of our own country” (1:3). Besides, Lesage knew Spain solely from books; he never set foot there. Gil Blas censors his saltier characters—the blaspheming highwaymen “uttered a thousand sallies which I cannot repeat” (1.8)—and many of the novel’s incidents are likewise “softened”; near the end, for example, Gil attends an auto-da-fé, but he skips over the details of this Catholic crime against humanity to say only “When the ceremony was over, I returned to my inn, shaking all over at the dreadful spectacle which I just beheld” (12.1). It could be argued that the actual burning of dissenters would be out of place in a comic novel, but why then would Lesage even introduce the event? His highwaymen treat a captured lady much more gentlemanly than their real-life counterparts would have, and though Gil reports on many romantic intrigues, they are all curiously formal and passionless (including his own; he prefers the companionship his longtime companion Scipio, another pícaro.) In another sop to his readers, Lesage includes many coded references to current events and people in 18th-century France, but the modern reader has to turn to the translator’s notes to decode them. From those notes the reader also learns that the novel isn’t very original; there are scenes plundered from Vicente Espinel’s Marcos de Obregón (see pp. 30–32 above)—which Lesage doesn’t conceal; he even includes Marcos as a character—and from a number of other 17th-century Spanish novels and plays. These supply many of the interpolated stories Gil hears from various characters, which add little to the book but bulk, and the last 3 books (the 1735 installment) basically replay Gil’s earlier court life and recycle characters from earlier in the novel, as though Lesage was too lazy to explore new satirical venues with new characters. The interiority promised by The Devil upon Crutches isn’t fulfilled here; Gil Blas sticks pretty much to surface appearances and doesn’t go in for much self-analysis. In all of these matters—realism, originality, interiority—Gil Blas was quickly superseded.
To be sure, “surface appearances” are the targets of Lesage’s satire as Gil discovers that few people are who they pretend to be: most doctors are quacks, authors are pretentious, clergymen are hypocrites, theater people are ridiculous, aristocrats are irresponsible, the Inquisition is staffed by thugs, and people rarely measure up to their public reputation. Gil gradually becomes disillusioned with the world, but he doesn’t question the culture or probe it to any extent: as with the auto-da-fé, he merely shakes his head and moves on. Smollett, who translated the novel into English while writing his first novel, the hotheaded Roderick Random (a Scots Gil Blas, but angrier and shorter), complains in the preface to his own novel that Gil’s blasé attitude “prevents that generous indignation which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world” (xxxv). And while one shouldn’t criticize Lesage for not being more sordid and vicious, it does help explain why his mild satire has given way to spicier fare. Regardless, it remained popular with the reading public into the early 20th century, and influenced many major writers over the centuries: though Voltaire was vexed to find himself mocked in it, according to Levi he nevertheless “plundered Lesage’s text, borrowed his style, and took over his narrative method” (458). Fielding found Gil Blas more useful than Don Quixote as a model for his Joseph Andrews because it dealt with an everyman rather than an eccentric, and Smollett acknowledged his debt to Lesage, admitting Roderick Random was “modelled on his plan.” As noted in the previous chapter, the German novelist Wieland borrowed some of its characters and settings for his Don Sylvio; the Spanish novelist Isla translated Gil Blas into Spanish; Sterne and Scott loved and learned from it; and in a letter to William Dean Howells (5 July 1875), Mark Twain said he had Gil Blas in the back of his mind when planning Huckleberry Finn.
The revised version of The Devil upon Crutches that Lesage published in 1726 opens with an appreciative foreword by a clergyman and writer named Laurent Bordelon (1653–1730), which is included in some translations (like Smollett’s). Sixteen years earlier, Bordelon published an encyclopedic novel of learned wit that is largely unknown to literary historians. None of the critical studies of the period I’ve been consulting mention it, not even Showalter’s Evolution of the French Novel, where he claims to have “read or examined three-fourths of all the fiction published in French between 1700 and 1720” (6). He probably ignored it because it doesn’t resemble a conventional novel, which makes one wonder how many other innovative novels have been lost to literary history because critics have too narrow a conception of the genre.92
In the spirit of Don Quixote, The Extravagant Shepherd, and The Mock Clelia, as Bordelon acknowledges in his preface, A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle (L’Histoire des imaginations extravagantes de M. Oufle, 1710) is a comic novel about a bibliomaniac who overdoses not on novels but on books about the occult. The lengthy subtitle informs us that Oufle’s “ridiculous extravagancies” were “Occasioned by his Reading Books Treating of Magic, the Black Art, Demoniacs, Conjurers, Witches, Hobgoblins, Incubuses, Succubuses, and the Diabolical Sabbath; of Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Geniuses, Specters and Ghosts; of Dreams, the Philosopher’s Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes, Talismans, Lucky and Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets, and All Sorts of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments, and Other Superstitious Practices.”93 Half of the episodic novel recounts Oufle’s outré adventures: convinced he’s been transformed into a werewolf, he terrorizes the town with his capering and howling; reading that men “born on the fifteenth day of the moon” are great lovers (50), the geezer romances some local ladies, one of whom the narrator calls by the Cervantine name Dulcine; suspecting everyone of being a demon, even a carpenter’s dog, he goes to ridiculous lengths to protect himself; easily fooled, he is spooked out of a bag of gold by his conniving younger daughter and crafty servant. The other half of the novel consists of arguments between Oufle and his rationalist brother Noncrède (“Unbeliever”) over the validity of occult beliefs. Despite all the damning evidence Noncrède and others confront him with, Oufle remains steadfast in his faith; the penultimate chapter concludes, “Monsieur Oufle continued as whimsical and superstitious as ever” (286), and as proof, the final chapter consists of a document that he and his equally credulous son Doudou (a clergyman) draw up, based on their reading, describing a witches’ sabbath. Unlike Don Quixote, Lysis, or the mock Clelia, Oufle doesn’t recover from his madness. (“Oufle” is an anagram of le fou: the madman.)
The most unconventional thing about Monsieur Oufle is its format: the narrator, a rationalist like Noncrède, presents his novel in the form of a scholarly treatise. The exchanges between Oufle and Noncrède are set off as formal debates or as epistolary essays; the college-student boyfriend of Oufle’s younger daughter—frustrated by her father’s adherence to an astrological prediction that she can’t marry before her older sister does—sends him a 60-page essay entitled “Critico-Comical Reflections on the Power and Effects Ascribed to the Planets, Celestial Signs, Comets, and Eclipses; on the Rash Folly of Horoscopes; on the Chance Predictions of Almanacs; on the Virtues of Pretended Talismans; and in general, on All the Chimeras and Impertinences of Judicial Astrology.”94 (The narrator describes the essay as “equally forcible, diverting, and comical” [102]—which describes the novel as a whole—and near the end, the narrator inserts one of his own essays, “Reflections on Magicians, Conjurers, Charms, Spells, and Conjurations.”) There are copious footnotes throughout the novel, some taking up an entire page, which document with scholarly thoro
ughness the sources of Oufle’s superstitions. In a typical comically erudite passage, after Oufle is robbed of his pistoles (gold coins) by what he thinks are ghosts, the narrator gives us this footnoted account:95
The day after the loss of his thousand pistoles, he rose very early to consult his books, to learn thence what he was to do to prevent being tormented by specters and phantoms. He was unlucky in what he first read, for he found what he did not search for, I would say: the art of making frightful specters appear by a man’s head, by putrefaction turned into flies, and then into dragons (a). He rejected this impertinent experiment, not because he thought it so but because, far from desiring to see specters, he was so tired with, and had such aversion to them, that he desired nothing but their flight from his house never to return. He then fell to reading what was more proper for his design. He at last found what he looked for, for there’s no scarcity of superstitious practices both for and against specters; and it being only against these ghosts that he desired to be instructed, he took only what served his design. He found then that he needed fear nothing of that nature if he would arm himself with dew cakes and honey (b); or if he laid purslane on his bed (c); if he wore a diamond on his left arm so as that it touched his flesh (d); or a chrysolite set in gold (e); or if he placed at the entrance of his chamber a nail drawn out of a bier, or some grave (f); lastly, if he carried in his hand nettles, and another herb called milfoil (g).
(a) “The ancients say that the hinder part of the head is its first and principal part; that it forms worms in a little time after the death of a man, that in seven days they become flies, and that in fourteen they change to dragons, whose biting is instantly mortal. If we take one of these and boil it up with oil of olives, form it into a light whose wick is to be part of a winding sheet, and fix it in a brazen lamp, we shall see horrible specters.” Admirable Secrets of Albertus Magnus, bk. 2, p. 160.
(b) “Dew cakes with honey were given to those who entered Trophonius’s cave to free them from any mischiefs from the phantoms which should appear.” Le Loyer, p. 136.
(c) “Balbinus says that where purslane is laid on the bed, those in it will not be disturbed by any vision that night.” The Admirable Secrets of Albertus Magnus, bk. 2, p. 142.
(d) “A diamond fastened to the left arm so as to touch the skin prevents all nocturnal fears.” Cardan, De subtilitate rerum, bk. 7.
(e) “To expel phantoms and rid people of folly, take the precious stone chrysolite, set it in gold, and let them wear it about them.” The Admirable Secrets of Albertus Magnus, bk. 2, p. 100.
(f) “According to Pliny (bk. 34, chap. 15), the ancients believed that a nail drawn out of a sepulcher and placed on the threshold of the bed-chamber door would drive away phantoms and visions which terrify people in the night.” Le Loyer, On Specters, p. 326
(g) “Herbam urticam tenens in manu cum mille folio, securus est ab omni metu & ab omni phantasmate.” Trinum magicum, p. 169. (98–99)
The narrator has droll fun showing off his immense erudition, as when Oufle arms himself with “anti-magical ammunition” from his occult library before approaching a woman he’s convinced is a witch, though he’s not as well-armed as he’d like to be:
Monsieur Oufle knew yet some other preservatives, but being in haste he could not make use of them because they were not easily gotten; they were the following: The bones of one’s relations (o); a bit of skin torn from the forehead of a hyena (p); certain excrements (q) not easy to be gotten when one will; a white sapphire, graven (r) talismanically; and a certain flower called plowman’s spikenard (s).
(o) “The Caribs, to secure themselves against charms and spells, put into a calabash, or gourd, the hair or some bones of their dead relatives, saying that the spirit of the dead speaks in them and warns them of the designs of their enemies.” De la Borde, The World Bewitched, vol. 1, p. 128.
(p) According to Pliny (bk. 22, chap. 3), ’twas customary to tear the skin off the forehead of a hyena and wear it about one against enchantments.
(q) Some daub the out and insides of their ships with the excrements of pure virgins to preserve them from evil spirits, according to Damião de Góis of Portugal, De Lappiorum regione.
“The menstruous blood of a woman stuck on the posts of the doors of the house dissolves charms.” Le Loyer, p. 830.
(r) Pliny says (bk. 37, chap. 9) that a white sapphire on which the sun and the moon is engraved, hung about the neck with the hair of Cynocephali [a legendary dog-headed tribe of people], is an efficacious remedy against charms, and bellows the favor of kings. But we must first find the Cynocephali, which never yet were in being. Bodin, Demonomania, p. 282.
(s) Some amongst the ancients wore on their foreheads, made up like a crown, the flower called plowman’s spikenard, in Latin baccharis, for fear of being charmed by an ill tongue, which Virgil thus expresses:
. . . Bacchare frontem
Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro.
Le Loyer, p. 256. (283)
Virtually all of the books cited in the notes are included in Oufle’s library, which is catalogued in chapter 2. No doubt inspired by the bibliographic chapter in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (2.7), the narrator devotes the entire chapter to listing and selectively annotating the principal books in Oufle’s library, beginning thus:
Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. There is much more learning than certainty in this book.
A Description of the Inconstancy of Evil Angels and Demons, by de Lancre. Amongst several curious things dispersed in this book, there is such an ample and very particular description of all that passes at the [witches’] sabbath that I don’t believe I should be better informed concerning it if I had been there myself.
An Apology of the Great Men Accused of Magic, by Naudé. We shall see in the sequel that Monsieur Oufle has not at all profited by the reading of this book, any more than of the following, which bears this title:
The World Bewitched, by Bekker. This work is very pernicious, and it has also met with great opposition.
Physica curiosa and Magia universalis, by Gaspar Schott.
Bodin’s Demonomania. ’Tis said of this book that ’tis a collection made with more application than judgment.
Danæus, De sortiariis.
De Odio satanæ, by Father Crespet.
Malleus maleficarum. If witches are not at present as much talked of as formerly, is it not because this mallet has knocked down so many that there cannot be many more?
Frommannus, De Fascinatione.
The Infernal Proteus, by a German author.
Olaus Magnus, Of the Northern Magic.
De Magis et veneficus, by Golman.
The History of Doctor Faustus. He that is never so little fond of illusions and surprising things will here meet with a great deal of pleasure.
De Sortilegiis, by Paul Grilland.
Wier, De Præstigiis dæmonum.
Sylv. Prierias, De Strigimagarum dæmonumque mirandis. (8–9)
—and it goes on like that for five fascinating pages. In the footnotes, dozens more books are cited and quoted, including a few novels like Le Comte de Gabalis, The Mock Clelia, The Devil upon Crutches, and one of Bordelon’s own earlier ones (The Adventures of Mital, 1708). The novel even has an index (omitted from the English translation), completing its resemblance to a scholarly tome.96
If you’re not a fan of the genre of learned wit, the above citations might look ponderous and overbearing (though when I first opened this book and saw all those scholarly footnotes, my heart leapt up as though I saw a host of golden daffodils). But the scholarly structure and painstaking citation of sources is the narrator’s way of imposing order and accountability on the disorderly world of superstition. Someone is responsible for the belief that menstrual blood wards off spells. Exasperated by people like Oufle who never question what they read, the narrator builds his case with lawyerly precision in order to win over his jury of readers, constantly resisting the urge to tear into a tirade against
such idiots: “Return we to the exploits of our visionary; but in doing so, I really commit a sort of violence on myself, for I find I’m so inclined to an invective against the distraction of his mind, and the cause of it, that if I was not afraid of tiring the reader, who expects facts rather than moral reflections, I should enlarge myself as far as the subject would permit” (42–43; cf. 179). And the facts he introduces are the quotations from occult authors, whom he blames for Oufle’s madness; he’s a foolish old man who doesn’t know better, but they are theologians and scholars who should have known better, who should have analyzed and verified their sources before committing them to print, and for that reason he introduces a mountain of damning evidence into the record.