The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, Alain René le Sage [most read books .txt] 📗
- Author: Alain René le Sage
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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,
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